I
Suddenly I thought of him, an old friend. I need not mention his name. After he left his uncle’s house, he was renting a six-tatami room above a printer in my hometown. The second story, each time the steam press downstairs rotated rattled and clattered like a steamboat. When I was still in high school, after I finished eating dinner in the dormitory, I went to visit this second story. There, beneath the glass window, he was rotating his neck, which was more slender than most, and we were always testing our luck at cards. And there above his head was a hanging brass oil lamp, always casting a round shadow…
II
From his uncle’s house, he went to the same Third Middle School in Honjo as me. He was at his uncle’s house because he did not have any parents. Though I say it was because he did not have any parents, I had heard that only his mother was alive. He felt a boyish passion not so much for his father as for his mother—this mother who had gotten remarried somewhere. I definitely remember one fall, when he looked at my face and immediately stammered, “I heard my younger sister (I vaguely remember him having a sister?) got married! You wanna go on Sunday?”
At once I went with him to a neighborhood on the outskirts of Kameido. Contrary to what we expected, it took no time at all to find where his sister was. This was a single room in a tenement house behind a barbershop. It seemed that the head of the household was out doing construction or something in the neighborhood, and the wife in the poorly-built house suckling an infant—there was nobody else but his younger sister. Thought I say younger, she seemed much more grown-up than him. Besides the slits in the long corner of her eyes, she hardly resembled him.
“Was the baby born this year?”
“No, last year.”
“DIDN’T YOU ALSO GET MARRIED LAST YEAR?”
“No, the March before that!”
He was going after her as though he had been hit with something. But his sister just responded politely, occasionally rocking the baby. With a largish cup of bitter tea in my hand, I stared at the moss on the brick which was propping open the back door. I felt a loneliness at their mismatched conversation.
“What kind of person is he?”
“What kind of person…well, he likes reading books!”
“What kind?”
“Stories, or anything, really.”
In truth, beneath a window in the house had been placed an old desk. On top of it were many books—stories and others, most likely. However nothing of the books remains in my memory, unfortunately. Although, I do remember that there were two brilliant peacock quills stood up in an inkwell.
“Well see you later. Say hi to him for me.”
Graceful as always, his sister bid us farewell, still feeding her baby.
“Really? Then say hello to everybody for me. May you be well!”
We walked back to Honjo in the dusk. He was definitely disappointed at his sister’s feelings on their first meeting. But, we did not speak of those feelings at all. He—I still remember it. His fingers on the Kennin Temple fence along the road, he said to me, “If you walk really fast like his, your fingers vibrate really weirdly! It’s like you’re being shocked or something.”
III
After he graduated middle school, he decided to take the test for high school. Unfortunately, he failed. It was from then on that he began renting the room above the printer’s. It was also from around that time that he became engrossed in authors like Marx and Engels. I, of course, didn’t know the first thing about social sciences. But I felt a respect—or perhaps a fear, rather—for words like “capital” and “exploitation.” He used that fear to criticize me on occasion. Verlaine, Rimbaud, Baudelaire…these poets were idols above idols to me at that time. But to him, they were nothing more than the manufacturers of hashish or opium.
Our debates, looking at them now, were hardly that. Though we earnestly added rebuttals to each other. But one of our friends, a medical student named K—, was always jeering at us.
“Why are you so SERIOUS about these discussion? Come with me to Susaki!” K— would say, eying us and grinning broadly. Of course, in truth I really did want to go to Susaki or somewhere. However, he was aloofly (in truth “aloof” does not really capture his attitude), ignoring K—, a Golden Bat cigarette hanging from his lip.
“It’s been said that ‘revolution’ is basically a social mensuration…”
In July of next year he transferred to a school in Rokkō in Okayama Prefecture. In that half a year or so he was happier than he had ever been. He was always writing letters telling me what he was up to. (He always listed the social science books he had read in the letters.) However, I was somewhat disappointed at his absence. Whenever I met with K— I told him rumors about him. Even K—…K— held much more of a scientific interest in him than friendship. “Whatever he thinks, that fool’ll forever be a child. However, even though he’s that sort of beauty he probably won’t arouse even the slightest hint of homoeroticism. Now why is that!?”
K— asked these sorts of things seriously behind the windows in the dormitory, as he masterfully blew smoke rings, one by one, from his Shikishima cigarettes.
IV
After he went to Rokkō, he became sick within a year and ended up returning to his uncle’s house. I am pretty sure he had tuberculosis of the kidneys. He was always talking livelier than expected, on his bed with his arms tucked around his knobby knees. But I could not help but look in the chamber pot in the corner of his room. There was a lot of room inside the glass for the glittering bloody urine.
“I’m done with this sort of body! I couldn’t cut it in jail,” he said, laughing bitterly. “When I see guys like Bakunin in photos, they’re all burly.”
But it was not as though there was still nothing that could comfort him. This was his extremely innocent love for his uncle’s daughter. He did not once speak to me of his love. But, one afternoon, one hazy, cloudy afternoon, he suddenly let it slip. Suddenly? No, it was not necessarily sudden. Like any young man, since the time I first laid eyes on his cousin, I had had an expectation of his love.
“Today, Miyo’s going to Odawara with some friends from school, and I happened to take a peep at her diary…”
I wanted to append half-derisive laughter to that “happened to.” But, of course, he went on.
“She wrote that she made the acquaintance of a college student on the train!”
“And then?”
“And then I was thinking I should warn Miyo…”
After a while I opened my mouth in criticism. “Isn’t that contradictory? It’s fine that you love Miyo, but she can’t love a stranger…there’s no reason in it! But since they’re your feelings it’s different.”
He was clearly acting displeased. But he didn’t add any sort of rebuttal. And then—and then what did he say? I remember that I had also gotten displeased. That was displeasure towards the invalid’s displeasure, of course.
“That was mean.”
“Yeah, it was.”
He nodded slightly, and then added in forced cheer, “Can I borrow a book or something? You can take it back next time.”
“What sort of book?”
“Some genius’s life story.”
“Then how about Jean-Christophe?”
“Sure, anything exciting is fine.”
With a feeling close to resignation, I returned to the boarding house in Yayoi. Unfortunately, there was nobody in the study room with the broken windows. Under the dim electric light I studied German grammar. However, I could not help but envy him: even if his love went unrequited, I still could not help but envy him, who had his uncle’s daughter.
V
After about six months, he went to the coast for a change of scenery. Though it was called a change of scenery, it was so that he could live in a hospital. I used winter break to make a trip out to visit him. His room was on the second floor, with little sun exposure and breezy from cracks. Sitting on the bed, he smiled heartily as usual. But he hardly ever spoke of arts or science.
“Whenever I see that palm tree, I come to feel a strange sympathy with it. Look, the leaves on top are probably moving…”
Right outside the window, the leaves on the twigs of the tree were blowing. Those leave, while all of them were quivering, the tips of the ones with fine tears were quivering sensitively. They were, in truth undoubtedly tinged with a modern sense of the ephemeral. But I thought of him all alone in his hospital room, and I mustered all the cheer I could.
“They’re moving, all right. What’s this ocean palm tree fretting about?”
“And then?”
“And then that’s the end.”
“That’s boring.”
I felt a sense of oppression as the exchange went on. “Did you read Jean-Christophe?”
“I started it…”
“You didn’t feel like going on?”
“It was a bit too exciting.”
I tried again with all the strength I could muster to return to the pathetic conversation. “I heard K— came to visit a while ago.”
“Yeah, it was a day trip! He was telling me about vivisection or something, I think.”
“He’s a drag.”
“What makes you say so?”
“You never ask why…”
After eating dinner, a fortunate wind blew up, and we decided to go out for a walk on the beach. The sun had set long ago. But traces of it were still visible. We sat down on a sand dune upon which tiny pine trees had grown, and, watching the two or three birds flying, we talking of many things.
“You’d think the sand is cold. Try putting your hand in it for a while.”
As he said, I put my hand into the sand, which was dappled with dried grasses. There there remained a faint trace of the sun’s heat.
“Yeah, that’s sort of uneasy. Even though it’s night, as you said, it’s warm.”
“It’ll get cold soon.”
For some reason I remember this conversation clearly. As well as the still, jet-black Pacific Ocean towards home…
VI
It was Chinese New Year of the following year when I heard that he had died. According to what I heard sometime later, the doctors and nurses of the hospital had been playing cards late into the night for New Year’s. He got angry that he couldn’t sleep because of the noise, and, lying flat on the bed, he scolded them in a loud voice. At the same time he had a severe lung hemorrhage and died instantly. When I looked at the black-banded letter, rather than sadness, I felt a sense of the ephemeral.
“Furthermore, the writings the deceased possessed were burned along with the body, so if by chance lent possessions of yours were included in this we beg your forgiveness.”
This was written in the corner of the letter. Reading this, I imagined all those books going up in flames. Of course, the first volume of Jean-Christophe I had lent him was surely among them. The sentimental me of that time felt that this fact was strangely symbolic.
And then, five or six days later, I happened to discuss him with K—. As always, K— was indifferent, and he asked, as well, with a rolled cigarette in his mouth:
“I wonder if ___ had known a woman?”
“Hmm…”
K— looked at my face for a while, as if doubting.
“Anyway, who cares? …But when ___ died, didn’t you feel like you had won, somehow?”
I hesitated for a moment. Then, to end that thread of conversation, K— answered his own question.
“I felt that, just a little.”
Even since, I have come to feel some sort of anxiety over meeting K—.
(November 13, 1926)