He

I

I suddenly remembered him, a friend from long ago. There is no need to give his name. After leaving his uncle's house, he was renting a six-mat room on the second floor of a printing shop in Hongo. Whenever the rotary press below started up, the whole upstairs shook and rattled like the cabin of a little steamboat. I was still a student at First Higher School then, and after supper at the dormitory I often went to visit him there. Whenever I did, he would be bending his unusually thin neck beneath the windowpane, always telling his fortune with a pack of cards. Above his head, too, a brass oil lamp hung from the ceiling, always casting a round shadow. ...

II

He used to commute from his uncle's house in Hongo to the same Third Middle School in Honjo that I attended. He was living with his uncle because he had no parents. Though I say he had no parents, it seems his mother at least was not dead. He felt for his mother—who had apparently remarried somewhere—a boyish and passionate attachment even stronger than what he felt for his father. One autumn, I remember, the moment he saw me he began speaking, almost stammering with excitement.

"Lately I've found out where my younger sister was married off to. I vaguely remember I had a sister, you know. Why don't we go see her this Sunday or something?"

I promptly went with him to a shabby outlying neighborhood near Kameido. It did not take us as long as I had expected to find where his sister lived. It was one unit in a row house behind a barber shop. The master of the house seemed to be out working at a nearby factory or somewhere; inside the poorly built dwelling there was no one visible but his wife—his sister—who was nursing a baby at her breast. Though she was his younger sister, she seemed much more grown-up than he did. Besides, apart from the long sweep at the corners of her eyes, she scarcely resembled him at all.

"Was that child born this year?"

"No, last year."

"Then you were married last year too, weren't you?"

"No, in March of the year before last."

He spoke with desperate earnestness, as though hurling himself against something unseen. But his sister only answered pleasantly, now and then soothing the baby as she did so. Holding an earthen teacup stained dark with coarse tea in my hand, I gazed at the moss on the brick wall blocking the view outside the kitchen door. At the same time I felt the sadness in their awkward, ill-fitting conversation.

"What sort of person is your husband?"

"What sort? ... He likes reading books, of course."

"What kind of books?"

"Storybooks and kodan books and things like that."

In fact, there was an old desk set beneath the window. On it there must have been several books, and among them probably some of those popular tale books. Yet unfortunately I remember nothing about the books themselves. What I do remember is that in the pen holder two peacock feathers had been stuck in, vivid and bright.

"Well, we'll come again sometime. Give my regards to your husband."

His sister, still nursing the baby just as before, bade us farewell with gentle politeness.

"Is that so? Then please give my regards to everyone. I'm terribly sorry I didn't even straighten your clogs for you."

We walked through the streets of Honjo as the day was drawing toward evening. He too must have been disappointed by what his sister felt—or failed to feel—upon meeting him for the first time. Yet, as if by prior agreement, neither of us said a word about it. I still remember: all he did was trail his fingers along the bamboo fence by the roadside and say this to me.

"When you keep walking like this, your fingers start trembling in a funny way. As if electricity were running through them."

III

After graduating from middle school, he decided to sit for the entrance examination to First Higher School. Unfortunately, he failed. It was after that that he began lodging on the second floor of the printing shop. It was also after that that he became absorbed in books by Marx and Engels. I, of course, had no knowledge whatsoever of social science. Yet words like capital and exploitation inspired in me a kind of respect—or rather, a kind of fear. He took advantage of that fear and often attacked me in argument. Verlaine, Rimbaud, Baudelaire—those poets were, to me at the time, idols beyond idols. But to him they were nothing more than manufacturers of hashish and opium.

Looking back now, our arguments were barely arguments at all. But at the time we were perfectly serious, each doing our utmost to refute the other. Only one of our friends—a medical student called K—always treated us with cool contempt.

"Instead of getting worked up over that sort of argument, why don't you come with me to Susaki sometime?"

Grinning, K would say things like that while comparing the two of us. In my heart, of course, I would have liked to go to Susaki or anywhere else. But he, with an air of detachment—really there is no other word for it than detachment—kept a Golden Bat cigarette between his lips and paid no attention to K's teasing. Indeed, sometimes he would strike first and blunt K's edge.

"Revolution, in the end, is just social menstruation, isn't it? ..."

In July of the following year he entered the Sixth Higher School in Okayama. For half a year or so after that, he was probably at his happiest. He wrote constantly, reporting on his life there. His letters always listed the names of the social-science books he had been reading. Still, I felt his absence to some degree. Whenever I met K, I always ended up talking about him. K too—though in his case, the interest he felt in him was closer to scientific curiosity than friendship.

"No matter how you look at it, he's the sort who'll stay a child forever. But for such a beautiful boy he doesn't stir the slightest homoerotic feeling, does he? I wonder what the reason for that is."

K would ask such things in complete seriousness, with the glass window of the dormitory behind him, skillfully blowing ring after ring of Shikishima cigarette smoke.

IV

Less than a year after entering the Sixth Higher School, he fell ill and returned to his uncle's house. The diagnosis, if I remember right, was tubercular disease of the kidneys. Sometimes I brought biscuits or the like and went to visit him in his student room. He would sit there on his bedding with his thin knees drawn up, talking with unexpected cheerfulness. But I could not help glancing at the chamber pot in the corner of the room. Usually it held urine glaring bright with blood through the glass.

"With a body like this, I'm finished. I couldn't endure prison life now, not by a long shot."

He would say this with a bitter smile.

"Even Bakunin—you can tell just from photographs that he had a powerful body."

Still, it was not as though nothing at all remained to comfort him. He was in love with his uncle's daughter, with an exceedingly pure love. He never once spoke to me directly of that love. But one afternoon—one cloudy spring afternoon—he suddenly confessed it to me. Suddenly? No, not entirely suddenly. Like any young man, from the first moment I saw his cousin I had half expected something like this.

"Miyo has gone to Odawara with the girls from school, and the other day I happened to read her diary. ..."

I was a little inclined to smile coldly at that "happened to," but of course I said nothing and waited for him to go on.

"She wrote there about a university student she got acquainted with on the train."

"And then?"

"And so I've been thinking I ought to warn her. ..."

At last I let something slip and made this criticism.

"Isn't that contradictory? You may love Miyo if you like, but Miyo mustn't love someone else—there's no logic in that. If you mean only that this is how you feel, that's another matter."

He was plainly displeased. But he made no attempt to answer my words. And after that—after that, what did we talk about? I remember only that I myself became uncomfortable. Naturally, it was the discomfort of having made an invalid unhappy.

"Well then, I'll be off."

"Ah, yes. Off with you."

After a slight nod, he added in an affected tone of casualness,

"Won't you lend me a book or something? Any time you come next is fine."

"What kind of book?"

"A biography of a genius, or something."

"Shall I bring you Jean-Christophe, then?"

"Yes, anything vigorous will do."

With something close to self-reproach in my heart, I returned to the dormitory in Yayoi-cho. In the study room, whose windowpane was broken, there was unfortunately no one there. Under the dim electric light I reviewed my German grammar. Yet I could not help envying him—him who had suffered disappointed love, perhaps, but who at least had his uncle's daughter to love.

V

About half a year later, he was sent to a seaside place to recuperate. Though I say recuperate, in fact he spent most of the time in a hospital there. Taking advantage of the school's winter vacation, I traveled a great distance to visit him. His sickroom was on the second floor, poorly exposed to the sun and full of drafts. Sitting up in bed, he smiled as briskly as ever. Yet he scarcely said a word about literature or social science.

"Whenever I look at that palm tree, I feel a strange sympathy for it. Look—the leaves up there are moving."

Just outside the window the palm tree was tossing the tips of its leaves in the wind. The whole tree swayed, and at the ends of its finely split leaves there was an almost nervous trembling. It certainly possessed that modern kind of melancholy. But thinking of him alone in that sickroom, I answered as brightly as I could.

"Yes, they're moving. What is there for a seaside palm to brood over? ..."

"And then?"

"And then that's all."

"What a dull answer."

In the midst of this sort of exchange I gradually began to feel short of breath.

"Did you read Jean-Christophe?"

"Yes, I read a little, but ..."

"You didn't feel like going on?"

"It's too vigorous somehow."

Once again I tried desperately to rescue the conversation from sinking.

"K came to see you the other day, I heard."

"Yes, he came and went back the same day. Talked about vivisection and such."

"What a disagreeable fellow."

"Why?"

"No particular reason. ..."

After supper, and taking advantage of the fact that the wind had died down, we decided to go for a walk along the shore. The sun had long since set, but it was still light around us. We sat down on the slope of a sandy dune where low pines grew and talked about various things while watching two or three seabirds flying.

"The sand feels cold like this, doesn't it? But try putting your hand farther in."

As he said, I thrust one hand down into the sand beneath the dried stalks of the wild beach grass. There I found that a trace of the sun's warmth still remained.

"Yes. It's a little uncanny. I wonder if it'll still be warm even at night."

"No, it'll turn cold soon enough."

For some reason I remember this exchange with perfect clarity. And beyond us, some fifty yards away, the dark and quiet Pacific. ...

VI

I heard of his death at the old New Year of the following year. Later I was told that the doctors and nurses at the hospital had been celebrating the holiday by keeping up a card party late into the night. Angry because the noise kept him awake, he had shouted at them from where he lay in bed—and at the same moment suffered a massive hemorrhage and died at once. When I looked at the postcard bordered in black, I felt less grief than futility.

"Although the books owned by the deceased were burned together with the remains, should any volumes borrowed from you happen to have been mixed among them, we beg you kindly to forgive us."

This sentence had been written by hand in one corner of the card. Reading it, I imagined several books rising up in flames. Naturally, among them there must have been the first volume of Jean-Christophe, which I had once lent him. To the sentimental person I was then, that fact seemed strangely symbolic.

Five or six days later, I happened to run into K, and we talked about him. K was as cold as ever; more than that, with a rolled cigarette between his lips, he put this question to me.

"Do you suppose X had known a woman?"

"Who knows ..."

K stared fixedly into my face, as though he doubted me.

"Well, that doesn't matter. ... But now that X is dead, don't you feel something almost like the feeling of a victor?"

I hesitated for a moment. K then cut me off and answered his own question.

"At least, that's how I feel."

From that time on, I felt a certain uneasiness whenever I met K.

(November 13, 1926)