To the Spring Equinox and Beyond Read online

  Sunaga seemed unsympathetic to both of Keitaro's complaints. In the first place, Keitaro's way of speaking made it difficult for him to know whether his friend was being serious or merely jesting. After one such vehement speech on these fantastic ideas, Sunaga asked in reply, "Well, aside from the question of making a living, what is it you want most?"

  Keitaro replied that he wished to do what detectives in the Metropolitan Police do.

  "Well, why not do it then? It's quite simple."

  "It's not that simple."

  And Keitaro offered a serious explanation on why detective work was impossible for him. By the very nature of his profession a detective is a diver who plunges from the surface of society to its depths. Almost no other profession is so suitable for grabbing hold of human mysteries. Moreover, a detective has the undoubted advantage of being able to observe the darker side of mankind without any of the dangers of degrading himself. Nevertheless, it is undeniable that his original purpose lies in disclosing the sins and crimes of others, that his profession is based on the malignant intention of trapping his subjects. Keitaro could not bring himself to do such inhuman actions. All he wanted was to study human beings—no, rather, to look with wonder and admiration at the incredible machinery of humanity operating in the darkness of night. Such was the drift of Keitaro's contention.

  Sunaga had been listening without offering a word, neither of contradiction nor of comment. To Keitaro, such behavior appeared mature, but he actually took it as mediocre. He left hating the calm way in which the other listened, seemingly unconcerned about his aspirations. Yet before five days had elapsed, he wanted to see his friend again, and as soon as he left his boardinghouse, he caught a streetcar for Kanda.

  A stranger would have found Sunaga's house extremely difficult to locate. To reach it one had to turn two or three times along a twisting side street sloping upward and branching off to the right from Sudacho, where a tall building, formerly the Ogawatei but now the Tenkado, stood at the corner. Since Sunaga's house was on a back street crowded with many small residences, the lots were not as wide as those in the uptown area. Nevertheless, it was a fine house. Leading from the gate to the bell by the lattice door at the entrance was a path of some yards paved with granite flagstones.

  Sunaga's father had owned the house and had rented it for many years to a relative. But after his death his wife thought that this house would be more convenient for her small family, especially in terms of location and size, so their residence on Surugadai was sold and they moved. When Keitaro once heard from Sunaga that the house was considerably repaired, almost rebuilt, he looked with renewed interest at the upstairs alcove post and the boards lining the ceiling. This second-floor room had been added later as a study for Sunaga. Except for some slight reverberations on very windy days, it was a perfect room of its kind, clean and bright and divided into two parts, one of four tatami, the other six. Sitting in this room, Keitaro could see the branches of a pine tree in the garden, as well as the upper part of a wooden fence that had traces left by the carpenter's adze and a protective line of spikes at the very top. Looking down through the railing of the balcony outside the study, Keitaro noticed some white flowers at the foot of the pine and, asking Sunaga their name, was told they were snowy herons.

  Each time Keitaro visited Sunaga and was shown into this room, he could not help being reminded of the clear difference between his friend and himself, one the young master, the other not much better than a university student. And while he felt contemptuous of Sunaga for living so settled and cozy a life, he envied the comfortable though too quiet pattern of his friend's existence. He thought it bad for a youth to live in this way, yet at the same time he wanted to become what Sunaga was. This time too, with that divided interest of these two contradictory thoughts within him, Keitaro proceeded to his friend's house.

  When, after following the twisting side street, he came to the corner where it crossed the street Sunaga's house was on, he saw before him a young woman just entering the gate of the house. He had caught only a glimpse of her back, but that curiosity common to young men, combined with his own peculiar romantic strain, made him hurry to the gate as if he were being pulled there by some invisible string. He cast a glance inside, yet even the woman's shadow had vanished. He saw only that the shoji—those familiar doors whose handles were adorned with maple leaves inserted between transparent paper—were quietly closed as usual. He stood looking wistfully at the closed shoji for some time. But presently he noticed a pair of clogs, a woman's, on the stepping-stone. They had been placed neatly together, the front of them facing the inside of the house, indicating that the maid had not turned them in the proper direction. Keitaro, combining in his mind the direction of the clogs and the unexpected promptness with which the woman had gone inside, concluded she was a frequent guest, someone who had no need to announce herself and who could easily slide open the shoji. Or perhaps she was part of the household—but this latter thought seemed a little odd to him, for he knew quite well that only four persons were living there: Sunaga, his mother, a maid, and a kitchen servant.

  For a while Keitaro remained standing in front of Sunaga's gate. He wanted not so much to watch secretly from outside the wooden fence the behavior of the woman who had gone into the house as to imagine the pattern of romance being woven by her and Sunaga. But all the same he found himself listening attentively. Yet it was, as usual, quiet inside. He heard not so much as a cough and certainly no woman's amorous voice.

  His fiancee? Such was Keitaro's first thought, but his imagination had not been disciplined enough to remain content with that. I bet his mother is out with the maid visiting a relative. The kitchen servant has retired to her room. And right now Sunaga and the girl must be whispering tete-a-tete. If this were true, it would be out of place to clatter open the lattice door as he usually did and in a loud voice ask for admittance. Or perhaps Sunaga, his mother, and the maid have all gone out together, and the kitchen servant is taking a nap. At just such a moment, the woman entered the house. If so, she must be a thief. It would be unpardonable for me to go away and leave things as they are.

  Keitaro stood there in a daze as though he had been bewitched by a demon.

  Presently the shoji of the upstairs room opened, and Keitaro was awakened from his reverie by the sudden surprise of seeing Sunaga along the passageway, a green glass bottle in his hand.

  "What are you doing down there? Did you lose something?" Sunaga asked, as though he found it odd to see Keitaro just standing there. Around Sunaga's throat was a white flannel cloth. The bottle in his hand seemed to be for gargling. Keitaro looked up and exchanged a few words about whether Sunaga had caught cold, but continued to stand where he was. Finally Sunaga told him to come up. Keitaro cautiously asked if it was all right to. As if not understanding, Sunaga nodded and withdrew behind the shoji.

  As Keitaro walked upstairs, he thought he heard a slight rustle of clothing in the inner room below. On the second floor he noticed nothing unusual except for a padded dressing gown with a black collar which his friend seemed to have been wearing and had discarded on the mats. From Keitaro's temperament and from his intimacy with Sunaga, it might have been expected he would ask straight out about the woman who had given him such concern, but owing to his sense of having wronged his friend in giving too free a rein to thoughts not altogether innocent, and because of his awareness that his imagination had settled on a conjecture too cynical to mention directly, Keitaro was deprived of the courage to ask freely who the girl was who had just entered the house. Instead, as if trying to hold back a thought that wanted to rush forward, he said, "For the time being I'm abandoning my dreams. I've come to the realization that earning a living is more important."

  He asked quite seriously that Sunaga introduce him to the uncle he had previously spoken of, the one living on Uchisaiwaicho, saying he wanted to have an interview with him for that very purpose. This uncle was the husband of the younger sister of Sunaga's mother. He ha
d gone into business after leaving government service and was now connected to several companies. Sunaga apparently had no intention of asking his uncle for help in finding a position. Keitaro remembered Sunaga's once saying that this uncle had offered him any number of possibilities, but that none of them appealed to him.

  Sunaga had arranged, he said, to see his uncle that morning, but a sore throat had prevented him from going out. In a few days he would be able to, so at that time he would definitely speak to his uncle about Keitaro. Then he added, whether as a precaution or for some other reason, "He's a very busy man, you know. Besides, he has job applicants from all over. I have no idea what he'll say, but it wouldn't hurt to go see him." Keitaro interpreted these words as a warning not to expect too much. One interview would at least be better than none, and in contrast to his usual behavior he pleaded with Sunaga to inquire on his behalf.

  Actually, though, Keitaro was not as worried or as anxious as his words implied. It was true, as he had himself asserted, that he had been and still was racking his brains and wasting no effort running about trying to find a job since his graduation from university. But there was exaggeration in the painful tone of voice— in half of it at least—with which he appealed to others, claiming he had not yet been given even the first glimmer of hope. He was not, as Sunaga was, the only child in his family, but like Sunaga he had only his mother at home, his younger sister having married. While he had no house or lot to rent as Sunaga did, he did own a small plot of farmland in the country. This tenanted land brought him yearly yields of rice—not much, but enough so that when the harvest was converted to cash according to the market price, he had no difficulties over the twenty or thirty yen required for his room and board each month. Furthermore, many a time had he requested extra expenses from his indulgent mother as if, so to speak, he were preying on himself. Under these circumstances, his clamoring for a position, though not altogether false, was certainly raised aloud through vanity in the hope of boasting about it to the people back home, to friends, and even to himself. Had the position itself been his real concern, he ought to have worked harder at the university in compiling a better record, but romantic that he was, he had made it a point to be as idle as he possibly could, the result being that his graduation was hardly a brilliant success.

  Keitaro talked with Sunaga for an hour or so. He had himself brought forward those urgent questions of position and subsistence, but since he was more concerned about the woman he had seen from behind a while ago, he was not as seriously attentive to those momentous issues as his words implied. At one point when he suddenly heard the laughing voice of a young woman coming from the drawing room below, he felt tempted to ask if Sunaga had a visitor. Yet the very moment in which he was weighing the question became the instrument for destroying the naturalness of its utterance and making it an untimely remark. And so it remained unasked after all.

  As for Sunaga, he tried bringing up topics that would humor Keitaro's curiosity as much as possible. He described how the back street he lived on just off the streetcar line was divided by small houses and narrow lanes into cubes that formed a hive of nameless townspeople in almost each of whose homes a drama was being enacted which would never surface to society at large.

  He began with a woman who lived several houses down from his, the mistress of a retired hardware dealer whose store was in Nihombashi. She had apparently taken a lover, an actor belonging to some theatrical troupe. The retired merchant knew about the affair but said nothing. On a side street opposite her home was a neat little nondescript house with lattice doors in front owned either by a pettifogger or an employment agency, and sometimes the blackboard in front had such advertisements as "Immediate Openings: Woman Reporter. Woman Cook." Once a pretty woman twenty-seven or twenty-eight years old came looking for a job. Enfolded in her long dark blue twilled mantle with frills on it, she resembled a Western nurse. The gist of the story was that both the master of that house and his wife were surprised to discover she was the daughter of the man he had once served as a houseboy.

  Sunaga next mentioned a gray-haired usurer that lived with his wife, who was about twenty years old, in a back alley behind Sunaga's house. It was said he had taken her as security for a loan. The neighboring residence was occupied by a professional gambler. While his dice-rolling cronies gathered there rubbing bloodshot eyes, the wife of one of the gamesters, a baby on her back under a nursing coat, occasionally came to fetch her husband, who was frenzily engrossed in his wagering. Crying, she would beg him to return, and the husband would assure her he would, but only in an hour when he had won back his losses. And then, almost hanging on to him, she would plead with him to leave at once, saying that the more he would try to win back, the more he would lose. Along that frozen midnight street the voice pleading for return and the one adamant against it would disturb the sleep of the neighbors.

  As Keitaro listened to these stories, he began to suspect that Sunaga, who had long been in this place rampant with such real-life novels, might likewise be playing a part in a secret drama of his own but feigning innocence. Of course, behind this conjecture was the faint shadow cast by the woman Keitaro had seen from behind.

  "While you're on the subject, let me in on your own story," Keitaro said, trying to attack, but Sunaga merely brushed aside the remark with a slight smile. "Well," he replied, "I've got a sore throat today." It sounded as if he had a story to tell, but not to Keitaro.

  When Keitaro went downstairs, the woman's clogs were no longer at the entrance. Whether their owner had left or they had been put in the clog box or were hidden by discreet hands, he could not guess. As soon as he was out on the street, he hurried into a tobacconist's, urged on by one knew not what, and emerged with a cigar in his mouth. Smoking, he walked along to Sudacho where, just as he was about to board a streetcar, he remembered the regulations against smoking, so he moved on toward Mansei Bridge. With the intention of making the cigar last until he reached his boardinghouse, he sauntered along, still thinking about Sunaga. Now, the image of his friend did not appear just by itself —it was invariably followed by the flitting figure of the woman he had seen.

  Ultimately he felt as if he were being jeered at by Sunaga: "How can you expect to come off looking good in romantic exploration by observing the world through a telescope from the third floor of a boardinghouse on Daimachi in Hongo?"

  Keitaro had never been familiar with or even interested in what Tokyoites referred to as the "lower-town life." Occasionally passing through some back street around Nihombashi, he had seen a lattice door so narrow that one had to move sideways to pass through it, an iron lantern hanging for no apparent reason above the earthen floor at the entrance, shining inlaid bamboo filling the gap under the stepping-board, and a sliding door whose lower part was paneled with boards of cedar or some other wood so thin that the sunlight had tinged it translucent red. When he took in these items, he was left with a cramped feeling. He thought he could not bear such a constrained life, one with everything around him so tidily ordered in trivial ways, and so glossy too. People living in such houses were, he imagined, so neat and punctual that they were even likely to be particular about the sharpness of a toothpick used after a meal. He conjectured that these minute points in their mode of living were all governed by traditional rules and, like their tobacco sets, shone dreadfully with the luster of custom which generation after generation of their forefathers had rubbed and polished.

  Even at Sunaga's house when he saw some useless pine tree guarded against snowfall by straw ropes or the small garden over which dead pine needles had been strewn with excessive scrupulousness, he could not help associating these things with the image of the young master of the house raised tenderly in the bosom of that delicate civilization of Old Edo. For one thing, Sunaga's habit of wearing a stiff sash tightly bound round his kimono waist and his way of sitting squarely on his seat seemed strange to Keitaro. Sometimes Sunaga's mother would come in and join them in their talk. Sunaga had told him she
was fond of reciting the classical epic songs, and when Keitaro listened to the words spoken in her sweet, engaging manner, words mellifluous yet quite articulate, he felt in them a delicious refinement not found in ready-made speech, as though they had just been brought from a cellar where they had been kept in storage for ages. He did not of course think that her speech was made up of hackneyed and set phrases, but he could not help recognizing that hidden beneath their surface was the deftness of an age-long practice in phraseology.

  In short, Keitaro wanted something freer, something more off the beaten track. However, on that particular day he hadn't been his usual self, at least not in his imagined fancies. He wished he had been brought up in a house of his own inherited from his father, a house along some back street where rows of black-walled residences built in the warehouse style stood with that moist atmosphere of the Tokugawa period still lingering over them. In that neighborhood playmates would have gently called out, "Kei-chan, come and play with us," and they would have played at gangsters or soldiers. Once a month he might have lit a sacred fire as he visited Suitengu Shrine in Kakigaracho or Fudo Temple in the Fukagawa district. (Indeed, Sunaga automatically accompanied his mother in observing this old-fashioned practice.) He might have worn a plain iron-blue haori and walked in ecstasy along streets imbued with the atmosphere of the Kabuki world modified by modern taste, discovering some amorous intrigues bound up in the conventions but at the same time vaulting over them.

  All at once the name Morimoto came to him, and it turned Keitaro's fancy a strange hue. He had, out of curiosity, willingly sought to shake hands with this shady-eccentric, the result being that he had nearly gotten involved in troubles he least expected. Fortunately. Keitaro's landlord believed in his integrity. If the landlord had had any mistrust in him, Keitaro might have been summoned to the police, his situation open to suspicion. The moment he thought of this possibility, the romantic dream he had been building suddenly lost its warmth and broke away meaninglessly like a bank of clouds made up of ugly fancies. But behind this ruin persisted the image of Morimoto's lean face with its double eyelids and its disheveled drooping moustache. Keitaro felt a certain fondness for that nondescript face, as well as contempt and pity; it seemed to him that behind it there loomed something mysterious. And with all these thoughts he associated that queer walking stick Morimoto had given him as a token of their friendship.