CHAPTER 36

The following day I went out again, braving the heat to buy the various things I had been asked to get. It had not seemed much when I received the letter with the list of purchases, but when it came to the point, it proved extremely tiresome. Wiping my sweat as I sat in the streetcar, I cursed these country folk who never spared a sympathetic thought for the time and effort to which they were putting someone else.

I did not intend to spend my summer back at home idly. I had worked out a daily program to follow and set out to gather the books I needed to pursue my plan. I had decided to spend a good half day on the second floor of Maruzen bookshop, looking through the foreign books. I located the shelves particularly relevant to my field and went through them methodically, investigating every book.

The most troublesome item on the shopping list was some ladies’ kimono collars. The shop assistant produced quite a few of them for me to look at, but when the time came for me to decide which ones to purchase, I could not. Another problem was that the prices seemed quite arbitrary. A collar that looked cheap turned out to be highly expensive, while others that I had passed over as expensive-looking actually cost very little. For the life of me I could not tell what made one more valuable than another. The whole mission defeated me, and I regretted not having troubled Sensei’s wife to come along and help me.

I bought a travel bag. It was, of course, only an inferior, locally made one, but its shiny metal fittings would look impressive enough to dazzle country folk. My mother had asked me in a letter to buy a travel bag, to carry all the gifts home, and she had specifically said a new bag. I’d laughed aloud when I read that. I appreciated her kindly intention, but the words somehow struck me as funny.

Three days later I set off on the train for home, as I had told Sensei and his wife I would on the night when I said my farewells. Sensei had been warning me about my father’s illness since winter, and I had every reason to be concerned about it, but for some reason the question did not much bother me. I was more disturbed by the problem of how my poor mother would fare after his death.

Clearly, something in me had already accepted the fact that he must die. In a letter to my elder brother in Kyushu I had admitted as much, writing that our father could not possibly recover his health. Although no doubt he was tied up with work, I added, perhaps my brother should try to get back and see him over the summer. I rounded it off with an emotional plea that our two aged parents living together alone in the country must surely be lonely, which should lie heavily on the consciences of us children. I wrote those words simply as they occurred to me, but once they were out, I found myself feeling rather different.

In the train I pondered these contradictions, and I soon began to see myself as superficial and emotionally irresponsible. Gloomily, I thought again of Sensei and his wife and recalled our conversation of a few evenings earlier, when I had gone there for dinner.

I pondered the question that had arisen between them then: Which will die first? Who could give a confident answer to that question? I thought. And suppose the answer were clear. What would Sensei do? What would his wife do? Surely the only thing either could do was continue just as they were—just as I too was helpless in the face of my father’s approaching death back at home. A sense of human fragility swept over me, of the hopeless frailty of our innately superficial nature.