To the Spring Equinox and Beyond (39 page)

"I don't remember insulting anyone."

"But you did. It's not a question of what you said or did—it's your attitude that's insulting. And even if it's not your attitude, it's in your heart."

"I don't have to put up with such prying and meddlesome criticism."

"A man can be so cowardly as to make that kind of worthless response. Takagi-san is broadminded enough to accept even someone like you because he's a gentleman. But you'd never be capable of accepting him— because you're a coward!"

  Matsumot's Account

I don't know what happened between Ichizo and Chiyoko after that last episode. Probably nothing of any real importance. At least as far as one can see from the outside, their relationship up to now doesn't seem to have changed at all from the earlier days. If you ask them about it, they'll offer a variety of views on the subject, but these are governed by their state of mind at the moment. So you may not be wrong in thinking they're telling plausible lies quite deficient in coherence, yet telling them as if they were of lasting value.

I also heard about that last incident between them— from both of them. It certainly didn't come from any misunderstanding on either side. Each of them believes in what they took each other to be, and the way they believe it is so natural that the collision they had is probably quite reasonable as well. Consequently, whether they are to get married or remain friends, there's no way to escape collisions of this kind, which must be regarded as the fate they were born to. In a way, however, the two of them are, unfortunately, quite attracted to each other. And it's dreadful when you realize that the way they're attracted has been dominated by a destiny no one has any authority over. They've formed themselves into a pitiable pair who, to phrase it in a neat epigram, meet to part and part to meet. I'm not certain you'll understand me when I say that if they do get married, the result will be equivalent to marrying in order to breed unhappiness, and if they don't get married, they'll feel discontented, as though they had remained unmarried only to continue their unhappiness. And so I think the wisest way is to let fortune take its course and let things develop directly through the hands of Nature. It will be all the worse for them if you or I poke our noses into the affair. As you know, I'm not a stranger to either Ichizo or Chiyoko. I've often been specifically asked by Ichizo's mother, my elder sister, for assistance or advice about their chances. But how can I arrange what is difficult to bring about even through heaven's own hands? After all, my sister has been dreaming her own impossible dream.

Both my sisters, Ichizo's mother and Taguchi's wife, are surprised at the great similarity between my character and Ichizo's. I myself have wondered how two such eccentrics could have come into existence among our close-knit group of relatives. It is his mother's view that Ichizo as he is now is solely the result of the influence I've had over him. Of the numerous faults of mine that displease her, the one that annoys her the most is this alleged evil influence I've unwisely exerted over my nephew. I readily admit I deserve the reproach when I reflect on the attitude I've taken toward Ichizo even to this very day. And I also admit, by the way, that she's quite justified in her complaint that I'm the cause of estranging her son from the Taguchis. However, that both my sisters are knitting their brows over Ichizo and me, regarding us as two eccentrics cut from the same mold, is unquestionably wrong.

Ichizo's disposition is one that coils inwardly whenever he comes in contact with the world. Whenever he receives an impulse, it turns round and round, driving itself in more and more deeply and carving itself more and more finely into the recesses of his mind. And it distresses him that this encroachment upon his mind continues, knowing no bounds. He's so worried about, it that he prays for any escape whatever from this inner activity, but he's dragged on by it as though it were a curse beyond his power to drive out. The time is going to come when he'll inevitably collapse, totally alone, under his own mental exertion. He's going to come to dread that moment. When it happens, he'll be exhausted, like a madman. This is the great misfortune lying at the very core of his life. In order to turn it into a blessing, there's no other way except to reverse the direction of his life and to make it uncoil outward. We must get him to use his eyes so that instead of carrying outside things into his head, he can look with his mind at things as they exist outside. He should find one thing under heaven— and a single thing is enough—which is so great or beautiful or gentle that it will engross his entire being. In a word, he has to become frivolous. At first, he had little regard for such an attitude. Now he's thirsting for it. Now, for the sake of his own happiness, he's praying with all his heart to the powers above to somehow become a wit, flippant and wanton. He already knew before I advised him that the only way in the world to save himself was by assuming a flippant pose. But he's struggling, still unable to put it into practice.

My relatives bear a silent grudge against me as the person responsible for having made Ichizo into the kind of person he now is. And I have to admit I have great qualms of conscience in that regard. I was, in fact, ignorant of the art of guiding a man according to his own character. I was indiscreet enough to think it proper to pass on to him as many of my own tastes as I could, and I got used to moving the pliable mind of this youth wherever it pleased me to. That seems to have been the cause of all the trouble. It was two or three years ago that I became aware of this fault. But when I noticed it, it was already too late. With my incapable arms folded, all I could do was offer an inward sigh.

What I'm saying is, the life I'm now leading suits me best, but it would never do for Ichizo. I'm fickle by nature; to give a cheap criticism of myself, I'm a born wanton. My mind is constantly flowing outward. And so it can be turned in any direction and be made subject to any external stimulus. Putting it this way, though, may not satisfy you sufficiently. Ichizo was born to reform the established order, while I came into the world to be educated by the world as it is taken for granted by ordinary people. In spite of being as old as I am, I have something quite young about me, but Ichizo, on the contrary, was already mature in his high school days. He uses society as material for his thought. I merely get on board, carried along by society's way of thinking.

His strong point is there, and there at the same time lurks his misfortune. And there too lies my own weakness as well as my happiness. When I'm at a tea ceremony, my mind is quiet. I get a feeling of
sabi
while twiddling a curio. At other places—storytelling halls, theaters, wrestling matches—-at all these I can put myself into the appropriate frame of mind. I'm so diverted by these interests that quite naturally I reach the point in which I can't help feeling emptied even of my very self. That's why I'm leading such a detached life, forcing my ego to push through. Ichizo, however, is a person who from the very first had nothing but his own ego. To make up for this deficiency—or rather, to curtail his unhappiness—the only possible way that his life should turn is to respond to the external universe instead of perpetually crawling into his inner world. But it is I who have indirectly deprived him of the one and only resource by which he could have made himself happy. The bitterness my relatives hold against me is absolutely justified—so much so that I consider it at least fortunate that Ichizo himself doesn't have anything against me.

The incident I want to talk about occurred, I believe, about a year ago, when Ichizo had not yet graduated from university. He came over on a day when I was in my study dipping into the history of Japanese flower-arrangement to answer an acquaintance's question on the subject. I was so absorbed in the job that when he greeted me, I merely looked over my shoulder and said hello. But I noticed that his color was quite bad. Worried about it, I went out of my study to look for him as soon as I came to a place in my investigation where I could leave off. As he regards my wife as a friend, I thought he might be talking with her in the sitting room, but he wasn't there. My wife suggested he was in the children's room, so I went down the hallway and opened the door to that room. He was sitting at Sakiko's desk, looking at a photograph of an attractive woman on the front page of a woman's magazine.

At that moment he looked around at me and informed me that he had just discovered a beautiful woman. "We've been looking at each other for about ten minutes," he said. He added that as long as that face was before him, he forgot the pain in his head and felt an involuntary pleasantness. At once I asked him whose daughter she was and where she lived. Oddly enough, he hadn't even read the name written below her photograph. "That's rather careless," I said. "If the face has attracted you that much, why not fix her name in your mind?" I thought that if the occasion arose, it was not absolutely impossible for him to take her as his wife. But he eyed me as if he were saying, "Why do I need to remember her name and address?"

The point of this example is that I looked at the photograph from the first as a representation of reality itself, while he merely looked at it as a picture. If somehow the woman's real position, status, education, or character had been added to the photograph in an attempt to transform the portrait on a piece of paper into a living being, he would just as soon have discarded all of it along with the face he had taken such a fancy to. This is where Ichizo and I are fundamentally different from each other.

A few months before Ichizo graduated from university—I think it was around April last year—I was consulted by his mother about his marriage for a much longer time than ever before. As usual, she expressed the simple yet stubborn desire to have Taguchi's elder daughter as her son's wife. It's my belief that it's not worthy of a man to reason with a woman, so I refrained as best I could from going into difficult arguments, but used plain and simple terms to convince my old-fashioned sister that what she wanted amounted to going against a parent's duty in that it wasn't allowing the person in question the greatest freedom. As you know, my sister is a very gentle woman, but she possesses more than the average amount of that characteristic common to her sex of persistently and untiringly repeating the same opinion whenever the occasion demands it. It wasn't so much that I disliked her persistence as it was that I was moved so strangely by the pathos in her excessive perseverance. This made me willingly accept her request to at least have Ichizo over to talk about it, since, as she said, there was no one else among our relatives he had any respect for.