CHAPTER 44

When September arrived, I was impatient to return to Tokyo. I asked my father if he would continue to send money for a while, as he had for my studies.

“While I’m here, you see, I can’t find myself the position you say I should,” I said. This was my explanation to him for returning to Tokyo. Of course, I added, he need only send the money until I found myself a job.

Privately, I felt that such a thing was unlikely to actually come my way. My father, on the other hand, knew nothing of actual circumstances and firmly believed the opposite.

“Well, then, it’s only for a short while, so I’ll see what I can do. But not for long, you understand. You have to get yourself some good work and become independent, you know. You really should not have to rely on anyone from the day you graduate. Young people these days seem just to know how to spend money and never think of how to make it.”

He had various other things to say on the subject as well, including, “In the old days children fed their parents, but these days they devour them.”

I heard him out in silence. When his lecturing seemed to have run its course, I stood quietly to leave.

He asked me when I was planning to go. The sooner the better, as far as I was concerned.

“Ask your mother to find an auspicious day in her almanac,” he said.

“I will.”

I was extraordinarily meek with him. I hoped to be able to leave without having to stand up to him, but he held me back.

“We’ll be lonely when you’re gone, with just the two of us here. It would be fine if I were well, but as things stand, there’s no knowing what might happen when.”

I did my best to console him and returned to my desk. Sitting among my jumble of books, I thoughtfully turned over in my mind my father’s unhappy words and what lay behind them. As I did so, I heard again the cicada’s song. This time it wasn’t a continuous shrill but the intermittent call of the cicada known as tsutsukubōshi, which sings toward the end of summer. In past summers when I had been home, I had often tasted a strange sadness as I sat quietly in the midst of the seething cicada song. This sorrow seemed to pierce deep into my heart along with the piercing insect cry. Always at such times I would sit alone and still, gazing into myself.

Since returning home this time the sadness had undergone a gradual change. As the summer cicada’s strident song gradually gave way to the more hesitant call of the tsutsukubōshi, the fates of those around me also seemed to be slowly turning through the great karmic wheel. As I pondered my father’s lonely words and feelings, I thought of Sensei, from whom I had received no reply. Since Sensei and my father seemed exactly opposite types, they easily came to mind as a pair, through both association and comparison.

I knew almost everything about my father. When we parted, the emotional bond between parent and child would be all that remained. Of Sensei, on the other hand, I still knew very little. I had had no chance to hear from him the promised story of his past. Sensei was, in a word, still opaque to me. I could not rest until I had moved beyond this state and entered a place of clarity. Any break in relations with him would cause me anguish.

I asked my mother to consult the almanac and fixed on a date for my return to Tokyo.