And Then Page 3

  “Oh.” Daisuke’s response was calm. He was a man who did not lose his normal tone of voice under any circumstances. And from this tone, subdued but no less apparent, there emerged a note of leisure.

  “I borrowed from the manager to cover up that hole.”

  “I wonder why he didn’t lend to this fellow Seki himself.”

  Hiraoka did not answer and Daisuke did not press the issue. The two walked on in silence.

  Daisuke guessed that Hiraoka had not told all, but he knew he did not have the right to take another step forward in pursuit of the truth. Furthermore, he was too much an urbanite to have his curiosity aroused over something like this. Daisuke, who lived in twentiethcentury Japan, Daisuke, who had barely reached the age of thirty, had already arrived at the province of nil admirari. His thinking was hardly so unsophisticated as to be shocked by an encounter with the darker side of man. His senses were hardly so wearied as to take pleasure in sniffing at the hackneyed secrets Hiraoka might harbor. Or, from another angle, one might say they were so fatigued that stimuli many times more pleasurable could not have satisfied them.

  Thus had Daisuke evolved in his private, distinctive world, which bore almost no resemblance to Hiraoka’s. (It is a regrettable phenomenon that behind every evolution, past and present, lies regression.) But Hiraoka knew nothing of Daisuke’s development. He seemed to regard him as the same naive youth of three years ago. If he were to bare his soul before this little master and confide to him all his weaknesses, it might be like a farmhand’s tossing horse manure before the startled young lady of the house. Better not take such a risk and incur Daisuke’s displeasure—this was how Daisuke read Hiraoka’s thoughts. It seemed to him stupid that Hiraoka walked along without answering him. To the extent that Hiraoka regarded him as a child— perhaps even more so—Daisuke had begun to view Hiraoka in the same light. But when the two resumed their conversation some two or three blocks later, not a trace of this feeling showed.

  “So, what are you planning to do from now on?” “Well …”

  “Maybe, with all the experience you’ve built up, it would be best to stay in the same business?”

  “Well, that would depend on the circumstances. Actually, I’ve been meaning to talk it over with you. What do you think, is there a chance I could get something in your brother’s company?”

  “I’ll ask him about it; I have to go home anyway in the next two or three days. But I wonder …”

  “If there isn’t anything in business, I’m thinking of trying the newspapers.”

  “That might not be bad either.”

  The two walked toward the streetcar stop. Hiraoka, who had been watching the top of the train approaching in the distance, suddenly announced that he was going to take it. Daisuke assented without attempting to detain him, but neither did he make any move to part. He walked on to the red pole marking the stop. There he asked, “How’s Michiyo-san?”

  “She’s the same as ever, thanks. She sends her regards. I was going to bring her today, but the train ride must not have agreed with her; she was complaining of a headache so I left her at the inn.”

  The streetcar came to a halt before the two. Hiraoka started to hurry toward it, but stopped at Daisuke’s warning. It was not his train.

  “That was a shame about the baby.”

  “Yes, it was too bad. Thanks for your card. It might as well not have been born if it was going to die.”

  “And—since then?”

  “No, nothing yet. There’s probably no chance now. Her health isn’t too good.”

  “Well, when you’re moving around like this, it’s probably easier not to have a kid.”

  “That’s true, too. Maybe if I were single like you, it’d be even better—more relaxed.”

  “Well, why not become single?”

  “Don’t kid me. Anyway, my wife keeps wondering if you’ve go tten married yet:’

  The streetcar arrived.

  CHAPTER III

  DAISUKE’S FATHER, NAGAI TOKU, was old enough to have seen the battlefield during the Restoration, but he was still in robust health. After quitting the civil service he had entered the business world, and while trying his hand at this and that, money had seemed to accumulate naturally, until, in some fourteen or fifteen years’ time, he had found himself a wealthy man.

  Daisuke had an older brother named Seigo. After finishing school, he had gone straight into a company with which his father had ties, so that by now he held a position of considerable authority. He had a wife, Umeko, and two children. The older of these was a boy, Seitarō, now fifteen years of age. The girl, Nui, was three years younger.

  Besides Seigo, there was an older sister, but she had married a diplomat and they now made their home in the West. There had been another brother between Seigo and this sister, and still another between her and Daisuke, but both of them had died young. Their mother was dead as well.

  Such was the composition of Daisuke’s family. The married sister and Daisuke, who had recently set up his own household, were gone, so that left five people, including the children, in the main house.

  Once a month without fail, Daisuke went home for money. He lived on money that could be specified neither as his father’s nor his brother’s. When bored, he went more frequently. He would tease the children, play a game of go with the houseboy, or engage his sister-in-law in theater talk.

  Daisuke was fond of his sister-in-law. Hers was a character in which Tempō mannerism and Meiji modernism were ruthlessly patched together. Once she had gone to the trouble of ordering an inordinately expensive piece of brocade with an unpronounceable name through her sister in France. She had cut it up with four or five other people to fashion into obi. Later, when it was discovered that the material had been exported from Japan, the family had a good laugh. It was Daisuke who had investigated the matter by checking the display cases of Mitsukoshi. Umeko also liked Western music and was easily persuaded to accompany Daisuke to his concerts. At the same time, she showed an unusual interest in fortunetelling, idolizing Sekiryūshi and a certain master Ojima. On two or three occasions Daisuke had tagged along in a ricksha to keep her company on her visits to these fortunetellers.

  These days, Seitarō was completely absorbed in baseball and sometimes Daisuke would toss him a few pitches. He was a child with a peculiar ambition: every year, at the beginning of the summer when all the hot-potato venders converted into ice parlors, Seitarō liked to be the first to run over and buy ice cream, well before the first hint of perspiration. When there was no ice cream, he contented himself with ices and still came home triumphant. Lately, he was saying that he wanted to be the first person to enter the new sumō wrestling hall as soon as it was completed. Once he asked if Daisuke knew any wrestlers.

  Nui was given to answering everything with “I’m warning you, you’d better watch out.’’ She also changed her hair ribbon several times a day. She had recently begun violin lessons, and as soon as she got home, she would practice what she had learned, producing sawlike noises. But she would never play if someone was watching. Since she shut herself up in her room and squeaked away, her parents thought she must be quite good. Daisuke was the only one who would ever peek in on her, at which times she would scold, “You’d better watch out.”

  Daisuke’s brother was often away from the house. When he was especially busy the only meal he took at home was breakfast. The children had no idea what he did with the rest of his day and Daisuke was equally ignorant on this point. In fact, he had decided that it was preferable not to know; as long as it was unnecessary, he did not probe into his brother’s outside activities.

  Daisuke was enormously popular with the children, reasonably so with his sister-in-law. With his brother, he could not tell. On the rare occasions when they met, they exchanged stories about their experiences with women. They talked perfectly nonchalantly,
like men of the world trading common gossip.

  Daisuke’s biggest headache was his father, who, in spite of his age, kept a young mistress. Daisuke had no objections to this; indeed, he was rather in favor of it, for he thought that it was only those who lacked the means who attacked the practice. His father was quite a disciplinarian. As a child, there were times when this had sorely troubled Daisuke, but now that he was an adult, he saw no reason why he should let it disturb him. No, what bothered Daisuke was that his father confused his own youth with Daisuke’s. Hence, he insisted that unless Daisuke adopted the same goals with which he himself had ventured into the world long ago, it would not do. Since Daisuke had never asked what would not do, the two had not quarreled. As a child, Daisuke was possessed of a violent temper and, at eighteen or nineteen, had even come to blows with his father once or twice. But time passed and soon after he finished school, his temper had suddenly subsided. Since then, he had never once been angry. His father believed this to be the consequence of the discipline he had imparted, and he secretly prided himself.

  In actuality, this so-called discipline had succeeded only in slowly cooling the warm sentiments binding father and son. At least Daisuke thought so. His father had completely reversed this interpretation. No matter what happened, they were of the same flesh and blood. The sentiment that a child felt toward a parent was endowed by heaven and could not possibly be altered by the parent’s treatment of the child. There might have been some excesses, but these had occurred in the name of discipline, and their results could not touch the bond of affection between father and son: so Daisuke’s father, influenced by the teachings of Confucianism, firmly believed. Convinced that the simple fact of bestowing life upon Daisuke permanently guaranteed him grateful love in the face of any unpleasantness or pain, his father had pushed his way. And in the end, he had produced a son who was coldly indifferent to him. Admittedly, his attitudes had changed considerably since Daisuke finished school. He was even surprisingly lenient in some areas. Still, this was only part of the program designed at the moment Daisuke was delivered into this world, and it could not be construed as a response to whatever inner changes the father might have perceived in his son. To this day he was completely unaware of the negative results his plan of education had yielded.

  His father was enormously proud of having gone to war. Given the slightest opportunity, he was apt to dismiss the likes of Daisuke with sweeping scorn; they were useless, those fellows, because they had never fought; they had no nerve. He spoke as if “nerve” were man’s most glorious attribute. Daisuke felt an unpleasant taste in his mouth every time he had to listen to such speeches. Courage might well have been an important prerequisite to survival in the barbaric days of his father’s youth, when life was taken right and left, but in this civilized day and age, Daisuke regarded it as a piece of equipment primitive as the bow and arrow. Indeed, it seemed plausible to him that many qualities incompatible with courage were to be valued far above it. After his father’s last lecture Daisuke had laughed about it with his sister-in-law, saying that according to their father’s theory, a stone statue would have to be admired above all else.

  Needless to say, Daisuke was cowardly. He could feel no shame in this. There were even occasions when he proudly styled himself a coward. Once, as a child, at his father’s instigation he had gone to the cemetery in Aoyama all by himself in the middle of the night. He had withstood the eeriness of the place for one hour, then, unable to endure it any longer, had come home pale as a sheet. At the time he himself was somewhat chagrined. The next morning, when his father laughed at him, he found the old man hateful. According to his father, it had been customary for the boys of his day, as part of their training, to get up in the middle of the night and set out all alone for Sword’s Peak, some two and a half miles north of the castle, where they climbed to the top and waited in a small temple to greet the sunrise. “In those days we started out with a different understanding from young people nowadays,” he observed.

  The old man who had uttered such words, who even now might utter them again, cut a pitiful figure in Daisuke’s eyes. Daisuke disliked earthquakes. There were times when, seated quietly in his study, he could feel their approach far in the distance. Then he would begin to think that everything—the cushion beneath him, the floor, and even the main pillar—was shaking. Daisuke believed that for him, this was the natural response. People like his father were either primitives with undeveloped nervous systems or fools who persisted in deceiving themselves.

  Now Daisuke sat face to face with his father. The small room had extended eaves, so that as one looked out upon the garden while seated, the edge of the eaves seemed to cut off the view. At least, the sky did not look very wide from this room. But it was a quiet room, where one could settle down.

  His father was smoking cut tobacco and had drawn a longhandled brazier close to him. From time to time he tapped off the ashes and the sound echoed pleasantly in the quiet garden. Daisuke arranged four or five gold cigarette holders in the hand brazier; he had tired of blowing the smoke through his nostrils, so he sat with folded arms, studying his father’s face. For all the years, there was a considerable amount of flesh left to that face. Yet the cheeks were sunken and the skin on the eyes sagged beneath the heavy brows. The hair was yellow rather than snowy white. When he addressed someone, he had a habit of distributing his glances equally between the listener’s face and his knees. These eye movements made the whites flash from time to time, producing a peculiar sensation in his listener.

  The old man was holding forth: “Man must not think of himself alone. There’s society. There’s country. Without doing a few things for others, one doesn’t feel right. Take you, for instance, you can’t possibly feel very good just loafing around. Of course, it would be different with an uneducated, lower-class sort, but there’s no reason why a man who has received the highest education should be able to enjoy doing nothing. What one has learned becomes interesting only when applied to actual practice.’’

  “Yes, that’s right,” Daisuke had been answering. Being hard pressed to respond to his father’s sermons, Daisuke had made it his practice to give vague, perfunctory answers. As far as he was concerned, his father’s ideas were always but half thought out. Having resolved a given question to his liking, he would launch out from that point; thus there was not an ounce of significance to what he said. Furthermore, though he might seem to be arguing for altruism as the guiding principle one minute, he would switch to the protection of self-interest the next. His words flowed abundantly, with an air of great importance, but their content was worth hardly a moment of their listener’s reflection. To attack his logic at its foundations and bring it tumbling down would have been an enormously difficult task, and what was more, an impossible one; Daisuke had concluded it was preferable to leave it untouched altogether. His father, however, starting from the premise that Daisuke belonged to his solar system, assumed that it was his right to determine every inch of his son’s orbit. Hence, Daisuke had no choice but to revolve politely around the sun that was his father.

  “If you don’t like business, that’s that. Making money is surely not the only way to serve Japan. I won’t object if you don’t earn any money. I can understand that you wouldn’t take it well if I meddled in your affairs merely for the sake of money. As far as money is concerned, I will continue to support you as I always have. I don’t know how many years are left me, and I can’t take it with me when I die. Your monthly allowance is no problem. So stand up and do something. Do your duty as a citizen. You’re thirty now, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “It is unseemly to be idle and unemployed at thirty.” Daisuke had never considered himself idle. He simply regarded himself as one of those higher beings who disposed of a large number of hours unsullied by an occupation. Whenever his father started in this vein, Daisuke felt sorry for him. The crystallization of heightened intellectual and esthet
ic sentiments—the fruit of all those days and months spent in meaningful pursuits—none of this would register on his father’s infantile mind. Since there was nothing else to be said, Daisuke answered seriously, “Yes, it is a problem.” The old man could not for a moment cease to regard Daisuke as a child, and since in fact his responses invariably had a childlike air about them, being simple and unworldly, the old man was scornful, and complained that little gentlemen were useless even when they grew up. If, on the other hand, Daisuke’s tone was cool, restrained, unabashed, and totally nonchalant, he became annoyed that perhaps this son had gone beyond his reach.

  “You’re in good health?”

  “I haven’t caught a cold in the past two or three years.”

  “You don’t seem to be on the stupid side, either. Didn’t you have a fairly strong record at school?’’

  “Well, yes.”

  “Then it’s a shame to play around like this. What was his name— you know, the fellow who used to come over to talk with you? I saw him two or three times myself.”

  “Do you mean Hiraoka?”

  “That’s the one, Hiraoka. Now, he didn’t have much, but didn’t he go somewhere right after graduation?”

  “But he blundered and came back.”

  The old man could not suppress a sardonic smile. “Why?” “Why? Probably because he works to eat.”

  The old man could not understand Daisuke’s meaning. “I wonder if he didn’t do something unpleasant.”

  “He probably does the right thing for each particular set of circumstances, but the right thing, in the end, probably turns out to be a blunder.”

  “Oh,” was the doubtful answer. Then, changing his tone, he launched out: “When young people ‘blunder,’ it’s because they are lacking in sincerity and devotion. I’ve tried a lot of things over the years, and judging from all my experiences, success is impossible without these two qualities.”