CHAPTER 22

My father’s illness was not as serious as I had feared. When I arrived, he was sitting up cross-legged in bed.

“I’m staying put here just to please everyone, since they worry about me,” he said. “I could perfectly well get up.” Nevertheless, the next day he had my mother put away his bedding and refused to listen to her protests.

“Your father seems to have suddenly got his strength back now that you’ve come home,” she remarked to me, as she reluctantly folded the silk quilt. And from what I could observe, he was not simply putting on a brave face.

My elder brother had a job in distant Kyushu and could not easily get away to visit his parents in any situation short of a real emergency. My sister had married someone in another part of the country, so could not be summoned home on short notice either. Of the three children, I was the one most easily called on, being still a student. The fact that I had followed my mother’s wishes and left my studies early to come home pleased my father greatly.

“It’s a shame you’ve had to leave classes early for such a trivial illness,” he said. “Your mother shouldn’t go exaggerating things in letters like that.”

This bravado was not confined to words, for there he was, with his sickbed folded away, behaving as if his health were back to normal.

“Don’t be too rash, or you’ll have a relapse,” I warned him, but he treated this with happy disregard.

“Come on now, I’m fine. All I have to do is take the usual care.”

And he appeared to be fine. He came and went around the house without becoming breathless or feeling dizzy. True, his color was awful, but this symptom was nothing new, so we paid it little attention.

I wrote to Sensei, thanking him for his kind loan and promising to call in and repay him when I returned to Tokyo in January. I went on to report that my father’s illness was less critical than feared, that we had no immediate cause for concern, and that he had neither dizziness nor nausea. I ended by briefly asking after Sensei’s cold—which was not something that I took very seriously.

I wrote this letter without any expectation that Sensei would reply. Then I told my parents about him, and as I spoke, the image of Sensei’s distant study hovered before me.

“Why not take some of our dried mushrooms to him when you go back?” my mother suggested.

“Fine. But I’m not sure Sensei eats such things, actually.”

“They’re not first-rate ones, but I don’t imagine anyone would dislike them.”

It felt somehow odd to associate Sensei with dried mushrooms.

When a reply came from him, I was quite surprised, particularly because it seemed written for no special reason. I decided that he had written back out of sheer kindness. That idea made his straightforward letter delight me. Besides, it was the first letter I had ever received from him.

Although one might naturally have thought that we corresponded from time to time, in fact we never had. I received only two letters from Sensei before his death. The first was this simple reply. The second was an extremely long letter that he wrote for me shortly before he died.

My father’s illness prevented him from being very active, even once he was up and about, and he seldom went outdoors. One unusually balmy day when he did venture out into the garden, I accompanied him just as a precaution. I offered my shoulder for him to lean on, but he brushed it off with a laugh.