CHAPTER 32

Apparently my teachers did not find my thesis quite as good as I thought it was. Nevertheless, I managed to pass. On the day of graduation I retrieved from the trunk my musty old formal winter wear and put it on. Up and down the rows of graduating students in the ceremony hall, every face looked heat-oppressed, and my own body, sealed tightly in thick wool impenetrable to any breeze, sweltered uncomfortably. I had been standing only a short time when the handkerchief I held was sodden with sweat.

As soon as the ceremony was over, I went back to my room, stripped off, and opened my second-floor window. Holding the tightly rolled diploma up to my eye like a telescope, I gazed through it, out over the world. Then I tossed it onto my desk and flung myself down spread-eagle in the middle of the floor. Lying there, I reviewed my past and imagined my future. This diploma stood like a boundary marker between the one and the other. It was a strange document indeed, I decided, both significant and meaningless.

That evening I was to dine at Sensei’s house. We had agreed beforehand that if I managed to graduate, I would keep the evening free for a celebratory dinner at his home.

As promised, the dining table had been moved into the living room, close to the veranda. The patterned tablecloth, thick and crisply starched, glowed with a fine white purity beneath the electric light. Whenever I dined at Sensei’s, the chopsticks and bowls were placed on this white linen that seemed to have come straight from some Western restaurant; the cloth was always freshly laundered.

“It’s just as with collar and cuffs,” Sensei remarked. “If you’re going to have dirty ones, you might as well go for color in the first place. If it’s white, it must be purest white.”

Sensei was, in fact, a fastidious man—his study too was always meticulously tidy. Being rather careless myself, this aspect of him occasionally struck me quite forcibly.

Once I mentioned to his wife how finicky he seemed, and she replied, “But he doesn’t pay much attention to the clothes he wears.” Sensei, who had been sitting nearby at the time, laughed, “It’s true, I’m psychologically finicky. It’s a constant problem for me. What a ridiculous way to be, eh?”

I was not sure whether he meant that he was what we would call highly strung or intellectually fastidious. His wife didn’t seem to grasp his meaning either.

This evening I was again seated across the table from Sensei with the white tablecloth between us. His wife sat at the end of the table, facing the garden.

“Congratulations,” Sensei said to me, raising his sake cup. The gesture did not make me particularly happy, however. This was partly due to my own rather somber mood, but I also felt that Sensei’s tone was not of the cheerful kind calculated to excite joy. Certainly he raised his cup and smiled, and I detected no irony in his expression, but I felt a distinct lack of any genuine pleasure at my success. His smile said, I guess this is the kind of situation in which people usually congratulate someone.

“Well done,” his wife said to me. “Your father and mother must be very happy.”

Suddenly the image of my sick father rose in my mind. I had to hurry home and show him my diploma, I decided.

“What did you do with your certificate, Sensei?” I asked.

“I wonder. Would it still be tucked away somewhere?” he asked his wife.

“Yes, I would have put it away somewhere,” she replied.

Neither of them knew what had become of it, it seemed.