CHAPTER 41

Slowly my father’s health and spirits declined. His big straw hat with its handkerchief, the one that had taken me by surprise when I first arrived, now lay neglected. Whenever I caught sight of it on the soot-blackened shelf I was filled with pity for him. While he still managed to be up and about with ease, I anxiously cautioned him to take things more carefully. Now, seeing him sitting pensive and silent, I realized he had indeed been relatively well before.

My mother and I had many discussions about it.

“It’s his state of mind that’s doing it,” she maintained, connecting his illness with that of the emperor.

But I felt it was not so simple. “I don’t think it’s just his state of mind; I think he’s actually gone downhill physically. It’s his health that’s the problem, not his mood.”

As I spoke, I began to feel it would be wise to call in a good doctor from somewhere else to have a look at him.

“You’re having a very boring summer, aren’t you?” my mother remarked. “We can’t celebrate this fine graduation of yours, and your father so unwell. And then there’s His Majesty’s illness—we really should have had that party as soon as you got home.”

I had returned on the fifth or sixth of July, and my parents had begun to talk about the celebration a week later. The date that had finally been chosen was over a week after this. This leisurely country approach, free of any sense of urgency, had spared me the social occasion I so disliked. But my uncomprehending mother seemed unaware of my relief.

The day word of the emperor’s death arrived, my father groaned aloud, newspaper in hand. “His Majesty has passed away! And I too . . .” He said no more.

I went into the town to buy some black mourning cloth. We wrapped it around the shiny metal ball on the tip of our flag-pole, hung a long three-inch-wide strip from the top of the pole, and propped it at our front gate, pointing at an angle into the street. The flag and the black mourning strip hung listlessly in the windless air. The little roof over our old gate was thatch; long exposure to rain and wind had discolored it to a pale gray, and the surface was visibly pitted. I stepped out into the street to examine the effect, taking in the combination of black strip of cloth and white muslin flag with its red rising sun symbol dyed in the center, and the look of this flag against the dingy thatch of the roof. Sensei had once asked me what sort of street front our house had. “I imagine it looks very different from the gate at the house where I grew up,” he’d said. I would have liked to show Sensei this old house I was born in, but the idea also made me embarrassed.

Back inside, I sat alone at my desk, reading the newspaper and imagining the scenes in distant Tokyo. The images in my mind coalesced into a scene of the vast city stirring everywhere with movement in the midst of a great darkness; I saw Sensei’s house, a single point of light in the seething, anxious throng that struggled blindly through the blackness.

I could not know that even then the little light was being drawn irresistibly into the great soundless whirl of darkness, and that I was watching a light that was destined soon to blink out and disappear.

I reached for my writing brush, thinking I would write to Sensei about the emperor’s death, but having written about ten lines, I stopped. I tore the page into shreds and threw it in the bin—it seemed pointless to write these things to Sensei, and besides, judging from previous experience, I would receive no reply. I was lonely. This was why I wrote letters: I hoped for a response.