Natsume Sensei looked at the calligraphic scroll and muttered as if to himself, “It’s a Kyokusō.” He was right: the seal was Kyokusō’s. I said to the Sensei, “Kyokusō was Ensō’s grandson, wasn’t he? What was the name of Ensō’s son, I wonder?” He answered, “Musō,1 probably.”
Then I woke up. The light from the next room was shining into the mosquito net. My wife seemed to be changing the diaper of our seven-month-old baby boy, who was crying the whole time. I turned my back to them and tried to get more sleep.
I heard my wife say, “No, Taka,2 I don’t want you to get sick again.”
“Is something wrong with him?” I asked.
“I think his stomach is a little funny.”
This baby tended to get sick much more often than our older boy; I felt both worried and ready to ignore it as more of the same.
“Have Dr. S3 look at him tomorrow,” I said.
“I was thinking of calling the doctor now.”
When the baby stopped crying, I went back to a sound sleep.
I still remembered my dream when I woke in the morning. I suspected that “Ensō” was Hirose Ensō, but Kyokusō and Musō were probably imaginary. Come to think of it, there was a storyteller named Nansō. I thought about these “-sō” names more than I did about the baby’s sickness, but that started to change when my wife came home from Dr. S’s.
“Another upset stomach, he says. He’ll come to look at him later.” She spoke almost angrily, cradling the baby in one arm.
“Just a little. 37.6. But he didn’t have any last night.”
I went up to my study and set to work. As usual, I made little progress, not necessarily because of the baby’s sickness. Soon a hot, steamy rain began to fall, rustling the trees in the garden. With my half-written story lying on the desk before me, I smoked one cigarette after another.
Dr. S came once before noon and once more in the evening. On his second visit he gave Takashi an enema. Takashi stared hard at the light bulb while this was being done to him. The liquid of the enema soon washed a thin blackish mucus out of him. I felt as if I were looking at his very illness.
“How’s he going to do, Doctor?”
“Oh, it’s nothing. Just don’t stop icing his forehead. And don’t hold him too much.”
With that advice, the doctor left.
I continued working into the night and finally got to bed around one in the morning. Coming out of the toilet just before that, I heard a knocking sound in the pitch-dark kitchen.
“Who’s there?”
“It’s me.” The voice belonged to my mother.
“What are you doing?”
“Cracking ice.”
Embarrassed at my own stupidity, I said, “Why don’t you turn the light on?”
“Don’t worry. I can do it by touch.”
I ignored this and switched the light on. She looked as if she had just crawled out of bed, her rumpled sleeping gown held closed by a slim sash. No wonder she had wanted the light off: this was no way to be seen, even at home. She was clumsily smashing ice with a hammer. The electric light glinted off the sharp water-washed angles of the smashed ice.
By morning, however, Takashi’s fever had climbed to just over 39. Dr. S came before noon and gave him another enema. I helped him with the job, hoping to see less mucus this time. When he withdrew the nozzle, however, much more mucus came with it than the night before.
“So much!” my wife exclaimed to no one in particular. The unseemly loudness of her voice made her seem like a schoolgirl again,4 as if seven years had suddenly dropped off her age. I glanced at Dr. S.
“It’s dysentery, isn’t it, doctor?”
“No, it isn’t dysentery. The children’s variety never happens before the infant is weaned.”
Dr. S was surprisingly calm.
After he left, I went back to work. I was writing a story for a special issue of the Sunday Mainichi, and the deadline was the next morning. I had little enthusiasm for the piece, but I forced myself to keep my pen moving. Takashi’s crying was getting on my nerves, though, and no sooner would he stop than his elder brother Hiroshi would start wailing.
Nor was that the only thing that grated on my nerves. A young man I had never met before arrived in the afternoon to ask for a loan. “I’m a manual laborer, but Mr. C wrote me this letter of introduction to you, so I was hoping you could help me,” he blurted out. I had no more than two or three yen in my purse at the time, so I handed him two books I could spare and told him to turn them into cash. The young man immediately opened the books and examined the publication data. “This one says ‘Not for Sale.’ Can you get money for ‘Not for Sale’ books?” I felt sorry for myself for having to put up with this, but I simply answered that he should be able to sell it. “Do you think so? All right, then, I guess I’ll be going.” Clearly dubious, the young man left without a word of thanks.
Dr. S came again that evening to do an enema. This time the volume of mucus had decreased significantly. “Oh, good, there’s so much less,” my mother said as she offered the doctor hot water to wash his hands. Her triumphant look almost suggested that she herself was responsible for the improvement. Not exactly relieved, I nevertheless felt something close to relief. This had to do not only with the amount of mucus but Takashi’s color and behavior, which were both normal.
“The fever will probably go down tomorrow,” Dr. S said to my mother as he washed his hands, looking pleased. “Fortunately, he doesn’t seem to be needing to throw up, either.”
When I awoke the next morning, my aunt was already awake in the next room and folding up her mosquito net. I thought I heard her say something about Takashi over the clanking of the net’s hardware. “What about Takashi?” I asked, my head still in a fog.
“He’s much worse. I think we have to take him to the hospital.”
I sat up in bed. This took me off guard after yesterday’s improvement. “Doctor S?”
“He’s here now. Hurry up. Get out of bed.” She wore a strangely stiff expression as if hiding her emotions. I went immediately to wash my face. The weather outside looked bad, overcast as usual. Somebody had thrown two gold-banded lilies into the bucket in the bathing room. I felt as if their fragrance and their brown pollen were going to stick to my skin.
In the space of a single night, Takashi’s eyes had become sunken. My wife said that when she went to pick him up this morning, his head dropped back and he vomited some kind of white stuff. He was yawning constantly as well, another bad sign. I felt a stab in the heart. At the same time, I felt a wave of revulsion. Dr. S was kneeling by the baby’s pillow, mute, a cigarette dangling from his lips. He looked up at me and said, “I have to talk to you.”
I showed him upstairs to my study. We sat on the matted floor, the unlighted hibachi between us. “I don’t think it’s bad enough to kill him,” he began, “but his whole digestive tract has shut down.” The only thing to do was starve him for a few days. “Probably the most convenient thing would be to put him in the hospital.”
I suspected that Takashi was in much greater danger than Dr. S was saying, that it was probably too late to do anything for him, even in the hospital, but this was no time to start confronting him with such doubts. I asked him to have the baby admitted. “Let’s make it U—— Hospital, then,” he said, “it’s so close by.” The doctor refused a cup of tea and went off to telephone the hospital. I called my wife to come upstairs. We decided to have my aunt go to the hospital with them.
This was my day to receive visitors. I had four starting first thing in the morning. I was conscious of my wife and aunt hurriedly preparing for the hospital as I carried on polite conversation with my first visitor. I suddenly became aware of something that felt like a grain of sand on the tip of my tongue. I had recently had a tooth filled and I wondered if some of the cement had broken off. Picking it out, I saw that it was a piece of the actual tooth. This gave me a superstitious twinge, but I went on smoking and trading remarks with my guest about a samisen that was up for sale. It was said to have belonged to the painter Hōitsu.5
Next came the young laborer who had called on me the day before. Standing in the entryway, he announced that he had been unable to get more than ¥1.20 for the books I gave him and started pressing me for another four or five yen. I refused, but he showed no sign of leaving. I finally lost my temper and shouted at him, “I don’t have time to stand here listening to this nonsense. Get out!”
“All right, but give me streetcar fare at least. Just fifty sen.”
When he saw that this wasn’t going to work either, he slammed the door and retreated through the gate. I promised myself never to respond to any such requests for money in the future.
Before long, my four visitors had become five. The fifth was a young scholar of French literature. As he entered my study, I excused myself and went downstairs to see what the situation was. My aunt was ready to leave, pacing up and down the veranda holding Takashi, whose thick wrap made him look chubby. I pressed my lips against his pale forehead, which was quite hot. His eyelids were twitching as well.
Instead of commenting on this, I asked in a near-whisper, “Did you call the rickshaws?”
“Pardon me? The rickshaws are already here,” she said with unusual formality as if speaking to a stranger.
At that point my wife came out. She had changed her clothes and was carrying a down comforter and a basket. She knelt before me with her hands on the floor mats. “We will be going now,” she announced with strange seriousness.
I suggested she change Takashi into his new hat—a summer hat I had bought him a few days earlier.
“I did that,” she said, peeking into the mirror on the clothes chest and pulling her kimono straight at the neck. I didn’t stay to see them off but went back upstairs.
With the new visitor, I talked about George Sand among other things. The canopies of the two rickshaws were visible through the young green leaves of the garden trees. Then suddenly they passed before my eyes, swaying above the fence. “The early nineteenth-century writers—Balzac, Sand—are far superior to the writers of the late nineteenth-century, don’t you think?” I remember with absolute clarity the passion with which the young man said this.
The stream of visitors continued into the afternoon. The sun was going down when I finally found the time to go to the hospital. The overcast skies had begun dropping rain. While I was changing into a better kimono, I ordered the maid to put out my rain clogs. Just then the Osaka editor N showed up to collect my manuscript. He wore mud-smeared boots, and his overcoat glittered with rain drops. I received him in the entryway, where I explained to him how the situation had prevented me from writing anything.
He expressed his sympathy and concluded, “I guess I’ll have to give up on this one.” I felt as if I had coerced his sympathy. I felt, too, that I had exploited my son’s critical condition as an excuse.
N had barely left the front door when my aunt arrived from the hospital. Takashi had thrown up his milk twice, she said. Fortunately, his brain did not seem to have been affected by the illness. She went on to talk about what a nice person the nurse was, that tonight my wife’s mother would be staying at the hospital with the baby, and so forth. “As soon as we got Taka there, they gave us a bunch of flowers, supposedly from some Sunday school pupils. I don’t know, it was creepy, like for a funeral.” This reminded me of my broken tooth of that morning, but I said nothing.
It was dark by the time I left the house, and a misty rain was falling. As I walked out through the gate, I realized I was wearing fair-weather clogs, not the rain clogs I had asked the maid to put out for me. To make matters worse, the left one’s thong was loose in front. I couldn’t help feeling that if the thong snapped my son’s life would end, but I was too annoyed to go back and change clogs. Angry at the maid, I walked along with great care to avoid overturning the loose clog.
I got to the hospital after nine. Soaking in water in a wash basin outside Takashi’s door were the flowers my aunt had mentioned—five or six lilies and pinks. Inside, the room itself was almost too dark to see faces: someone had put a piece of cloth over the light bulb. Still in their kimono, my wife and her mother were lying on a futon with Takashi between them. He was sound asleep, pillowed on my mother-in-law’s arm. When she saw me come in, my wife sat up on her heels and, with a bow, whispered, “Thank you for coming.” Her mother said the same thing to me. They seemed almost cheerful, which took me by surprise. I felt somewhat relieved and knelt down by their pillows. My wife said she was suffering doubly: since she wasn’t allowed to give Takashi her milk, she had to listen to him cry for it; and her breasts were so full they hurt. “A rubber nipple doesn’t help, either. I finally had to let him suck my tongue.”
“Now he’s drinking my milk,” my mother-in-law said with a laugh, showing me her withered breasts. “He sucks so hard—look how red I am.”
I found myself laughing with her. “But really, he’s doing much better than I expected. I figured he’d be done for by now.”
“Taka? Taka’s just fine. We’re cleaning him out, that’s all. His fever will go down tomorrow for sure.”
“Thanks to the Sainted Founder’s awesome powers, no doubt,” my wife teased her mother, a believer in the Lotus Sutra.6 Her mother seemed not to hear her, though, as she pursed her lips and blew hard at Takashi’s head, probably hoping to bring his fever down that way.
Takashi finally eluded death. When he was doing a little better, I thought about writing a sketch of the events surrounding his stay in the hospital, but I decided against it because of a superstitious feeling that if I let my guard down and wrote such a piece, he might have a relapse. Now, though, he is sleeping in the garden hammock. Having been asked to write a story, I thought I would have a go at this. The reader might wish I had done otherwise.
(July 1923)