Natsume Soseki - Light and dark

It was some ten minutes later that he began to indite, in formal epistolary Japanese on rice paper unlikely to offend his father, the phrases and flourishes that seemed most likely to coax some money out of him. When, feeling awkward and unnatural, he had finally completed the letter, he reread what he had written and was appalled by his own artless calligraphy. Never mind the text, the characters it was written in seemed to him to preclude any possibility of success. And what if he should succeed; the money couldn’t possibly arrive in time for when he needed it. When he had sent the maid to the post office, he burrowed under the covers and said to himself,

I’ll worry about tomorrow tomorrow .

THE FOLLOWING afternoon Tsuda stood before Yoshikawa, summoned by him.

“I hear you came to the house yesterday.”

“I stopped in briefly and said hello to Mrs. Yoshikawa.”

“So you’re sick again?”

“A little—”

“That’s no good — every five minutes.”

“This isn’t new — I’m still recovering from last time.”

His face registering mild surprise, Yoshikawa spat out his after-lunch toothpick. From his vest pocket he removed his cigar case. Tsuda struck one of the matches on top of the ashtray. In his eagerness to appear alert, he moved too quickly and the match went out before it could be of use. Flustered, he struck a second and lifted it with care to the tip of Yoshikawa’s nose.

“At any rate, if you’re sick, you’re sick. You’d better take some time off to pull yourself together.”

Tsuda thanked his boss and started from the room. Yoshikawa spoke to him through the smoke.

“I assume you’ve let Sasaki know.”

“I spoke to Sasaki-san and to some others and arranged for them to cover me.”

Tsuda reported to Sasaki.

“If you’re going to be taking off anyway there’s no reason to put it off. Do what you have to, recover as soon as you can, and get back to work.”

Yoshikawa’s words were a limpid reflection of his temperament.

“Start tomorrow if you can arrange it.”

“As you say—”

Now Tsuda felt he had no choice but to check in to the clinic the very next day. He was halfway out the door when once again he was detained by a voice at his back.

“By the way, how’s your father doing? Full of piss and vinegar as always?”

The rich fragrance of cigar smoke abruptly assailed Tsuda’s nose as he turned back.

“He’s well — thank you for inquiring.”

“I suppose he’s writing his poetry, taking it good and easy — what a life! I ran into Okamoto on the town last night and he was talking about your father. He was envious as hell. He’s come into some leisure time himself recently, but he’s no match for your old man—”

It had never occurred to Tsuda for a minute that his father was an object of envy among this crowd. Should someone offer to exchange their circumstances for his father’s, he had felt certain they would smile stiffly and beg to be left just as they were for at least another ten years. This was of course merely an assumption he had extrapolated from his own personality. At the same time, it was based on what he understood of Yoshikawa’s temperament and that of his cronies.

“My father is behind the times so he has no choice but to live the way he does.”

Little by little Tsuda had returned to the center of the room and was now standing where he had first entered.

“You’ve got it backward — he can live that kind of life because he’s ahead of the times.”

Tsuda felt tongue-tied. His lack of fluency in comparison to his boss felt like a burden. At an awkward loss for words, he gazed at the slowly dissipating cloud of cigar smoke.

“Be careful not to cause your father any worry. I know all about everything that’s going on with you, and if you take a wrong turn, I promise you I’ll make sure your old man knows about it, you take my meaning?”

These words, as though spoken to a child, might have been in jest or an admonishment; when Tsuda had listened to them, he finally fled the room.

ON HIS way home that day, Tsuda alighted from the streetcar before his stop and made his way a few blocks along the busy thoroughfare before turning into a side street. Midway down the narrow, winding street past the awning on a pawnshop and a go parlor and modest houses that might have been home to a neighborhood fire chief or a master carpenter, he pushed open a door inset with frosted glass and stepped inside. As the bell fastened to the upper part of the door jangled, four or five pairs of eyes glimmered at him from the cramped room just down the hall from the entrance. The room was not merely cramped; it was truly dark. To Tsuda, having stepped abruptly inside from the bright street, it felt like nothing so much as a cave. Huddling in one corner of the chilly couch, he returned the gaze of the glittering eyes, which just now had turned toward him in the darkness. Most of the men had seated themselves near the large ceramic brazier that had been installed in the center of the room. Two with folded arms, two more with one hand each on the edge of the brazier, another, apart, his face lowered to the newspaper scattered about as if to lick the print, and the last, in a corner of the room opposite the couch where he had seated himself, his body slightly atilt, in Western trousers, one leg over the other.

Having turned toward the door as one man when the bell rang, they withdrew into themselves as one man after a single glance. All silent, they sat in an attitude that might have been deep thought. They appeared to be taking no notice of Tsuda, or was it, more likely perhaps, that they were avoiding being noticed by him? It wasn’t only Tsuda; it appeared they kept their eyes lowered, looking away, in fear of the pain of noticing one another.

The members of this gloomy band shared, almost without exception, a largely identical past. As they sat waiting their turn in this somber waiting room, a fragment of that past that was if anything brilliantly colored cast its shadow abruptly over each of them. Lacking the courage to turn toward the light, they had halted inside the darkness of the shadow and locked themselves in.

Resting one arm on the armrest of the couch, Tsuda lifted his hand to his brow. In this attitude, as though he were offering to god a silent prayer, he was led to memories of two men he had encountered unexpectedly in this doctor’s house since the end of last year.

One was actually none other than his sister’s husband. Recognizing his figure in this dark room, Tsuda was astonished. Normally easygoing about such things, if not entirely unconcerned, his brother-in-law had seemed nonplussed, as if the intensity of Tsuda’s surprise had reverberated in him.

The other man was a friend. Supposing that Tsuda was afflicted with the same sort of illness as his own, he had spoken up without any hesitation or reserve, as if to do so were perfectly natural. Exiting the doctor’s gate together, they had engaged over dinner in a complex debate about sex and love.

Whereas the encounter with his brother-in-law amounted to little more than momentary surprise and had resulted in no repercussions, his conversation with his friend, which he had expected would be a one-time-only event not to be resumed, had later produced a rift between them. Obliged to reflect on his friend’s words in the past and their connection to his circumstances in the present, Tsuda shuttered his eyes open and dropped his hand from his brow as if he had received a sudden shock.