“Why should that be, I wonder. 103 degrees!”
“It’s nothing. It is only just the moments before the fever breaks out that I don’t like. My head hurts a little, I feel a chill, and then the fever comes.”
Outside it was dark now. The rain had stopped, but a wind was blowing. I switched on the lights and was about to go to the dining room when Mother called out, “The light hurts my eyes. Please leave it off.”
“But you won’t like lying in the dark that way, will you?” I asked, still hesitating by the switch.
“It doesn’t matter. When I sleep my eyes are shut. I don’t feel the least bit lonely in the dark. It’s the glare that I dislike so. Let’s not put the lights on in this room from now on.”
Her words filled me with foreboding. Without a word I switched out the lights in Mother’s room. I turned on a lamp in the next room and, feeling unbearably depressed, hurried to the kitchen. As I sat there, eating canned salmon and cold rice, heavy tears fell from my eyes.
With nightfall the wind began to blow harder and developed by about nine into a real gale with pelting rain. The porch blinds, which I had rolled up a couple of days earlier, clattered in the wind. I sat in the room next to Mother’s, reading with a strange agitation Rosa Luxemburg’s Introduction to Economics. I had borrowed this book from Naoji’s room (without his permission, naturally) along with the Selected Works of Lenin and Kautsky’s Social Revolution. I had left them on my desk. One morning, when Mother passed beside my desk on her way to the bath, she happened to notice the three volumes. She picked them up one after another, examined the contents, and then, with a little sigh, returned them softly to the desk. She glanced at me sorrowfully as she did so. A profound grief filled her look, but it was by no means one of rejection or antipathy. Mother’s chosen reading matter is Hugo, Dumas père et fils, Musset, and Daudet, but I know that even such books of sweet romances are permeated with the smell of revolution.
People like Mother who possess a Heaven-given education—the words are peculiar I know—may perhaps be able to welcome a revolution in a surprisingly matter-of-fact way, as a quite natural occurrence. Even I found some things rather objectionable when I read Rosa Luxemburg’s book, but, given the sort of person I am, the experience on the whole was one of profound interest. The subject matter of her book is generally considered to be economics, but if it is read as economics, it is boring beyond belief. It contains nothing but exceedingly obvious platitudes. It may be, of course, that I have no understanding of economics. Be that as it may, the subject holds not the slightest interest for me. A science which is postulated on the assumption that human beings are avaricious and will remain avaricious through all eternity is utterly devoid of point (whether in problems of distribution or any other aspect) to a person who is not avaricious. And yet as I read this book, I felt a strange excitement for quite another reason—the sheer courage the author demonstrated in tearing apart without any hesitation all manner of conventional ideas. However much I may oppose morality, I am powerless to prevent the image floating before my eyes of the wife of the man I love, coolly and quickly hurrying back to his house. Then my thoughts turn destructive. Destruction is tragic and piteous and beautiful. The dream of destroying, building anew, perfecting. Perhaps even, once one has destroyed, the day of perfecting may never come, but in the passion of love I must destroy. I must start a revolution. Rosa gave tragically her undivided love to Marxism.
It was a winter twelve years ago.
“You’re just like that spineless girl in the Sarashina Diary who never can open her mouth. It’s impossible to talk to you.”
My friend, so saying, walked away. I had just returned her, unread, a book by Lenin.
“Have you read it?”
“I’m sorry. I haven’t.”
It was on a bridge from which you could see the Tokyo Russian Orthodox Cathedral.
“Why? What was the trouble?”
My friend was about an inch taller than I and very gifted in languages. Her red beret became her. She was a beautiful girl with a face which was reputed to look like the Mona Lisa’s.
“I hated the color of the jacket.”
“You are strange. That wasn’t the real reason, I’m sure. Wasn’t it because you’ve become afraid of me?”
“I am not afraid of you. I couldn’t stand the color of the jacket.”
“I see.” She spoke sadly. It was then that she compared me to the girl in the Sarashina Diary and decided that it was no use talking to me.
We stood for a while in silence looking down at the wintry river.
“‘Farewell, if this should be our parting forever, forever farewell,’ Byron.” She murmured and then quickly recited the verses of Byron in the original English. She gave me a light embrace.
I felt ashamed of myself and whispered an apology. I began to walk toward the station. I looked back once over my shoulder and saw my friend still standing motionless on the bridge, staring at me.
That was the last time I saw her. We used to go to the same foreign teacher’s house, but we were in a different school.
Twelve years have passed and I have yet to progress a step beyond the Sarashina Diary stage. What in the world have I been doing all this time? I have never felt myself drawn toward revolution, and I have not even known love. The older and wiser heads of the world have always described revolution and love to us as the two most foolish and loathsome of human activities. Before the war, even during the war, we were convinced of it. Since the defeat, however, we no longer trust the older and wiser heads and have come to feel that the opposite of whatever they say is the real truth about life. Revolution and love are in fact the best, most pleasurable things in the world, and we realize it is precisely because they are so good that the older and wiser heads have spitefully fobbed off on us their sour grapes of a lie. This I want to believe implicitly: Man was born for love and revolution.
The door slid open suddenly and Mother poked in her smiling face. “You’re still up. Aren’t you sleepy?”
I looked at the clock on my desk. It was midnight.
“No, I’m not the least bit sleepy. I have been reading a book about Socialism and I’m all worked up over it.”
“Oh. Haven’t we anything to drink in the house? The best thing when you’re in such a state is to have a drink before you go to bed. Then you’ll be able to sleep soundly.” She spoke in a bantering tone, but there was an indefinable something in her attitude, a coquetry just a hair’s breadth removed from dissoluteness.
October came at last, but it didn’t bring any sudden change to bright autumn weather. Instead, one hot, humid day followed another, rather as it does during the rainy season. And every evening Mother’s fever hovered a little over a hundred.