A Child's Illness

When Professor Natsume saw the hanging scroll of calligraphy, he said, almost to himself, “That’s Kyokusō.” Sure enough, the signature read “Kyokusō Gaishi.” I said to him, “Kyokusō was Tansō’s grandson, wasn’t he? What was Tansō’s son called?” Without a moment’s hesitation, the professor answered, “Musō, I suppose.”

—At that, I suddenly woke up.

Light from the electric lamp in the next room was filtering into the mosquito net. My wife appeared to be changing the diaper of our two-year-old son. The child, of course, kept crying. Turning my back on them, I tried to go to sleep again. Then my wife said, “Oh, no, Taka. You mustn’t get sick again.”

I called out to her. “Is something wrong?”

“Yes. His stomach seems a little upset.”

Compared with our eldest son, this child was prone to one illness or another. That naturally made us anxious, but at the same time familiarity had bred in us a certain tendency to take it lightly.

“Have Dr. S look at him tomorrow.”

“Yes. I thought of asking him to come tonight, but…”

Once the child had stopped crying, I fell sound asleep again.

When I awoke the following morning, I still remembered the dream clearly. By Tansō I had meant Hirose Tansō. But Kyokusō and Musō seemed to be entirely imaginary people. Come to think of it, I recalled that there had perhaps been a professional storyteller called Nansō. The child’s illness, however, did not weigh heavily on my mind. It began to concern me somewhat only when I heard what my wife said after returning from Dr. S’s house.

“He says it is indigestion after all. He’ll come by himself later.”

Still holding the child sideways in her arms, my wife spoke as though she were angry.

“What is his temperature?”

“About thirty-seven point six. He had no fever at all last night, though.”

I shut myself in my upstairs study and began my day’s work. As usual, it made little progress. That was not necessarily due entirely to the child’s illness. Before long, a humid rain began to fall, rustling the trees in the garden. With the unfinished story before me, I lit one Shikishima cigarette after another.

Dr. S came to examine him once in the morning and again at dusk. In the evening he gave Takashi an intestinal irrigation. While it was being done, Takashi stared fixedly at the electric light. After a while the fluid washed out some darkish mucus. I felt as though I had seen the disease itself.

“How is he, Doctor?”

“Oh, it is nothing serious. Just keep plenty of ice on his head and cool it thoroughly. And one more thing—try not to rock or jostle him too much.” With that, the doctor went home.

I continued working that night and did not get into bed until about one. Beforehand, as I came out of the privy, I heard someone making a steady knocking sound in the pitch-dark kitchen.

“Who is that?”

“It’s me.”

The reply came in my mother’s voice.

“What are you doing?”

“Breaking up the ice.”

Ashamed of my thoughtlessness, I said, “Why don’t you turn on the light?”

“I’m all right. I can manage by touch.”

Ignoring her, I switched it on. Wearing nothing but a narrow sash over her clothes, my mother was handling the hammer awkwardly. Somehow, the sight of her seemed too wretched and forlorn to belong within an ordinary home. The ice, too, gleamed at its water-washed corners as it reflected the electric light.

Yet the following morning Takashi’s temperature was a little above thirty-nine degrees. Dr. S returned during the morning and repeated the previous night’s irrigation. As I helped him, I hoped there would be less mucus today. But when we removed the bedpan, there was far more of it than the night before. Seeing it, my wife cried out to no one in particular, “There’s so much!” Her voice had the unrestrained ring of a schoolgirl seven years younger than she actually was. Without thinking, I looked at Dr. S.

“Could it be infantile dysentery?”

“No, it isn’t dysentery. Dysentery, before a child has been weaned—”

Dr. S was unexpectedly calm.

After he left, I began my daily work. It was a story for a special issue of Sunday Mainichi, and the deadline was the following morning. Though I had no heart for it, I forced my pen to keep moving. But Takashi’s crying continually grated on my nerves. Nor was that all: whenever Takashi stopped, Hiroshi, who was two years older, would sometimes take his turn and burst into full-throated sobs.

There were other things to try my nerves as well. That afternoon an unfamiliar young man came to ask for financial help.

“I’m a manual laborer, but Professor C gave me a letter of introduction to you,” he said with a certain roughness.

Since I had only two or three yen in my purse, I handed him two books I no longer needed and told him to turn them into money. After accepting them, the young man carefully began inspecting the publication details at the back.

“This book says it was not for sale. Can I get money for a book that was not for sale?”

I felt miserable. Nevertheless, I replied that he ought to be able to sell it.

“Is that so? Well, goodbye, then.”

Still looking doubtful, the young man went away without so much as a word of thanks.

At dusk Dr. S performed another irrigation. This time there was much less mucus.

“Ah, there is very little tonight,” my mother said, almost triumphantly, as she brought the warm water for the doctor to wash his hands.

Though I was not exactly reassured, I felt a relaxation very close to relief. This was due not only to the smaller amount of mucus, but also to the fact that Takashi’s complexion and behavior appeared no different from usual.

“His fever will probably go down tomorrow. Fortunately, he does not seem to be suffering from nausea.”

Dr. S answered my mother as he washed his hands with a satisfied air.

When I opened my eyes the next morning, my aunt was already folding up her mosquito net in the adjoining room. As its rings rattled, she seemed to say something about “Taka.” My head still clouded with sleep, I asked vaguely, “Takashi?”

“Taka is worse. They say he has to be admitted to a hospital.”

I sat upright on the bedding. Coming only a day after the improvement, this seemed completely unexpected.

“Where is Dr. S?”

“He is already here. Come, come, get up quickly.”

As though trying to conceal her feelings, my aunt wore a strangely rigid expression.

I went at once to wash my face. The sky was still smothered in clouds, and the weather had a sickening look. Two mountain lilies had been tossed carelessly into a wooden pail in the bathroom. Somehow, I felt as though their smell and brown pollen would cling stickily to my skin.

In the course of a single night, Takashi’s eyes had become deeply sunken. That morning, they said, when my wife tried to lift him, his head had fallen backward and he had vomited something white. His constant yawning, too, was apparently a bad sign. I was suddenly overcome with pity for him. At the same time, I felt a sense of dread. Dr. S sat silently at the child’s bedside with a Shikishima cigarette between his lips. When he saw me, he said, “There is something I would like to discuss with you.”

I invited him upstairs, and we sat facing each other across an unlit brazier.

“I do not believe his life is in danger,” Dr. S began.

According to him, Takashi’s stomach and intestines had become thoroughly disordered. There was nothing to be done now but keep him from eating for two or three days.

“For that purpose, I think it would be more convenient to have him admitted to a hospital.”

I suspected that Takashi’s condition was far more dangerous than Dr. S admitted. I even wondered whether it might already be too late, hospital or no hospital. But this was naturally no time to dwell on such thoughts. I immediately asked Dr. S to arrange the admission.

“Then let us use U Hospital. If nothing else, its being close by will be convenient.”

Without touching the tea offered to him, Dr. S went to telephone U Hospital. In the meantime I called my wife and arranged for my aunt to accompany them to the hospital.

That was the day of the week when I received visitors. About four of them came during the morning. As I talked with them, I remained conscious of my wife and aunt hurrying to prepare for the hospital. Then I began to feel something like a grain of sand on the tip of my tongue. I thought the cement recently put into one of my decayed teeth must have come loose. But when I took the object from my mouth and looked at it on my fingertip, it was a piece of the tooth itself. I became slightly superstitious. Nevertheless, I went on smoking and talking with my visitors about such things as the rumored sale of Hōitsu’s shamisen.

Then the young man from the previous day, the self-proclaimed manual laborer, came to see me again. Standing in the entrance hall, he began bargaining. The two books I had given him had brought only one yen and twenty sen, he said, so could I not give him another four or five yen? No matter how often I refused, he showed no sign of leaving. At last I lost my composure and shouted, “I have no time to listen to this. You will have to go.”

Still dissatisfied, he continued with his wretched demands. “Then at least give me the train fare. Fifty sen will do.”

When he saw that this tactic would not work either, he slammed the latticed front door and finally retreated beyond the gate. At that moment I resolved never again to respond to an appeal for charity of this sort.

The four visitors became five. The fifth was a young scholar of French literature. Leaving this visitor for a moment, I went to the sitting room to see how things stood. My aunt, already prepared to leave, was pacing up and down the veranda with the heavily bundled child in her arms. I gently pressed my lips to the forehead of the pale Takashi. It was quite hot. The soft place on his head was twitching.

“Has the car come?” I asked quietly, speaking of something else.

“The car? Yes, it is already here.”

For some reason my aunt used formal language, as though she were a stranger.

My wife, who had changed her clothes, came in carrying a feather quilt and a basket.

“Well, we are going now.”

She placed both hands on the floor before me and spoke with a peculiar solemnity. I merely told her to replace Takashi’s hat with his new one. It was a summer hat I had bought only four or five days earlier.

“I have already put the new one on him.”

After answering, my wife glanced into the mirror on top of the chest of drawers and briefly adjusted her collar. Without seeing them off, I returned upstairs.

I was talking with the new visitor about George Sand and other matters. At that moment, between the young leaves of the garden trees, I caught sight of the canopies of two cars. Swaying above the hedge, they quickly passed before my eyes.

“Taken as a whole, the writers of the first half of the nineteenth century—Balzac and Sand, for example—were greater than those of the second half.”

The visitor—I remember it distinctly—the visitor was saying this with great enthusiasm.

The callers continued throughout the afternoon. It was not until dusk that I finally found time to go to the hospital. At some point the overcast sky had turned to rain. As I changed my clothes, I told the maid to put out my high wooden clogs. Just then Mr. N from Osaka appeared to collect my manuscript. He wore mud-spattered rubber boots, and traces of rain gleamed on his overcoat. Greeting him in the entrance hall, I explained that, owing to these circumstances, I had been unable to write anything. Mr. N expressed his sympathy.

“Then I will give up on it this time,” he said.

I somehow felt that I had compelled him to sympathize with me. At the same time, it seemed as though I had used my dying child as a convenient excuse.

Hardly had Mr. N left—or perhaps he had not yet left—when my aunt returned from the hospital. According to her, Takashi had vomited milk twice more after arriving. Fortunately, however, there still seemed to be nothing wrong with his brain. She also told me that the nurse appeared kindhearted and that my wife’s mother would stay at the hospital that night.

“As soon as Taka went in there, didn’t he receive a bunch of flowers from the Sunday-school children? The moment I saw the flowers, I had a dreadful feeling.”

She talked about things like that as well. I remembered how my tooth had broken off while I was talking that morning. But I said nothing.

It was completely dark when I left the house, and a fine rain was falling. The moment I stepped through the gate, I realized that I was wearing ordinary fair-weather clogs. Worse still, the front part of the left thong was loose. Somehow, I felt that if the thong broke, the child’s life would end as well. Yet I was far too agitated to endure going back and changing them. Angry at the maid’s stupidity in failing to put out the high clogs, I walked with the utmost care, making sure not to twist or turn my feet inside the clogs.

It was after nine when I reached the hospital. Sure enough, outside Takashi’s room, five or six tiger lilies and pinks stood immersed in the water of a washbasin. A wrapping cloth or something had been draped over the electric bulb inside the room, leaving it so dim that I could scarcely see anyone’s face. My wife and her mother were lying there, still wearing their sashes, with Takashi between them. Resting his head on my mother-in-law’s arm, he appeared to be sleeping peacefully. When my wife noticed my arrival, she alone sat up on the bedding and whispered, “It was very good of you to come.” Her mother said the same thing. Their voices sounded far more lighthearted than I had expected. Somewhat relieved, I sat down beside their pillows.

My wife said that because she was forbidden to nurse Takashi, she was suffering twice over: he cried for milk, while her breasts were painfully swollen.

“An ordinary rubber nipple was no use at all. In the end I let him suck my tongue.”

“He is drinking from my breast now,” her mother said with a laugh, showing me her shriveled nipple. “He sucks so desperately that he has made it as red as this.”

Before I knew it, I too was laughing.

“But he seems unexpectedly well. I thought that by now there would be no hope.”

“Taka? Why, Taka will be perfectly all right. It is nothing but a little diarrhea. His fever is sure to go down tomorrow.”

“Thanks to the holy founder’s blessing, I suppose?” my wife teased her.

But her mother, a believer in the Lotus Sutra, seemed not even to hear. Perhaps intending to blow away the malignant fever, she pursed her lips and earnestly blew, again and again, over Takashi’s head…

×　　　　　　　　　　×　　　　　　　　　　×

In the end, Takashi escaped death. When his condition first stabilized, I considered turning the events surrounding his hospitalization into a short literary sketch. But I had a superstitious feeling that if I carelessly wrote such a thing, his illness might return. In the end, therefore, I never wrote it. Now Takashi is asleep in a hammock suspended among the garden trees. Taking the request for a manuscript as my opportunity, I have decided for the present to try writing this account. My readers may find it more of a nuisance than anything else.

(July 1923)