It was a cozily designed dwelling, with an unpretentious gate. As such, it was, to be sure, not unusual for the neighborhood. It was in its plaque—Genkaku Sanbō—and the trees in the garden that rose above the height of the wall, that it clearly outshone every other house in elegance.
The master was Horikoshi Genkaku. Though rather well-known as a painter, he had made his fortune in the acquisition of a patent for rubber seals and subsequently in the purchase and sale of properties. The soil of the land he owned on the outskirts of the city had been so poor that not even ginger could be grown, but now all of this had been transformed into a “cultural village,”1 boasting red- and blue-tiled roofs . . .
Genkaku Sanbō was nonetheless a cozily designed dwelling, with an unpretentious gate. Adding to the sense of refinement were both the straw ropes recently used to protect the pine trees from the snow and the bright-red ardisia berries amidst the withered pine needles carpeting the entrance. There were few passersby along the alleyway that ran by the house. Even the bean-curd peddler, putting down his shoulder pole and tubs in the thoroughfare, would signal his presence with no more than a toot of his trumpet.
“What is the significance of the name?” asked a long-haired student of painting who happened by, carrying an oblong color-box under his arm. His companion, likewise dressed in a gold-buttoned uniform, said in reply:
“Well, I should hardly think a pun on ‘severe’ or ‘straitlaced’!”
The young men laughed lightheartedly as they continued on their way. The path was now again quite deserted, except for a thin blue thread of smoke rising from a Golden Bat cigarette that one of them had left discarded on the frozen lane.
Even before becoming Genkaku’s adopted son-in-law, Jūkichi had worked for a bank. Thus, on his return home each day, the electric lights were just coming on. For several days now, he had, on entering the gate, immediately detected a strange smell. The source was the bad breath of the old man, who lay in bed afflicted with pulmonary tuberculosis, a rare disease among the elderly. There was nonetheless no reason for the odor to have spread beyond the house. As Jūkichi, a satchel pressed under the arm of his overcoat, made his way along the stepping-stones leading up to the entrance, he could not help worrying about his state of nerves.
Genkaku was situated in an isolated room. When not flat on his back, he would sit up, leaning on a mountain of quilts. Jūkichi would take off his hat and coat and, without fail, put in an appearance to announce his return or to inquire about his father-in-law’s condition. Even so, he rarely went beyond the threshold, in part because he feared contagion but also because the odor offended him. Genkaku’s greeting in return was no more than a syllable or two, and these he murmured with a voice so weak that it sounded closer to mere breath. Such would sometimes fill Jūkichi with pangs of guilt, but his loathing of going in remained unchanged.
He would then call on his mother-in-law, O-tori, next to the sitting room. She too was bedridden and had been for seven or eight years, well before her husband. Unable to walk, she could not even go by herself to the privy. It was said that Genkaku had married her not only because she was a daughter of the principal counselor to a high lord but also because he had had his heart set on a belle. In this, her eyes retained something of their beauty despite her years. Yet as she sat in her bed, painstakingly darning her white split-toed socks, she bore a more than faint resemblance to a mummy. “Mother, how are you today?” Jūkichi would say as a similarly short salutation before entering the six-mat sitting room.
When his wife, O-suzu, was not there, she would be working in the cramped kitchen with her maid, O-matsu, who came from Shinshū. Needless to say, Jūkichi was much more familiar with both the tidily arranged sitting room and the modernized kitchen than with areas of the house occupied by his parents-in-law.
The second son of a politician who had once served as a provincial governor, he was a brilliant young man, more like his mother, who had been an old-fashioned poetess, than his father, who had always had the aura of le grand homme about him. His character could also be discerned from his friendly eyes and delicately narrow chin.
Coming into the sitting room, he would change from Western to Japanese clothes, lounge at the long brazier, smoke a cheap cigar, and playfully tease his only son, Takeo, who had just entered primary school that year. Jūkichi, O-suzu, and Takeo invariably ate together, gathered around their low dining table. Their usual liveliness had recently been partly replaced by a discernible air of formality, the cause of which was the arrival of Kōno, the nurse now taking care of Genkaku. This did not, to be sure, affect in the least Takeo’s propensity to engage in childish pranks; indeed, the presence of Kōno-san only aggravated it. Sometimes his mother would glare at him with a frown, but he would respond with no more than a look of utter incomprehension, as he shoveled rice from his bowl into his mouth with an exaggerated flourish. Being a veteran reader of fiction, Jūkichi sensed something “male” in Takeo’s exuberance, but though he was not always unperturbed by such behavior, he usually tolerated it with a stoical smile, as he ate in silence.
Nights in the villa were quiet. Takeo, who had to go to school the next morning, would, of course, be asleep by ten, but his parents too generally retired at the same hour. Only Kōno would remain awake, having begun her vigil at about nine, sitting at Genkaku’s bedside, her hands at the red-glowing brazier, never once dozing off. Genkaku himself was also sometimes awake, but he only spoke when his hot-water bottle had grown cold or when his compresses were dry. The only sound to be heard in this isolated room came from the rustling bamboo thicket. In the stillness and the cold, Kōno would ponder this and that as she watched over the old man—the state of mind and feelings of the various members of the family, her own future . . .
One cloudless afternoon after a snowfall, a woman of twenty-four or -five appeared at the kitchen entrance of the Horikoshi residence, holding a slender boy by the hand. Through the window set in the roof, the bright blue sky could be seen.
Jūkichi was, of course, not at home. O-suzu, who was sitting at her sewing machine, was not entirely surprised but was nonetheless taken aback. She arose and, walking past the long brazier, went to meet the visitor, who, on entering the kitchen, arranged her own footwear and that of the boy,2 who was clad in a white sweater. Even in this gesture, she was demonstrating considerable deference—and not without reason, for this was O-yoshi, a former maid, whom for the last five or six years Genkaku had openly kept as his mistress somewhere in the outskirts of Tōkyō.
As O-suzu looked at her face, she was astonished to see how quickly O-yoshi had aged. And the evidence was not in her facial features alone. Until four or five years before, her hands had been round and plump. Now they were so slender that the veins were visible. In what she wore as well—the trinket of a ring on her finger—O-suzu could see that her domestic circumstances were indeed wretched.
“My elder brother has instructed me to offer this to the master.”
With even greater diffidence, O-yoshi placed in a corner of the kitchen a package wrapped in old newspapers, before entering the sitting room, her knees to the floor. O-matsu had been in the midst of washing, but now, without pausing for a moment, began to cast furtive and disparaging glances at O-yoshi, who wore her hair in a freshly arranged ginkgo-leaf bun. The sight of the package only renewed her frosty expression. It was undeniably true that it gave off an unpleasant odor hardly in keeping with the modernized kitchen or its delicate dishes and bowls. O-yoshi’s eyes were not directed toward O-matsu, but she appeared to detect an odd look on the face of O-suzu, for she explained: “This is . . . i-it’s garlic.” Then turning to the child, who was biting his finger, she said: “Now, Botchan, make a bow.”
The boy, whose name was Buntarō, was, of course, the son of O-yoshi by Genkaku. O-suzu was struck with pity for O-yoshi that she should address him as “Botchan,”3 but common sense also immediately told her that with such a woman this was only to be expected. Feigning unconcern, she offered what tea and cakes she had on hand to the two sitting in a corner of the room, as she spoke of Genkaku’s condition and sought to amuse Buntarō.
Having made O-yoshi his mistress, Genkaku had regularly gone to see her once or twice a week, despite the inconvenience of changing trains. At first, O-suzu was revolted by the attitude of her father and would often tell herself that he might act with at least a modicum of consideration for her mother’s circumstances. For her part, O-tori seemed quite resigned to it all, though this only added to O-suzu’s sorrow for her, so that when her father went off on his visits, she would resort to such transparent lies as “Father has his poetry meeting today.” She was not unaware that such artifices were useless, and whenever she saw something close to a sneer on O-tori’s face, she regretted her own lack of candor, even as she felt still greater chagrin at her paralytic mother’s unwillingness to share her heartache.
Sometimes, having seen her father off, O-suzu would momentarily pause at her sewing machine to think about the household. Even before her father had taken up with O-yoshi, he had not been for her any sort of idealized patriarch, but for a woman as kind and gentle as she was, that was of little concern. She was nonetheless troubled when he began to take more and more paintings, calligraphic works, and antiques to the residence he had set up for his mistress. From the time O-yoshi was still their maid, O-suzu had never thought her to be a wicked person; on the contrary, she appeared to be more timid a woman than most. But her elder brother, a fishmonger somewhere on the edge of Tōkyō, might very well have a scheme or two of his own, and, in fact, he had struck her as a man full of wiles. Sometimes she would entreat Jūkichi to listen to her, as she attempted to confide her concerns to him, but he invariably brushed her aside. “I’m not the one to speak to Father about it,” was his reply, thereby obliging her to say no more.
Yet Jūkichi himself would make an occasional remark to his mother-in-law: “I hardly think that even Father regards O-yoshi as capable of appreciating a painting by Luó Pìn.” But O-tori would merely look up at her son-in-law and say with wry smile: “Such is Father’s nature. He is the sort of person who even asks me: ‘What do you think of this inkstone?’ ”
Such concerns appeared in retrospect to be absurd. That winter Genkaku’s illness suddenly took a turn for the worse, so that he was no longer able to visit O-yoshi. With unexpected docility he accepted Jūkichi’s proposal to end the arrangement—though, to be more precise, it was O-tori and O-suzu who, in fact, spelled out the conditions.
O-suzu’s fears regarding O-yoshi’s elder brother likewise proved to be groundless, for he expressed not the least objection to those conditions: She would receive one thousand yen in terminal compensation and a small monthly allowance for the education of Buntarō after she had returned to her parents’ house on a beach in Kazusa. He even returned, unbidden, the treasured tea utensils that Genkaku had left with her. O-suzu’s favorable feelings toward him now more than overcame her former suspicions.
“Incidentally,” he had said, “my sister would be more than happy to assist you in the care of the master, should you find yourselves shorthanded.”
Before responding to the proposal, O-suzu had gone for advice to her paralytic mother. There can be no doubt that in this she committed a strategic error, for O-tori’s response was to urge her daughter to summon O-yoshi and Buntarō as soon as the very next day. O-suzu tried repeatedly to persuade her mother to change her mind, for she feared that such would throw the entire household into turmoil, to say nothing of the effect on O-tori. But she refused to listen. (Moreover, having acted as an intermediary between her father and O-yoshi’s brother, O-suzu found it impossible to issue a blunt rejection.)
“If you had dealt with the matter before telling me, it would be one thing, but I mustn’t feel shame in front of O-yoshi.”
O-suzu thus resigned herself to accepting the brother’s offer. Perhaps this mistake too was a consequence of her ignorance regarding the ways of the world. As it was, when Jūkichi returned from the bank and heard the story from his wife, there appeared between his womanishly gentle eyebrows an expression of displeasure. “The extra help is certainly to be appreciated,” he remarked, “but you should have consulted with Father. If he had refused, you would have been freed of any responsibility.”
O-suzu, more downhearted than she had ever been, concurred in this opinion. Yet now to consult with the dying Genkaku, who naturally still had a lingering affection for O-yoshi, would clearly have been more impossible . . .
Even as she attended to O-yoshi and her son, O-suzu was recalling all of this regarding the woman, who, without presuming to warm her hands over the long brazier, was now talking, with occasional lulls, of her brother and of Buntarō. She had reverted to the provincial accent with which she had spoken four or five years earlier. On O-suzu it worked a soothing effect, even as she felt a vague uneasiness at the presence of her mother behind the single-layered paper door, whose silence was not broken by so much as a cough.
“So you can stay with us for about a week?”
“Yes, if my lady has no objection.”
“But you will need at least a change of clothes, won’t you?”
“My brother assures me that he will have such items sent by this evening.”
This she said as she reached into the bosom of her kimono for a caramel to give to the bored Buntarō.
“Well then, let us inform my father. He is now much weaker, you know. The ear he has directed toward the draft is chilblained.”
Before getting up from the long brazier, O-suzu absentmindedly reset the kettle.
“Mother . . .”
O-tori responded in the viscous voice of one just awakened from sleep.
“Mother, O-yoshi-san is here.”
With a sense of relief, O-suzu quickly got up, without looking at O-yoshi’s face. Passing through the next room, she again announced the arrival of “O-yoshi-san.”
Her mother was lying in bed, her mouth buried in her night-clothes, but she nonetheless looked up and with a twinkle in her eyes exclaimed: “Oh, already here?” O-suzu was palpably aware of O-yoshi’s presence behind her, as she made her harried and hurried way to Genkaku’s room, moving along the veranda that looked out on the snow-covered garden.
Entering his secluded chamber from the brightness outside, she was struck by how dark it seemed. Genkaku was sitting up, listening as Kōno read to him from the newspaper, but when he saw O-suzu, he immediately called out, “O-yoshi?” It was an intense, hoarse, almost needling voice.
“Yes, she’s here, Father,” said O-suzu reflexively, standing next to the sliding door. This was followed by a strained silence, before she continued:
“I shall bring her here immediately.”
“Mmm . . . Is she alone?”
“No.”
Genkaku nodded a wordless acknowledgment.
“Kōno-san, come this way,” said O-suzu. Without waiting for the nurse to respond, she left the room, passing with short, rapid steps down the corridor. A wagtail was at that moment perched on a hemp-palm leaf still covered with snow, moving its tail up and down, but O-suzu was preoccupied with a sense of foreboding, as though it had emerged from that isolated, foul-smelling room and were now pursuing her.
Now that O-yoshi had come to stay, the ambience of the household became visibly strained. It began with Takeo’s bullying of Buntarō. The boy resembled his mother more than his father, sharing with her not only facial features but also timidity. O-suzu was, of course, not without sympathy but nonetheless seemed at times to find him much too submissive.
Kōno took a coldly professional look at this banal domestic drama—or perhaps rather found amusement in it. She had her own dark past with which to contend, having attempted on numerous occasions to ingest cyanide in the aftermath of relations with the head of the household where she was employed or with hospital physicians. As a result, she had developed a morbid pleasure in the sufferings of others.
Since having come to work for the Horikoshis, she had discovered that the paralytic O-tori did not wash her hands after having relieved herself. For a time, being the deeply suspicious woman she was, she thought that O-suzu must be a very clever person indeed: “She somehow brings water to her mother without our knowing it.” Within four or five days, however, she realized that the fault lay with the daughter of the house. This gave her a feeling close to satisfaction, and now whenever the occasion called for it, Kōno would provide a washbowl.
“Kōno-san,” O-tori exclaimed tearfully, pressing her palms together in gratitude, “it is thanks to you that I can now wash my hands as any normal person does!”
Kōno was nonetheless unmoved by O-tori’s joy. Her amusement lay in seeing O-suzu obliged to bring the water herself at least every third time. Again being the kind of person she was, she hardly felt displeased or disturbed by the children’s quarrels. When with Genkaku, she feigned sympathy for O-yoshi and her son; in the presence of O-tori, her attitude toward the two was full of spite. It was a slow but effective strategy.
O-yoshi had been in the house for about a week when Takeo and Buntarō quarreled once more. The disagreement had begun over nothing more than the question of which is longer, the tail of a pig or the tail of a cow. The two had been in Takeo’s 4.5-mat study room, next to the entrance. Takeo had pushed his slender opponent into a corner, where he pummeled him with kicks and punches. O-yoshi, who had happened to pass by at that moment, held Buntarō in her arms, the boy still too stunned for tears.
“Now Master Takeo,” she remonstrated, “you musn’t be pickin’ on the weak.”
These were unusually barbed words for the usually withdrawn O-yoshi. Takeo was taken aback by her severity and fled crying to the sitting room, whereupon O-suzu left whatever work she was doing at her sewing machine and dragged Takeo back to O-yoshi and her son.
“How dare you behave so selfishly! Now tell O-yoshi-san that you are sorry. Get down on the mats and make a proper bow!”
Finding herself in front of the exasperated O-suzu, O-yoshi could only add her own tears to Buntarō’s and offer the most abject of apologies. Again it was Kōno the nurse who invariably assumed the role of arbitrator. She physically restrained O-suzu, whose face was red with anger, while imagining with inner contempt the feelings of someone else: Genkaku, who was listening intently to the commotion. Needless to say, she did not betray such thoughts in either her face or her comportment.
Yet it was not only the children’s quarrels that caused family unrest. O-tori, who had once seemed to have quite resigned herself to the existence of her husband’s mistress, now found the flames of her jealousy rekindled. Of course, she had never once uttered a bitter word to her. (It had been the same five or six years before, when O-yoshi was still living in the maid’s room.) Instead, O-tori was inclined to unleash her resentment on the innocent Jūkichi, who naturally refused to take it in the least seriously. O-suzu felt sympathy for him and would sometimes make excuses on behalf of her mother. But he would always rebuff her with a wry smile, saying: “We can’t very well have you behaving hysterically as well.”
Kōno also took an interest in O-tori’s jealousy, which she thoroughly understood, together with the old woman’s desire to punish Jūkichi for it. At the same time, she had come to nurture her own feelings of envy toward the married couple. O-suzu was in her eyes the spoiled daughter of the house. As for Jūkichi, he was clearly a man who stood above the crowd, but he was also precisely the sort of male she despised.
Their happiness struck her as undeserved, and so to “remedy” the injustice, her manner toward him took on an air of familiarity. Though such may have been quite meaningless to him, it provided a fine opportunity to annoy O-tori, who, leaving her knees fully exposed, would spitefully taunt him: “Jūkichi, is the daughter of an invalid not enough for you?”
Yet O-suzu did not cast the least suspicion on Jūkichi. Indeed, she seemed to feel a measure of pity for Kōno. This, however, only added to Kōno’s resentment and even increased her contempt for the kindhearted O-suzu. She was pleased to see Jūkichi begin to avoid her and at the same time to show signs of male interest. He had previously been quite unperturbed about undressing in Kōno’s presence when he entered the bath located next to the kitchen. Recently, however, he had not allowed himself even once to appear to her in such a state. He was now undoubtedly ashamed of his body, which resembled that of a plucked rooster. Seeing him in this way (his face was also covered with freckles), she secretly sneered at him, asking herself how anyone except O-suzu could possibly fall in love with him.
On a frosty, overcast morning, Kōno was sitting in front of the mirror in her three-mat room at the house entrance, arranging her hair into the straight-back style in which she always wore it. Now at last O-yoshi was to leave the next day for her home in the countryside. While Jūkichi and O-suzu were happy to see her go, O-tori appeared to be all the more irritated.
As she occupied herself with her hair, Kōno could hear O-tori’s shrill voice and somehow remembered a story she had once heard from a friend. It seems that a certain woman had, while living in Paris, become acutely homesick. Fortunately, a friend of her husband was about to return to Japan, and so she accompanied him on the same ship. The long ocean voyage did not appear to cause her any particular distress, but as they were approaching the province of Kii, she suddenly became so agitated that she threw herself into the water. The closer she had come to Japan, the more intensely homesick she had become . . . As Kōno slowly wiped her oily hands, she thought about a similar sort of mysterious force that acted on the jealousy of the invalid O-tori—and on her own.
“Mother! What have you done, crawling all the way out here? Mother! Kōno-san, could you please come?”
The voice of O-suzu appeared to come from the outside corridor near Genkaku’s room. Hearing it, Kōno looked into the clear mirror and for the first time permitted herself a cold snigger. Then with an air of surprise, she called out in reply: “Yes, I’ll be right there!”
Genkaku’s condition steadily deteriorated. He also suffered from excruciating sores running from his back to his hips, the consequence of having been bedridden for so many years. To ease his misery, if only slightly, he would occasionally groan. Moreover, his suffering was not only physical. Though O-yoshi’s presence provided some consolation, he was also constantly tormented by O-tori’s jealousy and the children’s quarrels. Yet that was still preferable to the terrifying loneliness he felt in the wake of O-yoshi’s departure, forcing him to come to terms with the long years he had lived.
In his present state, it seemed to him that his life had been a wretched one. He had certainly enjoyed comparatively sunny days when he first obtained the rubber-seal patent, whiling away the hours playing cards and drinking. He was nonetheless in a constant state of fretfulness about the envy of his contemporaries, about opportunities for profit that might slip by him. Moreover, in making O-yoshi his mistress, he had had to contend not only with the resultant bickering within his family but also with the constant and heavy burden of finding discreet financial means for her support. Adding all the more to his misery may have been a hidden desire that he had sometimes felt in the last year or two: for all his attraction to young O-yoshi, he had wished that she and her child would simply die.
Wretched? Yet on reflection, I know that I am not the only one in this condition.
Such thoughts would run through his mind in the night, as he remembered in minute detail his relatives, friends, and acquaintances. In the name of “safeguarding constitutional government,”4 the father of his adopted son-in-law had brought to social ruin many a weaker political opponent. An aging antiquarian, his closest friend, had had intimate relations with the daughter of his first wife. A lawyer had embezzled money from a trust fund. And then there was a seal engraver . . . Yet strangely enough, their sins could not in the least alleviate his suffering. On the contrary, they cast an even darker shadow over his life.
“Ah, but this misery too will pass, once the auspicious day comes . . .”
This was Genkaku’s sole source of comfort. Again to distract himself from the multiple torments that assailed him, both body and soul, he would attempt to revive happy memories. Yet again, he had had a wretched life. If there was a single part that was in the least cheerful, it was in the innocence of his early childhood. Often between waking and dreaming, he would remember the village in the mountain valley of Shinano, where his parents had lived. In particular, he could see the shingle roofs weighed down with stones and the dried mulberry twigs that smelled of silk worms. Yet even these recollections were but fleeting shadows. Sometimes between his groans he would try to chant the Lotus Sutra:
Myōon Kanzeon, Bon’on-kaichōon, Shōhi-seken’on5
After that, he wanted to hum popular songs of yore, but to sing Kappore, kappore after having just extolled Lady Kannon struck him as strangely profane.
“Sleep is paradise! Sleep is paradise!”
Genkaku wished simply to forget everything through deep and sound sleep, and, in fact, he had Kōno give him not only sedatives but also injections of heroin. Yet even in sleep he did not always find rest. Sometimes in dreams he would meet O-yoshi and Buntarō, and such were for him happy encounters. He also once dreamt that he was talking to a new twenty-point Cherry Banner card; on it was O-yoshi’s face of four or five years before. Awakening from such reverie only made him feel all the more miserable. Now the contemplation of sleep began to fill him with an uneasiness bordering on dread.
One afternoon, as the end of the year was approaching, Genkaku was lying on his back when he called to Kōno, who was sitting at his bedside:
“Kōno-san, it’s been a long time since I’ve worn a loincloth. Please have one made of bleached cotton, six shaku long.”
There was no need to send O-matsu to the clothing shop just to buy bleached cotton.
“I’ll put it on myself. Just fold it and leave it here.”
He had intended to use the loincloth to hang himself and spent a good half day thinking how he might carry out his plan. Yet being unable even to sit up without help, he could hardly expect to find the opportunity. Moreover, in the face of death, even Genkaku was fearful. Gazing in the dim electric light at a calligraphic scroll in the Ōbaku style hanging in the alcove, he sneered at his own lingering greed for life.
“Kōno-san! Please help me to sit up!”
It was about ten o’clock in the evening.
“I want to take a short nap. You shouldn’t refrain from taking a bit of rest yourself.”
“No, thank you,” replied Kōno curtly, giving him a strange look. “I shall stay awake. It is my duty.”
Genkaku sensed that she had seen through his plan. He nodded without saying anything further and pretended to sleep. Kōno sat at her patient’s bedside, opened the latest edition of a women’s magazine, and appeared to be absorbed in it. Genkaku still had his mind on the loincloth next to his futon, as he watched Kōno through half-closed eyes. He felt a sudden urge to laugh.
“Kōno-san!”
The nurse in turn gave him a startled look. Leaning against the pile of bedclothes, he gave vent to uncontrollable mirth.
“What is it?”
“Never mind. It was nothing.”
And yet he continued to laugh, waving his bony right arm.
“A moment ago I was struck by something quite amusing, though I’m not sure what . . . Now help me lie down again.”
About an hour later, Genkaku had fallen asleep. In the night, he had a terrifying dream. He was standing in a dense wood, looking into what appeared to be a sitting room, through the gap in the papered doors, whose solid board below the latticed panels was quite tall. In the room lay a child, stark naked. Though still an infant, its face, which was turned toward him, was covered with the wrinkles of old age. Genkaku almost cried out and awoke, covered with sweat . . .
He was alone in the dark room. “Is it still night?” he wondered, but then saw from the table clock that it was nearly noon. For a moment the feeling of relief filled him with cheer, but soon he had reverted to his normal state of gloom. As he lay on his back, he counted his inhalations and exhalations. He felt a vague presence urging him on: “Now is the time!” He silently reached for the loincloth, wrapped it about his head, and pulled hard with both hands.
At that moment, Takeo, a veritable ball of thick winter clothing, stuck his head in the door and then went running as fast as his legs would carry him to the sitting room, hooting with amusement:
“Grandfather’s doing something funny!”
Approximately a week later, surrounded by members of his family, Genkaku died of tuberculosis. He had a magnificent funeral. (O-tori’s paralytic condition precluded her attendance.) Having expressed their condolences to Jūkichi and O-suzu, the mourners burned incense in front of the coffin, which was wrapped in white damask silk. Once outside the gate of the house, most quite forgot about the deceased, but this was clearly not true of his old friends. “The old man must have achieved his life’s dream, with a young mistress and a tidy sum of money.” Such was the unanimous sentiment of their talk.
The sun was hidden behind the clouds, as a horse-drawn hearse moved through the streets of late December, heading toward the crematorium. Jūkichi rode behind, accompanied by a cousin, a university student, who, perturbed by the swaying of their shabby carriage, exchanged few words with him, concentrating instead on the small volume he was reading, an English translation of Wilhelm Liebknecht’s Erinnerungen eines Soldaten der Revolution. Having been up all night for the wake, Jūkichi dozed off or stared out the window at the newly constructed houses passing them by. “The entire neighborhood has changed,” he muttered listlessly, talking to himself.
Toiling their way through streets mired in mud and slush, the carriages at last reached the crematorium. Yet despite the telephone arrangements he had made, Jūkichi was told that the first-class furnaces were all in use; there were still, however, second-class places available. To the two men, such would have been a matter of indifference, but for O-suzu’s sake more than out of consideration for his father-in-law, Jūkichi ardently negotiated with the official on the other side of the half-moon window:
“You see, to be honest, the deceased began to receive medical care only after it was too late, and so at the very least we should like to give him a first-class cremation.”
This fabrication proved to be more effective than he had hoped.
“Well then, as the regular first-class furnaces are not available, we shall offer you the special first-class furnace—but without extra charge.”
Feeling awkward, Jūkichi repeatedly offered his thanks to the kind-looking elderly man in brass-framed spectacles.
“Oh, no, there’s nothing for which you have to thank me.”
Having sealed the furnace, Jūkichi and his cousin returned to their shabby carriage. They were on their way through the crematorium gate, when to their surprise they saw O-yoshi standing alone in front of the brick wall. She bowed her head in their direction, and Jūkichi, somewhat disconcerted, started to raise his hat to return the greeting. But already the carriage, listing from side to side, had passed her by, heading down a street lined with leafless poplar trees.
“Isn’t that . . .?” asked his cousin.
“Mmm . . . I wonder whether she was already there when we arrived.”
“I think I remember only a few beggars . . . What’s to become of her?”
Jūkichi lit a Shikishima and replied as coolly as possible.
“Who’s to know?”
His cousin, saying nothing in reply, pictured in his mind a fishing village on the coast of Kazusa and then O-yoshi and her son, who would be living there . . . His face suddenly took on a severe look, and in the sunlight that had now appeared from behind the clouds, he turned once again to his reading of Liebknecht.