CHAPTER 23

To keep my father from boredom, I frequently partnered him in a game of shōgi. Being lazy, we couldn’t be bothered to set up a special board but sat as usual around the warm kotatsu, placing the board between us on the low table so that between moves we could keep our hands tucked under the rug. Sometimes one of us would lose a piece, and neither would notice until the next game. Once, to great hilarity, my mother had to use the fire tongs to retrieve a lost piece from the brazier’s ashes.

“A go board is too high,” my father remarked, “and it has those legs, so you can’t put it on the table and play in comfort around the kotatsu the way you can with shōgi. This is a fine game for the indolent. How about another round, eh?”

He would always suggest another round whenever he had just won. Mind you, he’d say the same thing if he had just lost. In a word, he simply enjoyed sitting around the kotatsu playing shōgi regardless of the outcome.

At first I found this rare taste of the pleasures of the retired quite beguiling, but my youthful energies soon began to fret at such bland stimulation. From time to time I would yawn and stretch up my arms, waving aloft some piece I happened to be holding.

Whenever I thought about Tokyo, I felt the blood that pumped strongly through my heart pulsing to a rhythm that cried “Action! Action!” Strangely, through some subtle mechanism of the mind, this inner pulse seemed to be empowered by Sensei.

In my heart I experimentally compared the two men, my father and Sensei. Both were quiet, retiring people who, as far as the world at large was concerned, could just as well be dead. Neither received the slightest recognition. Yet playing partner to my shōgi-loving father and sharing his simple enjoyments gave me no satisfaction, while Sensei, to whom I had never gone for mere amusement, had influenced my mind far more deeply than would any idle entertainment. “My mind” sounds too cool and detached—let me rather say “my breast.” It would have felt no exaggeration to say that Sensei’s strength seemed to have entered my body, and my very blood flowed with his life force. When I pondered the fact that my father was my real father, whereas Sensei was quite unrelated to me, I felt as astonished as if I had come upon a new and important truth.

As tedium settled over me, my parents’ initial delight in me as some rare and precious creature was also fading, and they began to take my presence for granted. I suppose everyone experiences this shift when they return home for a vacation—for the first week or so you are fussed over and treated as honored guest, then the family’s enthusiasm wanes, and finally you are treated quite offhandedly, as if they don’t really care whether you are there or not. This second phase now inevitably set in.

These days, furthermore, each time I came home from the city, I brought a new aspect of myself that was strange and incomprehensible to my parents. It was an element that was fundamentally out of harmony with both of them—rather as if, to make a historical analogy, I had introduced into a traditional Confucian household the disturbing aura of forbidden Christianity. Of course I did my best to hide it. But it was part of me, and try as I might to keep it to myself, they sooner or later noticed. Thus I grew bored and disillusioned with home life, and longed to go back to Tokyo as soon as possible.

Fortunately, my father’s condition gave no sign of deteriorating further, although the state of his health continued to be fragile. Just to be sure, we called in a highly reputable doctor from some distance away, but his careful examination revealed no new problems.

I decided to leave a little before the end of the winter vacation. But when I announced this decision, human feelings being the perverse things they are, both parents were against it.

“You’re going back already? It’s very soon, isn’t it?” said my mother.

My father joined in. “You could easily stay another four or five days, surely?”

But I held to my original plan.