CHAPTER 33

In Sensei’s house, when a meal with informal guests had progressed to the point where the rice was served, his wife dismissed the maid and served us herself. This was the custom. The first few times I dined there, it made me feel rather awkward, but once I grew more used to it, I had no difficulty handing her my empty bowl for refilling.

“More tea? More rice? You certainly eat, don’t you?” she would say teasingly, completely unabashed at her own directness.

But that day, with the summer heat beginning, my normally large appetite deserted me.

“So that’s all? You’ve begun eating like a bird lately.”

“No, it’s just that I can’t eat a lot when it’s hot like this.”

She called the maid and had her clear the table, then ordered ice cream and fruit to be served.

“I made it myself,” she explained. Sensei’s wife was at such loose ends, it seemed, that she could take the time to make her own ice cream for guests. I had several helpings.

“So now that you’ve graduated,” said Sensei, “what do you plan to do next?” He had half-turned his cushion toward the garden and was leaning back against the sliding doors at the edge of the veranda.

I was only conscious that I had graduated; I had not yet decided on any next step. Seeing me hesitate, Sensei’s wife intervened. “Teaching?” she asked. When I did not reply, she tried again: “The civil service, then?”

Sensei and I both burst out laughing. “To be honest,” I said, “I haven’t any plan at all yet. I haven’t even so much as thought about what profession to enter, actually. I can’t see how I can choose, really, since I don’t know what’s a good profession and what’s not until I try them out.”

“That’s true enough,” she responded. “But after all, you’ll inherit property, so it’s natural that you’d feel relaxed about the question. Just take a look at others who aren’t so fortunate. They’re far from able to be so blithe.”

Some of my friends had been searching for positions as middle-school teachers since well before graduation, so her words were true. I privately acknowledged that but what I said was “I may have been a bit infected by Sensei.”

“Oh dear, he’s not a good influence, I’m afraid.”

Sensei grimaced. “I don’t mind if you’re influenced by me. What I’d like is for you to make sure, while your father is still alive, that you get a decent inheritance, as I said the other day. You mustn’t relax until that’s sorted out.”

I recalled our conversation back in early May in the spacious grounds of the nursery garden among the flowering azaleas. Those forceful words, spoken with emotion as we were walking back, echoed in my mind. They were not only forceful, those words, they were terrible. Ignorant of his past as I was, I could not fully make sense of them.

“Are you very well off?” I asked Sensei’s wife.

“Now why should you ask such a question?”

“Because Sensei won’t tell me the answer.”

She smiled and looked at Sensei. “That would be because we’re not well off enough to make it worth mentioning.”

“I’d like to know, so that when I go home and talk to my father, I’ll have some idea of how much I’d need to live as Sensei does.” Sensei was facing the garden, calmly puffing on his cigarette, so I naturally addressed his wife.

“Well, it’s not really a question of how much, you know . . . I mean, we get by, one way and another . . . Anyway, that’s beside the point. The point is, you really must find something to do in life. You can’t just laze around like Sensei does . . .”

Sensei turned slightly. “I don’t just laze around,” he protested.