Mr. O's New Autumn

I was sitting with my knees drawn up, talking with O, the Western-style painter. Wearing a red shirt, O lay flat on his stomach on the tatami, chain-smoking cigarettes. And beside him there lay a strangely formidable artificial leg, with its white-tabi-clad foot turned upward.

"It still feels like late summer, doesn't it?"

Before answering, O knitted his brows slightly and glanced toward the asters by the veranda. Somehow, in the meantime, several stalks of asters had burst into clusters of tiny flowers, standing motionless in the sun.

"Well now, this fellow's already blooming. What's it called again? That flower chap in those fan paintings."

×

It was an evening so clear that, though we were by the sea, not even the sound of the waves could be heard. I was out walking with O again along a broad sandy road. Then from ahead a young woman came walking along beside a hedge. She wore a white kasuri kimono with a red sash, and she was rather tall.

"Ah, that young lady is hard to watch. She doesn't know what to do with those long legs of hers."

In fact, the young woman's manner was exactly as O had described it.

×

With his cane tucked under his arm, O was urinating against the concrete wall behind a large villa. Just then a policeman wearing spectacles or something of the sort happened to pass by. The officer, clearly wanting to rebuke him, made as if to point at O with his white folding fan.

"This is it. This is it."

Stammering a little, O tapped his right leg two or three times with his cane. Since the right leg was artificial, it must have rung hollow.

"My house is right there, you see..."

The policeman merely grinned and passed on without saying a word.

×

It was evening, with the last of the western sunlight still lingering on the rooftops and the tops of the pines. I happened to run into O in front of a candy store. For the first time in a while he had changed into Japanese clothes and was coming along on crutches.

"Crutches today, are they?"

O grinned, showing his white teeth.

"Yes, today I've gone with oars."

×

I went over to O's house, and under the electric light in his four-and-a-half-mat room we talked about all sorts of things. Mostly, though, we talked about nerves and telepathy and such. One of my friends, a man named U, would put a glass of water by his pillow; after a while, when he looked at it, the water would somehow be half gone. And one night, just as he was dozing off, water was suddenly splashed over his face. But when he sprang up in alarm and looked, the glass itself was still standing there perfectly upright. Stories like that came up too.

Then we decided to go into town on foot and do a little shopping. At that point O, unlike his usual self, began shutting things such as the casement window. Not only that, he said to me with a laugh,

"If there's light showing in this window, then somehow, when I come back from outside, I feel as if there'll be someone sitting here, having tea or something."

Of course O was living alone here, cooking for himself.

×

Today again O, unchanged as ever, was wearing his red shirt and black vest as he crouched under the back eaves at eleven in the morning, lighting a charcoal brazier. For kindling he was using dry pine needles and pine cones. Sticking my head in at the back gate, I said, "How is it? Can you get the rice cooked?" But O turned around and, instead of answering my question, jerked his chin toward the pine trees nearby.

"When you're cooking rice like this, every pine starts looking like kindling."

×

Wearing a Panama hat, O sat down on a low sand dune, briskly working his brush. A white bungalow, nothing but its posts showing, stood silent with its shutters closed among a stand of young pines. He was sketching that. The pines all around us, too, had grown to two or three feet high, and in the unmistakably autumnal wind they bore green pinecones.

"So pinecones really do grow even on pines like these."

Without turning toward me, O answered as he continued to move his brush.

"Feels like a young girl getting pregnant."

×

In between his professional work, O busily composes haiku. If I were to add some of them here as an afterthought to this sketch of O, they would be these:

Clouding over, pruning shears set to the dwarf bamboo.

Why not dry the futon cotton too, on the trellis of the sponge gourds?

Withered leaves have turned to butterflies -- threadlike silver grass.

In the pale sunlight, peeling sponge gourd skins by the well.

Most vivid of all, the blue-green summer grass in the pine grove.

With the first chestnuts, a few great ones mixed in.

Balsam seeds split open -- and there, the shrike's cry.

(Kugenuma, 15, 10, 11)