SŌSUKE had been relaxing for some time on the veranda, legs comfortably crossed on a cushion he had set down in a warm, sunny spot. After a while, however, he let drop the magazine he had been holding and lay down on his side. It was a truly fine autumn day, the sun bright, the air crisp, and the clatter of wooden clogs passing through the quiet neighborhood echoed in his ears with a heightened clarity. Tucking one arm under his head, he cast his gaze past the eaves at the expanse of clear blue sky above. Compared to the tiny space he occupied here on the veranda, this patch of sky appeared extremely vast. Thinking what a difference it made, simply to take in the sky in the rare, leisurely fashion afforded by a Sunday, he squinted directly at the blazing sun for a few moments, then, averting his eyes, rolled over to his other side and faced the shoji. Beyond its panels his wife was seated, busy with her needlework.
“Beautiful day, isn’t it,” he called out to her.
She murmured in acknowledgment. Sōsuke, apparently not eager to strike up a conversation himself, lapsed back into silence. Presently his wife spoke up.
“Why don’t you take a stroll?”
This time it was Sōsuke who answered noncommittally.
Two, three minutes later, she brought her face up close to the glass panels in the shoji and peered out at her husband lying on the veranda. She saw that at some inner prompting he had brought his knees up to his chest, prawn-like, as if he were occupying a cramped space. His head of black hair was cradled between his arms, and his face was totally obscured by his elbows and clasped hands.
“Sleeping in such a place—why, you’ll catch cold,” she cautioned. She spoke in a manner characteristic of contemporary schoolgirls, in which overtones of Tokyo speech mingled with undertones from somewhere else. Peering up from between his elbows and blinking exaggeratedly, Sōsuke mumbled, “Don’t worry, I’m not asleep.”
Once again they fell silent. Sōsuke heard two or three rings of a bell announcing the passage of a rickshaw gliding along on rubber wheels, followed by the distant crowing of a rooster. Basking in the warm sun’s rays that readily penetrated to the shirt beneath his newly tailored kimono, made from machine-spun cloth, Sōsuke passively registered the sounds. Then, as if suddenly reminded of something, he called out to his wife through the shoji.
“Oyone,” he asked, “what’s the character for ‘kin’ in ‘kinrai’?”
“It’s the same as the one for ‘Ō’ in ‘Ōmi,’ isn’t it?”[1] His wife’s reply contained no hint of condescension, nor was it accompanied by the sort of shrill laughter peculiar to young women.
“But that’s the character I can’t remember—the one for ‘Ō.’”
Sliding the shoji open halfway, his wife thrust her ruler out beyond the track and with its edge traced for him the character on the veranda. “Like this, you see.” She said no more. The tip of the ruler rested where she had ended her tracing, and for a moment her gaze lingered intently on the pellucid sky.
“Oh, so that’s it,” said Sōsuke, not looking at his wife and without the faintest smile that might indicate this had all been a little joke.
Oyone, for her part, appeared to make nothing of their exchange. “Oh yes, a really fine day,” she remarked, more or less to herself, and resumed her needlework, leaving the shoji half open behind her.
Sōsuke raised his head slightly from between his elbows and now looked directly at his wife for the first time. “You know, there’s something amazing about Chinese characters.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, no matter how simple the character, once you get to thinking about it, it starts looking a bit odd, and suddenly you can’t be sure anymore. The other day I got all mixed up over the ‘kon’ in ‘konnichi.’[2] I’d put it down correctly on paper, but when I scrutinized it I got the feeling it was wrong somehow. After that, the closer I looked at what I’d written the less it looked like kon . . . Hasn’t that ever happened to you, Oyone?”
“Certainly not.”
“It’s just me, then?” Sōsuke asked, bringing a hand to his head.
“Just you. There’s obviously something wrong.”
“I wonder if it’s my nerves again.”
“Yes, that must be it!” Oyone said, eyeing her husband.
At this Sōsuke got to his feet. He traversed the sitting room, stepping gingerly over Oyone’s sewing basket and scattered threads, and opened the sliding panels to the parlor. Its southern exposure was blocked by the vestibule, with the result that the shoji at the other end of the room presented a distinctly chilly appearance to the gaze of someone just coming in out of the sunlight. He opened these as well. Yet even here on the eastern veranda, where one might expect the sun’s rays to strike in the morning, at least, they scarcely penetrated at all because of a cliff-like embankment that loomed over this side of the house, sloping down so steeply that it all but brushed the eaves. The embankment was covered with vegetation. Lacking so much as a single row of stone revetment, it looked precariously close to crumbling down. Astonishingly, however, it seemed as though nothing of the sort had ever happened, and the landlord went along year after year simply leaving things as they had always been. An elderly produce dealer, a resident of the quarter for two decades, had offered a ready explanation for this phenomenon as he stood with his vegetables outside the kitchen door one day. According to him, this plot of land had originally been covered by a sprawling thicket of bamboo; when it was cleared, the roots had not been dug up but left buried. The earth here, the peddler had said, was in fact more stable than one might think. Sōsuke had raised some doubts: If the roots were just left there, wouldn’t the bamboo grow back into a new thicket? Well, the old man had said, it seems that once it had been cut down to the ground like that it couldn’t easily grow back, but there was no need to worry about the cliff; no matter what, it would not crumble down. After this spirited defense, delivered as if he had a personal stake in the matter, the old man had departed.
The face of the embankment was largely colorless. Even in autumn the green vegetation merely faded into a pale, patchy tangle. There was no touch of the elegant such as would have been provided by plumes of susuki grass or ivy vines. In a kind of compensation several tall, slender mōsō bamboo trees,[3] a vestige of the former grove, rose cleanly out of the soil, two of them halfway up the steep slope, three more near the top. The bamboo had recently taken on a yellowish hue, and whenever Sōsuke stuck his head out beyond the eaves and saw the sun’s rays strike their trunks, he felt as though he were observing the warmth of autumn there atop the embankment. Sōsuke was one of those men who left home for work every morning and returned after four o’clock; normally he was far too pressed for time to take in the scenery towering above him. After exiting the unlit toilet and washing his hands in the basin, however, he happened to glance up beyond the eaves and noticed the bamboo. Leaves gathered densely atop the bamboo stalks, like the stubble on a monk’s close-cropped head. As the leaves luxuriated in the autumn sunlight they drooped down heavily in silent clusters, not a single one stirring.
Sōsuke returned to the parlor, closing the shoji behind him, and kneeled down at his desk. Although the couple had designated this room the parlor, as it was the one to which guests were conducted, it might more aptly have been called a study or a living room. In the alcove in the north wall hung a token scroll, a rather peculiar one, and in front of it was displayed a misshapen, murky crimson flower vase. In the space between the alcove’s lintel and the ceiling glinted two shiny brass S-hooks. No plaques hung from them. The only other item on the wall was a cabinet of shelves with glass doors that contained, however, nothing worthy of note.
Opening the desk drawer, which was trimmed with silver hardware, Sōsuke rummaged around vigorously but to no avail, and finally snapped the drawer shut. He then removed the cover from an ink stone and began writing a letter. Finished, he pondered a moment and then called to his wife in the next room.
“Oyone, what’s my aunt’s address in Naka Roku-Banchō?”
“Number twenty-five, isn’t it?” she answered, and then, after pausing long enough for him to write it down, added, “But a letter won’t do the trick. You have to go over there and have a real talk.”
“First let’s see if a letter won’t actually work,” he declared, as if to have done with it. “If it doesn’t, then I’ll go.” His wife did not reply. “Well, what do you think?” he persisted. “Won’t that do?”
Oyone, seemingly loath to disagree, protested no further.
Letter in hand, Sōsuke stepped directly from the parlor into the vestibule. When she heard his footsteps Oyone got up from the sitting room and proceeded to the vestibule by way of the veranda.
“I’m going out for a stroll,” said Sōsuke.
“Enjoy yourself,” his wife replied with a smile.
Half an hour later, at a rattling of the door being opened, Oyone left off with her needlework and again proceeded by way of the veranda to the vestibule, where instead of Sōsuke she found his younger brother, Koroku, wearing the cap of the secondary school[4] he attended.
“It’s hot!” he said as he undid the buttons of his black woolen cloak, so long that only about six inches of his hakama[5] showed below the hem.
“But just look at you,” said Oyone, “wearing that bulky thing on a day like this!”
“Well, I was thinking it might turn cold when the sun went down,” Koroku explained hastily, before following his sister-in-law along the veranda to the sitting room. “I see you’re hard at work as usual,” he said, glancing at a partly stitched kimono, and sat down cross-legged in front of the long brazier. After sweeping her sewing into the corner, Oyone moved opposite Koroku, took down the tea kettle, and began putting coals in the brazier.
“If it’s tea you’re serving, don’t make any for me,” said Koroku.
“None at all?” Oyone asked in a cajoling, schoolgirlish tone. “Well, what about some sweets, then?” she said with a smile.
“You have some?” asked Koroku.
“Actually, I don’t,” she replied truthfully, but then, as if remembering something—“Wait a minute, there just might be . . .”—she rose, pushed the coal scuttle out of the way, and opened a small storage compartment attached to the wall.
Koroku stared idly at Oyone from behind, focusing on the swelling above the hips where her jacket covered her obi. Whatever she was looking for seemed to take forever to find, and so he said, “Let’s skip the sweets, too—but tell me, where’s my brother?”
“He went out for a while,” she replied, her back still turned toward him. She was intent on her search. Eventually she clapped the compartment door shut. “Nothing! Your brother must have gobbled them up when I wasn’t looking,” she said as she returned to her place opposite Koroku.
“Well, then, won’t you treat me to supper this evening?”
“Why, of course!” said Oyone, looking at the clock on the wall. It was nearly four o’clock. Oyone made a mental note of the two hours left before mealtime. Koroku silently studied her face. He was, in fact, not especially interested in being treated by his sister-in-law.
“Nee-san,[6] do you suppose my brother’s gone to see the Saekis on my account?” he asked Oyone.
“Well, he has been saying over and over that he’s going to see them, but he hasn’t done so yet. But then, you know, your brother goes off in the morning and doesn’t come home till evening, and when he gets home he’s exhausted—even the walk to the bathhouse is a chore. So you shouldn’t keep pressing him, it isn’t fair.”
“Yes, of course he’s busy, but as long as this matter is unsettled I feel too anxious to concentrate on my studies.” As he spoke, Koroku picked up the brass fire tongs and, wielding them energetically, scrawled something in the ashes in the brazier. Oyone watched the tips of the tongs move this way and that.
“But he did just send a letter to the Saekis,” she said by way of consolation.
“What’d it say?”
“Well, I didn’t actually see it. But I’m sure it had to do with the matter in question. When your brother comes home you should ask him yourself. I’m sure that was it.”
“If he did send a letter I suppose that was probably it.”
“Yes, he really did send a letter. When he left awhile ago he had it in his hand and was going to mail it.”
Koroku did not wish to hear another word on the subject from his sister-in-law, whether of justification or consolation. He thought to himself with annoyance that if his brother had time to go out for a stroll, he might as well have strolled right on over to the Saekis instead of sending a letter. Entering the parlor, he took out a foreign book with a red cover from the cabinet and restlessly flipped through its pages.