CHAPTER 1

I always called him Sensei, and so I shall do in these pages, rather than reveal his name. It is not that I wish to shield him from public scrutiny—simply that it feels more natural. “Sensei” springs to my lips whenever I summon memories of this man, and I write of him now with the same reverence and respect. It would also feel wrong to use some conventional initial to substitute for his name and thereby distance him.

I first met Sensei in Kamakura,¹ in the days when I was still a young student. A friend had gone there during summer vacation for sea bathing and urged me to join him, so I set about organizing enough money to cover the trip. This took me two or three days. Less than three days after I arrived, my friend received a sudden telegram from home demanding that he return. His mother was ill, it seemed.

He did not believe it. For some time his parents had been trying to force him into an unwanted marriage. By present-day standards he was far too young for marriage, and besides he did not care for the girl in question. That was why he had chosen not to return home for the vacation, as he normally would have, but to go off to a local seaside resort to enjoy himself.

He showed me the telegram and asked what I thought he should do. I did not know what to advise. But if his mother really was ill, he clearly should go home, so in the end he decided to leave. Having come to Kamakura to be with my friend, I now found myself alone.

I could stay or go as I pleased, since some time still remained before classes began again, so I decided to stay where I was for the moment. My friend, who was from a prosperous family in the Chūgoku region, did not lack for money. But he was a student, and young, so in fact his standard of living was actually much like my own, and I was spared the trouble of having to find a cheaper inn for myself after he left.

The inn he had chosen was somewhere in an out-of-the-way district of Kamakura. To get to any of the fashionable spots—the billiard rooms and ice cream parlors and such things—I had to take a lengthy walk through the rice fields. A rickshaw ride would cost me a full twenty sen. Still, a number of new summer houses stood in the area, and it was right next to the beach, making it wonderfully handy for sea bathing.

Each day I went down to the shore for a swim, making my way among soot-blackened old thatched country houses. An astonishing number of men and women always thronged the beach, city folk down from Tokyo to escape the summer heat. Sometimes the crowd was so thick that the water was a tightly packed mass of black heads, as in some public bathhouse. Knowing no one, I enjoyed my time alone amid this merry scene, lying on the sand and leaping about up to my knees in the waves.

It was here in this throng of people that I first came upon Sensei. In those days two little stalls on the beach provided drinks and changing rooms, and for no particular reason I took to frequenting one of them. Unlike the owners of the grand summer houses in the Hasé area, we users of this beach had no private bathing huts, so communal changing rooms were essential. People drank tea and relaxed here, or left their hats and sun umbrellas in safekeeping; after they bathed, they would wash themselves down at the stall, and attendants would rinse their bathing suits for them. I owned no bathing clothes, but I left my belongings at the stall whenever I went into the water, to avoid having anything stolen.