十

Just as in the season when the weather shifts from late summer into autumn, so from the end of spring into the start of summer, heavy rains fall on and on now and then. In Senzoku-chō and the Yoshiwara paddies the water rose, as it did every year, nothing out of the way. Honjo too was flooded in places, it seemed; and Ragetsu, two or three days afterward, on his way home from some errand of an evening, came to call and see how things stood near O-Toyo’s place in Imado — and found that, the flooding being no harm, he was instead startled by a far more unlooked-for calamity. His nephew Chōkichi was in the very midst of an uproar, just then being borne off to the isolation hospital in Honjo on a litter. The mother O-Toyo, weeping, followed behind the litter, repeating just as it stood the doctor’s explanation: that Chōkichi, thinly clad in his first lined kimono of the season, had gone from evening till far into the night walking through the muddy waters to watch the confusion of the flood near Senzoku-chō, and from that night had caught a chill that turned at once into typhoid fever. At his wits’ end, Ragetsu was, willy-nilly, left behind in the house to mind it until O-Toyo should return.

The inside of the house, after the ward-office men had been round to disinfect it with sulfur smoke and carbolic acid, lay in a disorder like a soot-sweeping or a moving-day, and with the lonesomeness of a place from which all human life has gone it was just like the feeling after the coffin has been carried out from a funeral. Outside the rain-shutters, closed against the world’s eyes even before the day had darkened, the wind had clearly risen suddenly with the night, so that all the shutters of the house began to rattle. The air had turned disagreeably chill, and each time the wind blowing now and then through the torn screen of the kitchen door, in as far as the room itself, swayed the flame of the dim hanging lamp as though to blow it out, the black oily smoke fogged the chimney, and the shadows of the furniture set carelessly back this way and that stirred over the dirty matting and the wall with its peeling wainscot-paper. From some nearby house a voice rose, beginning the Hyakumanben nenbutsu chant, and caught the ear all at once, mournfully. Ragetsu was all alone, with nothing to do. He was bored, too. And there was a faint loneliness on him. At a time like this there must be saké, he thought, and searched about the kitchen; but it being a woman’s household, not so much as a single saké-cup was to be found. Going back to the front window, he drew open one of the rain-shutters a little way and looked out into the street; but on the door-lamps across the way there was not one sign of anything that looked like a wineshop, and the back-street of the outskirts had already, even in the early evening, mostly shut its doors, so that only the gloomy Hyakumanben voices, on the contrary, came the more distinct. With the wind blowing fierce from the river, setting the telephone wires over the roofs whistling hyuu, hyuu, and with the starlight showing keen and clear, the windy night made a cold feeling come over him, as if winter had come all of a sudden.

There being nothing for it, Ragetsu shut the rain-shutter, and again, dully, sat down beneath the hanging lamp, and smoking one cigarette after another, watched the hands of the wall-clock move. Now and again a rat ran across the ceiling-boards with a dreadful sound. It occurred to Ragetsu of a sudden that there might be some book or other thereabouts to read, and he peered here and there over the top of the chest of drawers and into the closet, but the only things to be found in the way of books were Tokiwazu practice-books and an old bound almanac; so at last, lamp in one hand, he climbed up to the second floor that had become Chōkichi’s room.

On the desk books were piled, several volumes deep. A cedar-board bookcase stood there too. Ragetsu drew from his bosom the spectacles tucked in his paper-holder, and was opening one Western-style textbook after another with curiosity, when something fell patari onto the matting; picking it up to see what it was, he found it a photograph of Oito in the figure of a geisha in her spring dress. Quietly slipping it back among the books as it had been, and still idly rummaging through the volumes thereabouts one by one, he came this time upon an unexpected letter. The letter seemed to be one broken off unfinished, and with the torn scroll-paper the wording was cut off; but from the characters that could be read it was quite possible to grasp the whole of the meaning. Chōkichi grieved, in close detail, over how, once parted from Oito, the two of them grew apart in heart day by day from their differing circumstances, until in the end his cherished childhood friend would become no more than a stranger; over the helplessness of feelings that, even should they now and again exchange letters, would never come to agree. And bound up with this — that he had set his mind on becoming an actor or a performer, yet that wish too would in the end go unfulfilled; that, vainly envying the good fortune of Kichi-san of the barber’s shop, he passed each day idly, in aimless hours, and how worthless it all was; that now, having no courage even to kill himself, he wished he might fall ill and die — so it was written.

For no reason he could name, Ragetsu was struck by a truly heart-rending feeling that Chōkichi’s walking through the flood-waters and falling ill had been a thing done on purpose, and that all hope of his full recovery was now utterly cut off. He was pressed by remorse: why, at that time, had he offered Chōkichi counsel so against his own heart and thwarted the boy’s wish? Ragetsu, without quite meaning to, recalled once more his own youth, when he had been turned out of his parents’ house, infatuated with a woman. And he thought: come what may, he must take Chōkichi’s side. If he did not make Chōkichi an actor and unite him with Oito, then there was no profit in having brought down the house handed down through generations and tasted all these worldly hardships. It would shame the name of Master Shōfū-an Ragetsu, who prided himself on being a man of taste.

Again, of a sudden, a rat ran across the ceiling-boards. The wind had not yet ceased to blow. The flame of the hanging lamp wavered without rest. Ragetsu pictured in his heart, again and again, side by side, the figures of the two beautiful young people — pale-faced Chōkichi with his clear, wide eyes and long face, and round-faced Oito with the charm at the corners of her mouth and the up-turned outer corners of her eyes — just as an author of ninjōbon contrives the design of a frontispiece. And he cried out in his heart: Whatever fever has hold of you, you must not die. Chōkichi, be easy — I am here beside you.

(Shinshōsetsu, December 1909)