CHAPTER 45

It was almost time for me to leave—it must have been my second-to-last evening at home—when my father had another fall. I was tying up the wicker trunk packed with my books and clothes. My father had just gone into the bathroom. My mother went in to wash his back, then cried out to me. When I rushed in, my naked father was slumped over, supported from behind by my mother. By the time we brought him back into his room, however, he was declaring that he was all right. Nevertheless, I sat by his pillow cooling his forehead with a damp towel until nine o’clock, when I finally got up to eat a light supper.

The next day my father was in better shape than expected and insisted on getting up to go to the toilet himself, despite our protests.

“I’m fine again,” he announced, repeating the words he had spoken to me the previous winter, after he had had the first fall. At that time he had indeed been more or less fine, and I hoped that the same would prove to be the case this time. But the doctor just cautioned us to be careful, and even when we pressed him, he would say nothing more definite.

Because of this fresh anxiety, when the day of my departure arrived, I no longer felt inclined to go. “Should I stay a bit longer, just to see how it goes?” I said to my mother.

“Yes, please do,” she begged me.

My mother, who had been unconcerned as long as my father could still go out into the garden or the backyard, now overreacted in the opposite direction and was consumed with worry.

“Wasn’t this the day you were going back to Tokyo?” my father inquired.

“Yes, but I’ve put it off for a while,” I told him.

“Is it because of me?” he asked.

I hesitated. If I said it was, it would only confirm that he was seriously ill. I didn’t want to unnerve him.

But he must have read what was in my heart, for he said, “That’s a shame for you,” and turned away to face the garden.

I went back to my room and looked at the wicker trunk abandoned there. It was securely fastened, ready to leave at a moment’s notice. I stood vacantly before it, wondering whether to untie the straps.

I spent three or four days in a state of awkward suspension, like one half-risen from his seat to leave. Then my father had another fall. The doctor ordered absolute rest.

“What will we do?” my mother murmured to me, in a voice hushed so that my father would not hear. She looked miserable.

I got ready to send telegrams to my brother and sister. But my father was experiencing almost no pain. The way he talked, he might have been in bed with no more than a cold. And he had an even better appetite than usual. He was disinclined to listen to warnings from those around him.

“Since I’m going to die, I intend to die eating tasty food.”

These words struck me as both comic and tragic. After all, he was not in the city, where really tasty food was actually to be had. In the evening he asked for strips of persimmon-flavored rice cake, which he munched on with relish.

“Why should he hanker so? He must surely still have quite a strong spirit,” said my mother, groping in her despair for anything positive. Interestingly, to refer to his desire for food, she was using an old expression that was once specifically associated with illness.

My uncle paid my father a visit, and as he rose to leave, my father held him back, loath to let him go home. He said it was because he was lonely, but he also seemed to want to complain to someone about how my mother and I weren’t giving him enough to eat.