CHAPTER 3

The next day I went to the beach at the same hour yet again, and again I saw Sensei there. I did the same the day after, but never found an opportunity to speak to him or even to greet him. Besides, Sensei’s demeanor was rather forbidding. He would arrive at the same time each day, with an unapproachable air, and depart just as punctually and aloofly. He seemed quite indifferent to the noisy throng that surrounded him. The Westerner who had been with him that first day never reappeared. Sensei was always alone.

Finally my chance came. Sensei had as usual come striding back from his swim. He was about to don the kimono that lay as usual on the bench, when he found that it had somehow gotten covered in sand. As he turned away and quickly shook it out, I saw his spectacles, which had been lying on the bench beneath it, slip through a crack between the boards and fall to the ground. Sensei put on the robe and wrapped the sash around his waist. Then, evidently noticing that his spectacles were missing, he quickly began to search for them. In a moment I had ducked down, thrust my hand under the bench, and retrieved them from the ground.

“Thank you,” he said as he took them.

The next day I followed Sensei into the sea and swam after him. I had gone about two hundred yards when he suddenly stopped swimming and turned to speak to me. We two were the only beings afloat on that blue expanse of water for a considerable distance. As far as the eye could see, strong sunlight blazed down upon sea and mountains.

As I danced wildly in place there in the water, I felt my muscles flood with a sensation of freedom and delight. Sensei, meanwhile, ceased to move and lay floating tranquilly on his back. I followed his example and felt the sky’s azure strike me full in the face, as if plunging its glittering shafts of color deep behind my eyes.

“Isn’t this good!” I cried.

After a little while Sensei righted himself in the water and suggested we go back. Being physically quite strong, I would have liked to stay longer, but I instantly and happily agreed. The two of us swam back to the beach the way we had come.

From this point on, Sensei and I were friends. Yet I still had no idea where he was staying. On the afternoon of the third day since our swim, he suddenly turned to me when we met at the stall. “Are you planning to stay here a while longer?” he asked.

I had not thought about it and had no ready answer. “I don’t really know,” I responded simply.

But the grin on Sensei’s face made me suddenly awkward, and I found myself asking, “What about you, Sensei?” This was when I first began to call him by that name.

That evening I called on him at his lodgings. I say “lodgings,” but I discovered it was no ordinary place—he was staying in a villa in the spacious grounds of a temple. Those who shared the place, I also discovered, were not related to him.

Noticing how he grimaced wryly when I persisted in calling him “Sensei,” I excused myself with the explanation that this was a habit of mine when addressing my elders. I asked him about the Westerner he had been with. The man was quite eccentric, he said, adding that he was no longer in Kamakura. He told me a lot of other things about him, then remarked that it was odd that he, who had few social contacts even with his fellow Japanese, should have become friends with such a person.

At the end of our conversation I told him that I felt I knew him from somewhere but could not remember where. Young as I was, I hoped that he might share my feeling and was anticipating his answer. But after a thoughtful pause, he said, “I can’t say I recall your face. Perhaps you’re remembering somebody else.” His words produced in me a strange disappointment.