CHAPTER 51

“Who is this Sensei you keep talking about?” my brother asked.

“I told you about him the other day, remember?” I replied crossly, annoyed that he could so easily forget the answer to a question he himself had asked.

“Yes, I know what you said then.” He was implying that what I’d said didn’t explain it.

Personally, I felt no need to bother trying to explain Sensei to my brother. But I was angry. That’s just like him, I thought.

My brother was assuming that since I so evidently respected this man I honored with the name Sensei, he must be someone of distinction in the world, at the very least a professor at the university. What could be impressive about someone who had made no name for himself and did nothing?

This instinct of my brother was in complete accord with my father’s. But while my father had jumped to the conclusion that Sensei was living an idle life because he was incapable of doing anything, my brother spoke in terms that dismissed him as hopelessly lazing about despite his abilities.

“Egoists are worthless types. It’s sheer brazen laziness to spend your life doing nothing. A man’s talent amounts to nothing if he won’t set it to work and do all he can with it.”

I felt like retorting that my brother didn’t seem to understand the meaning of the word egoist, which he was bandying about.

“Still,” he added as an afterthought, “if this fellow can find you a position, it’s a fine thing. Father’s delighted at the prospect as well, you know.”

As for me, I couldn’t believe Sensei could do such a thing until he gave me a clear answer; nor did I have the courage to claim otherwise. But thanks to my mother’s announcement of her hasty conclusions, I could not suddenly turn around and deny it. My longing for a letter from Sensei needed no urging from her, and I prayed that when it came, it might somehow fulfill everyone’s hopes with word of a position that would make me a living. Faced with the expectations of my father, so close to death, my mother with her urgent desire that he should be somehow reassured, and my brother and his statements that a man wasn’t fully human unless he worked, and indeed all the other relatives, I found myself tormented by an issue that I privately cared nothing about.

Not long afterward my father vomited a strange yellow substance, and I recalled the danger that Sensei and his wife had spoken of.

“His stomach must be upset from being bedridden for so long,” my mother concluded. Tears came to my eyes to see how little she understood.

When my brother and I met in the sitting room, he said, “Did you hear?” He was referring to something the doctor had said to him as he was leaving.

I needed no explanation to understand its import.

My brother looked at me over his shoulder. “Would you like to come back home and manage the place?”

I could make no reply.

“Mother won’t be able to cope with it on her own,” he went on. Apparently he was perfectly happy to let me rot here in the dank and dreary countryside. “You can do all the reading you like in the country, and you wouldn’t have to work. It’d suit you down to the ground.”

“The elder son’s the one who ought to come back,” I said.

“How could I do that?” he said, curtly dismissing the suggestion. He was driven by the powerful urge to work in the wider world. “If you don’t want to do it, I suppose we could ask our uncle to help out, but someone will have to take Mother in.”

“The first big question is whether she’d be willing to leave here or not.”

Even while our father still lived, we were talking at cross-purposes about what would happen after his death.