CHAPTER 50

My father’s condition deteriorated to the point where the fatal blow seemed imminent, only to hover there precariously. Each night the family would go to sleep feeling that tomorrow might well be the day of reckoning.

He was completely free of the kind of pain that is a torture for others to witness—in this way at least, he was easy to nurse. We took care to ensure that someone was always taking his turn by the bedside, but the rest of us could usually settle down to sleep at a reasonable hour.

Once when I couldn’t get to sleep for some reason, I mistakenly thought I heard my father faintly groaning. I slipped out of bed in the middle of the night and went to check on him. That evening it was my mother’s turn to stay up with him. I found her asleep beside him, her head resting on her crooked arm. My father lay peacefully at her side, like one laid gently down inside a deep sleep. I tiptoed back to bed again.

I shared a bed under a mosquito net with my brother, while my sister’s husband, who was treated more as a guest, slept alone in a separate room.

“Poor Seki,” my brother said. Seki was our brother-in-law’s family name. “He’s caught here day after day, when he ought to be getting back.”

“But he can’t really be so busy, if he can stay on like this,” I said. “You’re the one who must be finding it difficult to stay so long.”

“There’s no help for it, is there? This isn’t an everyday matter, after all.”

So our conversation went as we lay there side by side. My brother believed, as did I, that our father was doomed, and this being so, we longed for it all to be over. Essentially we were awaiting our father’s death, but we were reluctant to express it that way. Yet each of us was well aware of what the other was thinking.

“He seems to be still hoping he’ll recover, doesn’t he?” my brother remarked.

This idea was not entirely unjustified. When neighbors came to visit him, my father always insisted on seeing them. He would then proceed to apologize that he hadn’t been able to invite them to my graduation celebration, sometimes adding that he’d make amends once he was better.

“It’s a good thing your celebration party was canceled, you know,” my brother remarked to me. “Mine was dreadful, remember?” His words prodded my memory, and I smiled wryly, thinking of that event’s alcohol-inflamed disorder. I had painful memories of the way my father had gone around forcing food and drink on everyone.

We two brothers were not terribly close. When we were little, we had fought a lot, and being the younger, I was constantly reduced to tears. In school our different choices of field of study clearly reflected our different characters. While I was at the university, and especially once I had come in contact with Sensei, I came to look on my distant brother as rather an animal. We had not met for a long time and lived very far apart, so both time and distance separated us.

But circumstances had at last brought us together again, and a brotherly affection sprang up naturally between us. The nature of the situation played a large part. There at the bedside of our dying father, my brother and I were reconciled.

“What do you plan to do now?” my brother asked me.

I responded with a question of a completely different order. “What’s the situation with the household property?”

“I’ve no idea. Father hasn’t said a thing about it yet. But as far as actual money goes, it won’t amount to much, I’m sure.”

As for my mother, she continued to fret over the awaited letter from Sensei, badgering me with reminders about it.