The Setting Sun

Mother’s fever did not go down the following day. My uncle handed me 2,000 yen with instructions to telegraph him if it should happen that Mother had to be hospitalized. He returned that day to Tokyo.

I took the necessary minimum of cooking utensils from our baggage and prepared some rice-gruel. Mother swallowed three spoonfuls, then shook her head. A little before noon the doctor appeared again. This time he was in slightly less formal attire, but he still wore his white gloves.

I suggested that it might perhaps be better if Mother went to the hospital. “No,” the doctor said, “I do not believe it to be necessary. Today I shall administer a strong injection, and the fever will probably abate.” His answer was just as unreassuring as the previous time, and he went away as soon as he had finished giving Mother the “strong injection.”

That afternoon Mother’s face turned a bright red and she began to perspire profusely. This, perhaps, was to be attributed to the miraculous powers of the injection. Mother said, as I changed her nightgown, “Who knows, he may be a great doctor!”

Her temperature had dropped to normal. I was so happy that I ran to the village inn and bought a dozen eggs from the proprietress. I soft-boiled some at once and served them to Mother. She ate three and about half a bowl of rice-gruel.

The next day the great doctor appeared in his formal costume again. He nodded gravely when I thanked him for the success of the injection, with an expression as much as to say “Exactly as I expected.” He examined Mother carefully, then turning to me said, “Your mother has quite recovered. She may therefore eat and do whatever she desires.”

His manner of speech was so peculiar that I had all I could do to keep from bursting out laughing. I showed the doctor to the door. When I returned to her room, I found Mother was sitting up in bed.

“He really is a great doctor. I’m not sick any more,” she said absent-mindedly, as if she were talking to herself. She had a very happy expression on her face.

“Mother, shall I open the blinds? It’s snowing!”

Snowflakes big as petals had softly begun to fall. I threw open the blinds and, sitting next to Mother’s side, watched the snow.

“I’m not sick any more,” Mother said, once again as if to herself. “When I sit here with you this way, it makes me feel as if everything that has happened was just a dream. To tell the truth, when the time came for moving, I simply hated the thought. I would have given anything to stay a day, even half a day, longer in our house in Nishikata Street. I felt half-dead when I had to board the train, and when we arrived here, after the first moment or two of pleasure, I felt my heart would burst with longing for Tokyo, especially when it grew dark. Then everything seemed to go blank before me. It wasn’t an ordinary sickness. Cod killed me, and only after He had made me into someone entirely different from the person I had been, did he call me back to life.”

From that day to the present, we have managed to continue our solitary lives in this cottage in the mountains. We prepare meals, knit on the porch, read in the Chinese room, drink tea—in other words, lead an uneventful existence almost completely isolated from the world. In February the whole village was buried in plum blossoms. One placid, windless day succeeded another well into March, and the blossoms remained on the boughs until the end of the month. At whatever time of the day one saw them, the blossoms were breathtakingly beautiful, and their fragrance flooded into the room whenever I opened the glass doors. Toward the end of March a wind would spring up every evening, and as we sat in the twilighted dining-room drinking tea, petals would blow in through the window into our cups. Now in April our conversation, as we knit on the porch, has generally turned on our plans for cultivating the fields. Mother says she would like to help. Even as I write these words the thought strikes me that, just as she said, we have already died, only to come back to life as different people. But I don’t suppose a resurrection like Jesus’ is possible for ordinary human beings. Mot

her spoke as if the past were already forgotten, but all the same, when she tasted the soup this morning she thought of Naoji and uttered that cry. Nor, indeed, have the scars of my past healed.

Oh, I would like to write everything down plainly and absolutely without concealment. I sometimes secretly think that the peace of this house in the mountains is nothing more than a lie and a sham. Even assuming that this has been a short period of respite vouchsafed by God to my mother and myself, I can’t escape the feeling that some threatening, dark shadow is already hovering closer to us. Mother pretends to be happy, but she grows thinner by the day. And in my breast a viper lodges which fattens by sacrificing Mother, which fattens however much I try to suppress it. If it is only something which comes with the season, and nothing more! That I could have done such a depraved thing as burn the snake eggs certainly shows what a state I am in. Everything I do seems only to make Mother’s unhappiness the more profound and to weaken her.

As for love … no, having once written that word I can write nothing more.

CHAPTER TWO / FIRE

During the ten days that followed the incident with the snake eggs, one ill-fated thing after another occurred to intensify Mother’s unhappiness and shorten her life.

I was responsible for starting a fire.

That I should have started a fire. I had never even dreamed that such a dreadful thing would happen to me. I at once endangered the lives of everyone around me and risked suffering the very serious punishment provided by law.

I must have been brought up so very much the “little lady” as not to have been aware of the obvious fact that carelessness leads to conflagrations. Late one night I got up to wash my hands, and as I passed by the screen in the entrance hall, I noticed a light coming from the bathroom. I gave it a casual glance only to discover that the glass door of the bathroom was a glowing red, and I could hear an ominous crackling. I rushed to the side door and ran outside barefoot. I could see then that the pile of firewood which had been stacked beside the furnace was blazing furiously.

I flew to the farmhouse below our garden and beat with all my might on the door. “Mr. Nakai. Fire! Fire! Please get up! There’s a fire!”

Mr. Nakai had apparently already retired, but he answered from inside, “I’ll come at once.” While I was still urging him to hurry, he dashed out of his house, still in his bedclothes.

We raced back to the fire. Just as we began to draw water from the pond with some buckets, I heard Mother call from the gallery next to her room. I threw down my bucket, climbed up to the gallery, and caught Mother in my arms. She was on the point of collapse. “Mother, please don’t worry. It’s all right. Please go back to bed.” I led her back to bed and having persuaded her to lie down, I flew back to the fire. This time I dipped water from the bath and passed it to Mr. Nakai to throw on the burning woodpile. The blaze, however, was so intense that we could not possibly have extinguished it that way.

I heard voices shouting below, “There’s a fire. Fire at the villa!” Suddenly four or five farmers broke through the fence and rushed up to us. It took them just a few minutes to get a relay of buckets going and put out the blaze. If the fire had lasted just a little longer, the flames would have spread to the roof.

“Thank Heavens” was my first thought, but in the next instant I was aghast at the sudden realization of what had caused the fire. It was only then that it occurred to me that the disaster had taken place because the previous night, after I removed the unburned sticks of firewood from the furnace, I had left them next to the woodpile, thinking that they were already out. This discovery made me want to burst into tears. As I stood there rooted to the ground, I heard the girl from the house in front say in a loud voice, “Somebody must have been careless about the furnace. The place is gutted.”

The village mayor, the policeman, and the head of the fire brigade were among those who appeared. The mayor asked, with his usual gentle smiling face, “You must have been terribly frightened. How did it happen?”

“It was all my fault. I thought that the firewood had burned out.” This was all I could say. The tears came welling up, and I stood there incapable of speech, my eyes on the ground. The thought came to me then that the police might arrest me and drag me off like a criminal, and at the same moment I suddenly became aware of the shamefully disheveled appearance I made as I stood there barefoot in my nightgown. I felt utterly lost.

The mayor quietly asked, in a tone of sympathy, “I understand. Is your mother all right?”

“She is resting in her room. It was a dreadful shock for her.”

“Anyway,” said the young policeman, trying to comfort me, “it’s a good thing that the house didn’t catch fire.”