SŌSUKE and Oyone were without question a loving couple. In the six long years they had been together they had not spent so much as half a day feeling strained by the other’s presence, and they had never once engaged in a truly acrimonious quarrel. They went to the draper to buy cloth for their kimonos and to the rice dealer for their rice, but they had very few expectations of the wider world beyond that. Indeed, apart from provisioning their household with everyday necessities, they did little else that acknowledged the existence of society at large. The only absolute need to be fulfilled for each of them was the need for each other; this was not only a necessary but also a sufficient condition for life. They dwelled in the city as though living deep in the mountains.
In due course their lives began to turn monotonous. In their effort to avoid the stress that comes with living in a complex society, they eventually cut themselves off from access to diverse experiences that such a society affords, and in so doing came to forfeit, in effect, the prerogatives regularly enjoyed by civilized people. Intermittently they themselves recognized that their daily lives lacked variety. While neither felt the slightest hint of dissatisfaction or inadequacy with regard to the other, within the confines of the inner lives that they had created for themselves lurked a muffled protest against something stultifying, something lodged there that would not admit new stimuli. That they nonetheless lived out each and every day with the same stoical spirit was not because they had from the outset lost all interest in the wider world. Rather, it was because the wider world, after having isolated the two of them from all else, persisted in turning a cold shoulder. Blocked from extending themselves outward, they began developing more deeply within themselves. What their life together had lost in breadth it gained in depth. For these six years, instead of engaging in casual interactions with the outside world, they had explored the recesses of each other’s hearts. To the world they continued to appear to be two people. But in their minds they had become part of a single organism that it would be criminal to split apart. Their identities were so merged that the slenderest nerve endings in one of them were entangled with those of the other. They were like two droplets of oil on the surface of a large basinful of water. They had joined not through having repelled the surrounding water but rather through having been propelled by water into converging courses that brought them together in a single sphere.
United in this fashion, they experienced a harmony and a mutual fulfillment rarely attained in marriage—and concomitantly, a sense of tedium as well. Yet even when under the sway of such languor, they were cognizant of their good fortune. At times this tedium affected their consciousness like a scrim of oblivion, obscuring their love for a spell in a distracted haze. Still and all, no lacerating doubts arose to unsettle their equanimity. For they continued to be just as intimately joined to each other as they were estranged from the society around them.
Even as they sustained this remarkably close bond from one day to the next, year after year, they acted in each other’s company as though unaware of anything out of the ordinary about their relationship. From time to time, however, they both made a point of reaffirming the love they felt for each other. This process invariably involved going back to a time prior to their life together—to the inescapable memory of how much, in order to unite themselves in marriage, they had been forced to sacrifice. Such recollections caused them to bow and tremble before the terrible retribution that Nature had proceeded to inflict on them. At the same time they never failed to pay homage to the power of Love. They walked along through life together on the path toward death, lashed by fate each step of the way. Yet the lash’s tip, they realized, had been dipped in a honey-like balm that healed all wounds.
In his student days, as the scion of a Tokyo family of considerable means, Sōsuke had freely and fully indulged the flamboyant tastes common to his class. In his dress, his mannerisms, and his opinions, he exuded the aura of a bright young man of the modern age, and with head held high sauntered about wherever he pleased. Like his starched white collar, his well-turned cuffs, and the patterned cashmere stockings that showed just below his cuffed trousers, his mind was exquisitely socialized.
By nature quick-witted, Sōsuke was little inclined to study. Viewing academic pursuits merely as a means of social advancement, he scarcely ever entertained the notion of a scholarly career, which requires something of a retreat from society. In the manner of other ordinary students he simply attended classes and blackened with ink large numbers of notebooks. But once the notebooks had been deposited somewhere at home, he rarely looked them over or made any further notations; even the gaps created by absences from class for the most part went unfilled. Leaving the notebooks piled up neatly on his desk, he would vacate his impeccably tidy study and go out for a stroll. Not a few of his friends envied him this air of a man of leisure. Sōsuke himself took pride in it. His future as reflected in his own eyes shimmered like a rainbow.
Back then, unlike the present, he had many friends. The plain truth of it was that in his cheerfully callow view all people appeared, more or less interchangeably, as friends. He lightly traversed his youth with optimism intact and without ever managing to learn the true meaning of the word “enemy.”
“So long as you don’t show up looking glum,” Sōsuke would say to his classmate Yasui, “you’ll be welcome just about anywhere.” And in fact he had never managed to look serious enough to offend anyone.
“That’s easy for you to say—you’re always so healthy,” Yasui, who was always suffering from one ailment or another, would reply enviously.
Though originally from the province of Echizen,[52] Yasui had lived in Yokohama so long that his accent and general appearance conformed to those of someone born and bred in Tokyo. He lavished care on his clothes and affected long hair parted straight down the middle. While he and Sōsuke had attended different secondary schools, at the university they often found themselves sitting side by side at lectures, and from time to time would ask each other about material they had missed. Before long these classroom chats grew into a friendship. For Sōsuke, who was still a stranger in Kyoto, it was a boon to have made such a friend at the beginning of the academic year. With Yasui as his guide he drank in like warm saké all the impressions offered by his new surroundings. The two of them made almost nightly forays into the livelier neighborhoods, such as those clustered along the avenues of Sanjō and Shijō. Occasionally they wandered through the Kyogoku quarter. Standing in the middle of a bridge, they would gaze down at the waters of the Kamo River and look up at the moon silently rising over the hills of Higashiyama. The Kyoto moon struck Sōsuke as rounder and larger than the moon of Tokyo.
When they grew weary of city streets and the crowds they would avail themselves of weekends to visit the outlying areas. Sōsuke delighted in the dense concentrations of brilliant greenery presented by the thickets of great bamboo dotting the landscape, and he marveled at the elegant rows of pines, their trunks, when reflecting the sunlight, seemingly dyed red. One day the two of them climbed up to the Pavilion of Compassion at Senkōji.[53] As they gazed up at a large plaque inscribed by the monk Sokuhi,[54] they heard the splashing of oars plying the stream in the valley floor. It so resembled the call of wild geese that they had to smile. Another time they trekked as far as the Heihachi Teahouse Inn[55] and spent the night there. They ordered from the hostess some unappetizing grilled river fish on skewers and downed them with saké. The hostess wore a light cotton towel around her head in the country style and old-fashioned baggy blue trousers.
For awhile, immersed in these new sensations, Sōsuke managed to assuage his appetite for life. But in the course of roaming around the old capital and inhaling its venerable scent, at some point it began to seem stale. As the novel effect initially produced on him by the lovely mountains and sparkling waters wore off, he grew dissatisfied. With the warm blood of youth still coursing through his veins, he was unable to discover a verdant oasis that might quench its heat. Nor had he found any sphere of action in which his natural ardor could flare up and consume itself. His racing pulse only caused his whole body to tingle with nervous energy. Languishing there in the inn, arms folded against his chest, Sōsuke surveyed the mountains that stretched out in all directions. “I’m tired of these boring old places,” he said presently.
With a chuckle, Yasui launched into an anecdote about a friend of his who hailed from a truly remote locale—just to keep things in perspective. The place was Tsuchiyama—the one where “the rain keeps coming down,” as it says in the ballad[56]—and it had been a well-known post station on the old Tokaido Road. From morning to night, according to Yasui’s friend, you could see nothing but mountains all around: It was like living at the bottom of a cone-shaped mortar bowl. As a child, he recalled, whenever the spring rains poured down he had panicked at the prospect of the family’s inn being submerged, seemingly any minute, beneath the water flowing down from the surrounding mountains. It struck Sōsuke that there could be no crueler fate than to live out one’s life stuck at the bottom of this mortar bowl.
“How can people possibly survive in such a place?” he exclaimed with a look of incredulity.
With another chuckle, Yasui related a story that this same friend had told him about the most prodigious native son that Tsuchiyama had given to the world: a fellow who had long ago swindled someone out of a strongbox and been crucified for his trouble.[57] Chafing as he was at the constraints of Kyoto life, Sōsuke allowed as how such events were indispensable, perhaps once in a century, to break the monotony.
At this stage of his life, Sōsuke’s gaze was riveted to the world of the new. Once he had taken in the full cycle of local beauty spots that nature had to offer through the four seasons, he felt no need to visit blossoms here, autumn leaves there, simply for the sake of renewing memories of yesteryear. In his quest to establish a demonstrable record of a life lived to the full, his overwhelming priorities were the present in which he was now engaged and the future that was in the process of unfolding; the receding past was but an illusion, of as little value to him as a vanished dream. He began to cringe at the thought of viewing countless peeling shrines and weathered temples—indeed, at the very prospect of focusing his bright young eyes on history’s faded relics. His sensibility was not yet so desiccated as to lure him down the sleepy byways of antiquity.
At the end of the school year, Sōsuke and Yasui took leave of each other with promises to meet again soon. Yasui’s plan was first to return to his original home in Fukui Prefecture, then go on to Yokohama; if he were to send Sōsuke a letter to let him know when he had arrived, ideally they could later take the train back to Kyoto, stopping, if time permitted, at Okitsu, where they could make a leisurely tour of Seikenji, the Zen temple, the pine grove on Miho strand, perhaps even Mount Kunō.[58] Pronouncing this an excellent plan, Sōsuke anticipated the pleasure of receiving Yasui’s note from Yokohama.
When Sōsuke had then returned to Tokyo, his father was still in the best of health and Koroku was but a child. After a year’s absence, it actually thrilled him to breathe again the scorching, sooty air of the capital. Gazing down from some eminence on the congeries of roof tiles stretching out for miles in all directions under the blazing sun, he had almost exclaimed aloud: This is Tokyo! At this period in his life, each and every detail of this dizzying panorama assailed his senses with a force that drummed into his head the word “Mag-nif-i-cent!”
His future was like a tightly closed bud waiting to blossom into a flower as yet unknown to others, whose ultimate form was indeed far from clear even to him. What he could intuit clearly was that “boundless” was the best way to describe what lay ahead. Even in the summer heat, he did not neglect to lay plans for his life after graduation. Although he had not yet decided whether to pursue a career in the civil service or in business, he realized that in either case it would be to his advantage to lay as much groundwork as possible now. His father introduced him personally to some of his acquaintances and provided indirect introductions to others. Sōsuke selected those who might carry particular weight in the future and went to visit these men. One of them had already left the city, ostensibly for a summer resort. Another was simply not at home. Still another man on his list told him to visit his office, saying he was too busy to meet with him at home. Sōsuke arrived at seven in the morning, with the sun still low in the sky, and took the elevator up to the third floor of a red-brick building, only to be confronted to his amazement by the spectacle of seven or eight others waiting there to see the very same man. And yet it somehow excited him to visit new places like this and encounter novel situations that, whether or not his errand proved successful, made him feel as though he were adding to his mental file a type of experience about which he had previously been ignorant.
Similarly, in this phase of his life he considered the role assigned to him by his father in the annual airing of the family heirlooms a particularly fascinating opportunity. Seated on a damp rock in front of the storehouse, feeling the cool breeze that blew through the building, he pored with great curiosity over illustrated maps of famous places in Edo and a gazetteer entitled The Fine-Grained Sands of Edo[59] that had passed through several generations of his family. Then, sitting cross-legged in the middle of the parlor, where even the mats were hot, he would pack the camphor crystals[60] brought to him by the maid into little paper cones of the sort doctors use to dispense medicinal powders. From childhood Sōsuke had a fixed set of associations linking the strong aroma of camphor with the sweaty dog days of summer, earthenware moxa burners, and long-winged, fork-tailed kites lazily circling overhead in a clear blue sky.
While thus caught up in one thing or another, Sōsuke was overtaken by the approach of autumn.[61] Leading up to the traditional watershed mark, the two hundred and tenth day in the old calendar,[62] the winds blew and rains fell. Clouds looking like splotches of thin black ink moved ceaselessly across the sky. In the space of two or three days the temperature fell precipitously. The time had come for Sōsuke to bind up his wicker trunk with strong hemp rope and prepare to return to Kyoto.
In the meantime, however, he had not forgotten the travel plans agreed to with Yasui. When he arrived in Tokyo two months earlier he had at first simply bided his time, but as the departure date approached and there was still no word from Yasui, he became concerned. Since they had parted ways in Kyoto, Sōsuke had not received so much as a postcard. He sent off a letter to Yasui’s old home in Fukui; there was no reply. He then thought of making inquiries in Yokohama, only to realize he had neglected to ask Yasui for his address there. And so his hands were tied.
On the eve of Sōsuke’s departure his father took him aside and, after handing him a sum of money that included, as his son had requested, something extra for the side trip on the way back to Kyoto, counseled him, “Now, be sure to watch your spending.” Sōsuke had listened to this well-worn piece of parental advice in the fashion typical of young sons. “I won’t be seeing you until you come home again next year,” his father added. “Take very good care of yourself.”
But when the time for him to return came around the next year, it was no longer possible for Sōsuke to go home. And the next time he did return to Tokyo his father already lay cold in death. Even now, Sōsuke could not recall the scene of their final parting without feeling a stab of remorse.
At the very last moment before he left for Kyoto, he had received a proper, sealed letter from Yasui, who wrote to the effect that while he had fully intended to stick to their plan of traveling together, something had come up that required him to return right away. He concluded with the hope that they could get together again in a leisurely fashion back in Kyoto. Sticking the letter into his suit pocket, Sōsuke boarded the train.
When he reached Okitsu, where the two friends were to have stopped together, Sōsuke exited the station and walked alone straight down the town’s single thoroughfare toward Seikenji. Now that it was September and the summer season over, the flow of vacationers had ebbed, leaving the inn relatively tranquil. Sōsuke stretched out prone in a room with a view of the sea and wrote a few lines on a postcard to Yasui, which included the words: “Since you did not join me, here I am all by myself in this place.”
The following day, still sticking to their original plan, he went, again by himself, to view the pines of Miho and to visit Ryūgeji, a temple associated with the Tokugawa family, making an effort all the while to store up impressions that could later be revived in conversation with Yasui. Perhaps it was the weather, or perhaps it was the absence of the companion he had counted on, but Sōsuke found little pleasure in viewing the pine-covered beaches or making the ascent to the temple. Lounging about at the inn was even more tedious. Stripping off the yukata provided by the inn and draping it along with the short sash over a railing, he quickly left Okitsu.
On his first day back in Kyoto, Sōsuke, tired from the overnight train trip and busy with tidying up afterward, did not so much as step into the sunlit streets. When, on the following day, he got around to visiting the campus, he found the faculty not much in evidence and the students still few and far between. Strangest of all, Yasui, after so emphatically announcing his intent to return to Kyoto on a date that fell some days earlier, was nowhere to be seen. Perplexed, Sōsuke made a detour on his way home to Yasui’s lodgings, which were located next to the well-wooded and well-watered precincts of Kamo Shrine. Before the vacation, in resorting to this out-of-the-way retreat, which might as well have been a country village, Yasui had stressed the need for some quiet backwater where he could properly study. The house he had chosen was flanked on two sides by weathered earthen walls that lent it an old-fashioned aura. The owner, Sōsuke learned from Yasui, had been a cleric on the staff of Kamo Shrine. His wife, a forty-year-old woman who wielded the Kyoto dialect quite expressively, saw to Yasui’s needs.
“‘Seeing to my needs’ consists in her dropping off a lousy meal three times a day,” Yasui had complained to Sōsuke shortly after moving in. Sōsuke was already acquainted from previous visits with the landlady responsible for the so-called lousy meals, and she, for her part, remembered who he was. No sooner had she caught sight of him than, after an elaborate greeting in her mellifluous Kyoto idiom, she took the words out of his mouth by asking him about Yasui’s whereabouts. Evidently she had heard nothing from him since he left for home at the beginning of summer. Sōsuke mulled over this surprise all the way back to his lodging.
For the next week or so, on every visit to campus, he felt a presentiment as he entered the lecture hall: Would he catch sight of Yasui’s face today? Would he chance to hear his voice? Each day he returned home with the same vague but palpable sense of dissatisfaction. Indeed, by the third or fourth day, viewing himself as having some responsibility concerning such things, since it was to him Yasui had clearly communicated his intention to return early, Sōsuke began to worry about his safety. He made inquiries about Yasui’s movements, asking every classmate who had been at all friendly with him, but no one knew a thing. One of them did say that just the night before, in the midst of the crowds around Shijō, he had seen a man wearing a yukata who looked a lot like Yasui. Sōsuke did not consider it likely that it was, in fact, his friend. The very day after Sōsuke gleaned this bit of information, however, that is, an entire week after he had arrived back in Kyoto, Yasui himself burst in on him at his lodging dressed just as the classmate had described.
As Sōsuke gazed for the first time in a long while at the figure of his friend, not yet dressed for school and with straw hat in hand, he had the sensation that something new had been superimposed on this face since he had last seen it before vacation. His black hair had been slicked down with pomade and parted down the middle with ostentatious precision. In fact, Yasui announced, byway of an explanation for showing up out of the blue, he had just come from a barbershop.
That evening the two of them spent more than an hour engrossed in conversation. The peculiar mannerisms in Yasui’s speech remained unchanged: a certain gravity in his enunciation; a reserved tone, as if holding back from expressing himself too freely in deference to Sōsuke; the verbal tic of “never-the-less . . .” which he overused as before. And yet in the course of their conversation he said not a word about why he had left Yokohama ahead of Sōsuke, nor explained where he had stopped en route, thus arriving in Kyoto later than his friend. He did mention that it was only three or four days ago that he had finally returned, and that he had yet to settle in again at the lodging he had moved into before the summer break.
“Where are you staying, then?” Sōsuke asked. Yasui named an inn in the Sanjō district. It was a third-rate establishment. Sōsuke knew of it.
“What are you doing in a place like that?” Sōsuke pressed him further. “Are you going to stay there much longer?”
At first Yasui replied vaguely that circumstances made it convenient to stay there for the time being. But then he announced a new development to his astonished friend: “I’m thinking of getting away from boardinghouse life . . . maybe I’ll rent a small house.”
Within the week, as good as his word, Yasui was the master of a house in a tranquil locale close to the university. In addition to the gloomy darkness common to all Kyoto houses, this cramped rental had pillars and latticework painted a darkish red color seemingly calculated to intensify the fusty look of the place. Near the front gate was a single willow tree; on whose property it stood was hard to say. Sōsuke observed its long branches whipping about in the breeze, practically touching the eaves of Yasui’s house. The garden, unlike those of Tokyo, was laid out with some order. Befitting a region where rocks were easy to come by, a good-size boulder had been set in the garden directly opposite the parlor. Around its base spread a cool, luxurious carpet of moss. Behind the house stood an empty toolshed, its threshold rotted out, and beyond that, the neighbor’s bamboo thicket, all of which was visible to anyone visiting the toilet.
Sōsuke first visited the house at the beginning of the term, just a few days shy of October. As he could recall to this day, it had still been so hot that he was carrying a black umbrella around as a parasol. Peering through the lattice door as he closed his umbrella, he had caught sight of the fleeting outline of a woman dressed in a broad-striped yukata. The ground-level area inside, made of hard-packed earth, extended to the rear of the house; from the entranceway, one could dimly see all the way back. Sōsuke stood there until the retreating figure in the yukata vanished through the back door. Then he slid open the lattice. Yasui himself appeared at the entrance to greet him.
The two went into the parlor, where they sat talking for a while, but at no point did the woman Sōsuke had spied so much as look in on them. She did not speak, nor make any kind of noise. The house was not at all large, so she must have been in an adjoining room, yet it had been quite as if there were no one there besides the two of them. This silent wraith of a woman was Oyone.
Yasui chatted volubly about his native region, about Tokyo, and about his courses this term. About Oyone, however, he spoke not a word. For his part, Sōsuke lacked the nerve to ask. And so the subject went unmentioned that day.
When the two met the next day, the woman was still very much on Sōsuke’s mind. Yasui, meanwhile, said not a word about her, and acted as if there were nothing out of the ordinary. For all the unrestrained conversations these two fast friends had entered into, with the easy, trusting candor of youth, Yasui kept the door shut on this one topic. And for all Sōsuke’s curiosity, it was not strong enough for him to try forcing it open. Thus a whole week went by in which the never-mentioned woman remained a barrier lodged between the consciousnesses of the two friends.
That Sunday Sōsuke called on Yasui again. Prompted by some business connected with an organization they both belonged to and having nothing to do with the woman, the visit was intended to be brief. No sooner had Sōsuke been seated in the same spot in the parlor, however, and begun gazing out at the small plum tree next to the garden hedge, were the same sensations he had experienced on his previous visit vividly evoked. Today, too, the house around him was perfectly silent. He could not help imagining the dim figure of the young woman hidden within this silence. At the same time he felt no presentiment that she might actually reveal her presence, something that seemed just as unlikely as before.
In the midst of these ruminations Sōsuke suddenly found himself being introduced to Oyone. In contrast to the bold-striped yukata worn last time, her attire today, when she came in from the next room, suggested that she was either on her way out to or just back from an errand. This had taken Sōsuke by surprise. But there was nothing eye-catching in the woman’s dress, either in the color of her kimono or the sheen of her obi, as might turn his surprise into astonishment. Moreover, on this first meeting Oyone showed little of the alluring shyness common among young women. Indeed, she appeared to be a most ordinary person, albeit more tranquil and taciturn than the average. This woman was so composed, Sōsuke could see, that it would make no difference in her behavior whether she was off somewhere by herself or in the company of others, and he concluded it was not necessarily out of shyness that she avoided mingling with people.
Yasui introduced Oyone with the words: “This is my little sister.” As she sat directly across from Sōsuke and took part in a desultory conversation for a few minutes, he could not detect even a hint of provincial speech.
“Have you been in Fukui until recently?” he asked, but before she could reply Yasui broke in, “No, in Yokohama, for a long time now.”
It soon became apparent that Yasui and Oyone planned to go shopping in the city center that day, which was why Oyone had changed out of her everyday clothes and, in spite of the heat, wore a fresh pair of white socks. Sōsuke felt embarrassed at having intruded on them at the moment they were about to leave the house.
“We’ve only just moved in, you see, and we find something else we need every single day,” Yasui said with an apologetic laugh. “We have to go into town a couple of times a week.”
“I’ll walk out to the street with you,” said Sōsuke, immediately getting to his feet. Then, at Yasui’s suggestion, he took a moment to look around the house. After taking in the likes of a square charcoal brazier with a tin ash pan, a cheap-looking brass tea kettle in the next room, and an oddly brand-new wooden bucket next to the ancient sink in the kitchen, he made his way back through the house and out to the front gate. Yasui padlocked the gate and ran off to entrust the key to a neighbor. While Sōsuke and Oyone were waiting they exchanged pleasantries.
Years later, he could still recall the words that had been exchanged during those three or four minutes. These amounted to no more than the simple words of greeting any man might utter to any woman in an effort to be sociable—words that, if one were to describe them, might be said to be like water: pale and shallow. Sōsuke could not even have guessed the number of times he had uttered phrases of just this sort to complete strangers and passersby on the paths of everyday life.
Each time he recalled this exceedingly brief conversation word for word, he had to admit to himself how insipid, how virtually devoid of all color it had been. He could only marvel, then, at how those first, colorless murmurings had led to a future for the both of them dyed with the brightest of reds. All these years later, their lives no longer glowed with such a vivid color; in the natural course of things, the passion that had inflamed them had subsided into darker embers. Whenever he looked back on those early days, he cherished his memory of the brilliant history that had been launched by those innocuous words; at the same time he trembled at the power that fate could wield by transforming so casual an encounter into such a dramatic event.
Sōsuke recalled how, as the two of them stood before a mud wall outside the gate, the upper half of their shadows had been cast at an exaggerated angle against the surface. He recalled Oyone’s shadow there on the wall, topped off by an irregularly shaped cone where her parasol had obscured her head. He recalled how mercilessly the early-autumn sun, already beginning its decline, had beat down on them. He recalled, too, that when Oyone, parasol in hand, moved into the not very cool shade of the willow tree, he had stepped back in order to frame with his gaze both the purple of her parasol with its fringe of white and the only slightly faded green of the willow branches.
Now, whenever he thought back on that day, everything remained clear to him. Nothing extraordinary had happened. They waited until Yasui reappeared from behind the wall, then the three of them headed toward town. The two men walked shoulder to shoulder while Oyone, who was wearing loose-fitting sandals, fell slightly behind. The conversation was more or less confined to the men, and was in any case cut short when a bit farther on Sōsuke parted ways with the pair and returned home.
Yet the impressions made on him that day stayed with him for a long while. At home again, in the bath, then later, when seated by the lamp, the image of Yasui and Oyone, like figures in a flat, brightly colored print, repeatedly flashed before his mind’s eye. That was not all; when he bedded down for the night he began to wonder if Oyone was in fact, as she had been introduced, Yasui’s sister. Although, short of putting the question directly to Yasui, there was no way to resolve these doubts, he wasted no time jumping to his own conclusion. Reflecting as he lay there on the way that the two interacted, there was plenty of room for such a conclusion, he decided, and smiled to himself. Then he sensed how absurd it was to prolong his idle speculation on the matter. Finally he got up and blew out the lamp, which he had left burning.
Sōsuke was far too friendly with Yasui to let so much time pass between meetings that his memories could gradually fade away until they left no trace. Besides being together every day on campus, they continued to visit each other, as they had before the vacation. When Sōsuke visited Yasui it did not always happen, however, that Oyone came out to greet him. On roughly one out of three visits she would not appear, reverting instead to the totally silent presence she had maintained on his first visit. But this did not ultimately prevent them from becoming quite friendly; before long they were on good enough terms to joke with each other.
Soon it was fall. Although Sōsuke had little interest in sightseeing in Kyoto, as he had done the previous autumn, when invited by Yasui and Oyone to gather mushrooms, he discovered a fresh aroma in the bright, crisp air. He also accompanied the two of them on an outing to enjoy the autumn foliage. As they made their way from Saga toward Takao, cutting across the flanks of the mountains, Oyone used her parasol as a walking stick and hiked up her kimono in a manner that left her underskirt showing around her ankles. As the sun shone down on a stream more than three hundred feet below their high vantage point, revealing clearly, even from this distance, the streambed beneath the translucent flow, Oyone looked over at the two men and said, “Kyoto is lovely, isn’t it?” Still gazing down on this scene, Sōsuke exclaimed to himself that Yes, Kyoto was lovely indeed.
Outings of this sort, the three of them together, were not uncommon. More often, though, they would get together at Yasui’s house. Once, when Sōsuke stopped by for one of his regular visits, he found Yasui to be out and Oyone sitting alone in the house as if abandoned in the midst of autumn’s desolation. After a few words of sympathy he ensconced himself in the parlor, where, as they warmed their hands over the brazier that stood between them, Sōsuke lost himself in an unexpectedly lengthy conversation before returning home. Another time, he was sitting idly at his desk in his lodging room, uncharacteristically at loose ends, when all of a sudden Oyone turned up at his door. She had been shopping nearby and was just dropping in for a moment, she said. At Sōsuke’s urging she stayed for some tea and sweets, and left only after a long, leisurely chat.
Amid these various comings and goings, the leaves had fallen from the trees. Then, one morning, the high mountain peaks were capped with white snow. The dry riverbed was scoured by winds, and thin, long shadows of people moved across the bridge. The Kyoto winter that year was utterly merciless, inflicting its piercing cold silently yet relentlessly. Yasui was hard hit by the harsh weather and contracted a severe case of influenza. He alarmed Oyone by running a fever a good deal higher than those brought on by an ordinary flu. Before long, however, his temperature went down. He seemed to be coming out of it, but his symptoms lingered and he was never able to make a full recovery. Thereafter Yasui would suffer the ups and downs of a slight fever for days on end.
The doctor said that the respiratory tract appeared to have been affected and urged a rest cure away from the city. Yasui reluctantly packed his wicker trunk; Oyone, her carryall. Sōsuke accompanied them to Shichijō station and saw them to their compartment, keeping up a cheerful conversation until it was time for the train to depart.
“Come visit us sometime,” said Yasui from the compartment window after Sōsuke had alighted from the train.
“Yes, please do,” Oyone chimed in.
The train slowly slipped by Sōsuke, who stood on the platform glowing with good health; then, with a sudden acceleration and a belch of steam, it headed for Kobe.
The convalescing Yasui welcomed the New Year in his new surroundings. From the first day of his arrival on he sent Sōsuke a picture postcard more or less every day, in none of which was omitted an invitation to come visit them anytime. Each card also included without fail a couple of lines in Oyone’s hand. Sōsuke made a special stack of these cards on his desk so that whenever he came home they were the first thing to catch his eye. From time to time he went back over them all in order, reading some through again, glancing at others. Finally another card arrived in which Yasui had written that he was completely well now and would be coming home. But here they’d come all this way and had yet to receive a visit from Sōsuke, so as soon as he got this card he should leave immediately, even if he would only be able to stay a brief while. These few words supplied a sufficient goad to Sōsuke, who abhorred above all the tedium of an uninterrupted routine. He boarded a train and arrived at Yasui’s inn that very night.
As the three of them, now happily reunited, sat facing one another in the bright lamplight, the first thing Sōsuke noticed was the lustrous color that the recently ailing Yasui had regained. If anything, he looked healthier than ever. Yasui himself announced that yes, he was feeling very well indeed, and as if to prove the point rolled up his shirt sleeve and stroked a pulsing blue vein. Oyone’s eyes sparkled with delight. Sōsuke took particular note of their sheer liveliness. Heretofore his dominant impression of Oyone had been one of utter composure, even in the midst of riotous noise or scenes of disorder. Now it became obvious to him that this image had been largely conveyed through the steady gaze that she seldom allowed to be diverted.
The next morning the three of them went out in front of the inn and gazed at the sea’s dark currents flowing far offshore. They breathed air redolent of pitch oozing from the pine trees. The winter sun unabashedly ran its short course across the sky and sank into the west. As it receded from sight it dyed the low-hanging clouds yellow and red, like cooking-stove flames. Even when night fell no wind blew; only the occasional passing breeze bestirred the pines. The warm, sunny weather lasted through the entire three days of Sōsuke’s stay.
Sōsuke said he wanted to stay on awhile before returning. Oyone said they should indeed enjoy themselves a little longer. Yasui said they owed the fine weather to Sōsuke’s arrival. But at last the three of them packed up their wicker trunks and carryalls and returned to Kyoto. The rest of the winter had proved mild, with the north winds deflected back to the cold lands from whence they came. The patches of snow that clearly marked the mountaintops here and there gradually melted away, and then, all at once, green buds burst forth everywhere.
Whenever Sōsuke thought back on those months, it struck him that had the progression of the seasons been arrested then and there, and had he and Oyone been turned into stone on the spot, they would have been spared much pain. The drama commenced at winter’s end, when the faint signs of spring were just emerging, and reached its climax when the cherry blossoms scattered, giving way to fresh green leaves. It had been a life-and-death struggle. Their agony could be likened to that of raw, green bamboo being roasted over a hot flame until the oil came out. The unwary couple had been suddenly knocked over by a furious wind. By the time they got back on their feet, their entire world was covered with grit. They found themselves likewise encrusted, yet they had no inkling of when the storm wind had blown them over.
The world had heaped on the couple unmitigated censure for their moral failings. At first they were taken aback, but before they could accept the censure of their own consciences, they felt obliged to establish their own sanity. To their astonishment, what they discerned was not a pair of shameful sinners but rather two senseless people who had defied all logic. There was no excuse, no reason whatsoever for their actions. Therein lay their unspeakable anguish. They were left to contemplate ruefully how this cruel fate had lashed out against them so suddenly, as if on a whim, and, in a perversely playful way, ensnared two innocent mortals in its trap.
By the time the couple’s conduct had been fully exposed to the glaring scrutiny of others, they were themselves beyond any tortured moral equivocation. Submissively offering their pale foreheads, they were branded with the mark of burning flames. Henceforward they found themselves bound together by invisible chains and were constrained to walk lockstep, hand in hand, wherever they might go. They abandoned their parents. They abandoned their other relatives. They abandoned their friends. More generally, they abandoned society. Or they were abandoned by all of them. Sōsuke naturally faced expulsion from the university. He chose, for the sake of appearances, to withdraw formally, thus managing to salvage some shred of human dignity.
Such was the past shared by Sōsuke and Oyone.