CHAPTER 24

By the time I returned to Tokyo, the New Year decorations had disappeared from house fronts. In the city no sign remained of the recent New Year festivities; the streets were given over to a chill, wintry wind.

I took the first opportunity to visit Sensei and return the money I had borrowed. I also brought along the mushrooms that my mother had pressed on me. Laying them before Sensei’s wife, I hastened to explain that my mother had suggested the gift. The mushrooms were carefully packed inside a new cake box. Sensei’s wife thanked me politely. When she rose to leave the room, she picked up the box, then feeling its lightness asked in surprise what the cakes were. It was typical of the wonderfully childlike frankness she could display once she got to know someone well.

Both of them questioned me at length and with great concern about my father’s illness. “Well, it seems from what you say of his condition that there’s no cause for immediate alarm,” Sensei said. “But being the illness it is, he’ll need to look after himself very carefully.”

I could see that he knew a great deal more than I did about kidney disease.

“It’s typical of that illness that the patient feels quite well and unaware of the disease. I knew a military officer who was killed by it—he simply died overnight, quite astonishing. His death was so sudden that his own wife hadn’t even realized he was ill. He just woke her in the night saying he felt bad, and the next morning he was dead. It happened so swiftly that she said she’d assumed he was sleeping.”

The optimism I had been inclined to feel shifted to sudden anxiety. “I wonder if that’s what will happen to my dad. There’s no saying it won’t.”

“What does the doctor say?”

“He says there’s no hope of curing it, but he also assured us there’s no need to worry for the present.”

“Well, then, that’s fine, if that’s what the doctor says. The man I just told you about wasn’t aware he was ill, and besides, he was quite a rough army fellow, not the sort to notice things.”

I felt somewhat comforted.

Seeing this change in me, Sensei added, “But sick or well, humans are fragile creatures, you know. There’s no anticipating how and when they might die, or for what reason.”

“That’s how you feel yourself, is it, Sensei?”

“I’m in fine health, but yes, even I think this from time to time.” A suggestion of a smile played on his lips. “You often hear of people keeling over and dying, don’t you? Of natural causes. And then other people die suddenly, from some unnatural act of violence.”

“What’s an unnatural act of violence?”

“Well, I don’t know. People who commit suicide use unnatural violence on themselves, don’t they?”

“People who are murdered also die from unnatural violence.”

“I wasn’t thinking of murder, but now that you mention it, that’s true, of course.”

So the conversation ended that day.

Even later, after I returned home, my father’s illness did not worry me unduly. Nor did Sensei’s talk of natural and unnatural deaths leave more than a passing, vague impression on my mind. I was preoccupied with another matter, for I finally had to set to and write the graduation thesis that I had tried, so many times, to come to grips with before.