He continued, “It can’t be helped. Might be a good idea to ask at Fukui’s for a bed. Chie, take her over there, won’t you? No, on second thought, it would be dangerous in the streets for two women alone. Damned nuisance. I’ll have to show her the way myself.”
Outside you could tell it was the middle of the night. The wind had died down a little and the sky was filled with shining stars. We walked side by side. I said, “I could perfectly well have slept in the same room with the others.”
Mr. Uehara merely grunted sleepily.
“You wanted just the two of us to be together, didn’t you?” I spoke with a little laugh.
He twisted his mouth into a bitter smile. “That’s the nuisance of it.” I was intensely, almost painfully, aware of the fact that it was love he felt for me.
“You drink a great deal. Is it like that every night?”
“Every day. From morning.”
“Does the liquor taste so good?”
“It stinks.”
Something in his voice made me shudder. “How is your work coming?”
“No good. Whatever I write now is stupid and depressing. The twilight of life. The twilight of art. The twilight of mankind. What bathos!”
“Utrillo,” I murmured before I knew it.
“Yes, Utrillo. They say he’s still alive. A victim of alcohol. A corpse. His paintings of the last ten years have been incredibly vulgar and worthless without exception.”
“It’s not only just Utrillo, is it? All the other masters too.”
“Yes, they’ve all lost their vitality. But the new shoots have also lost their vitality, blasted in the bud. Frost. It’s as though an unseasonable frost had fallen all over the whole world.”
His arm lay lightly around my shoulders. It was as if my body were being enveloped in his cape, but I did not deny him. I nestled all the closer as we walked slowly on.
The branches of trees beside the road. Branches destitute of even a single leaf, narrow, sharp, stabbing the night sky. “Branches are beautiful, aren’t they?” I whispered, almost to myself.
“You mean the harmony between the blossoms and the black branches?” he asked in a somewhat confused tone.
“No, I’m not referring to the blossoms or the leaves or the buds or anything else. I love branches. Even when they’re perfectly bare, they’re fully alive. They’re not a bit like dead branches.”
“You mean only Nature retains her vitality?” He thereupon gave several more of his tremendous sneezes.
“Have you caught a cold?”
“No, I haven’t. I have a funny habit—whenever my drunkenness reaches the saturation point, all at once I start to sneeze like that. It’s something of a barometer of my intoxication.”
“What about love?”
“What?”
“Is there someone? Someone who is approaching the saturation point?”
“Don’t make fun of me! Women are all alike—they’re so damned complicated. Guillotine, guillotine, shooshooshoo. As a matter of fact there is someone, no, half a someone.”
“Did you read my letters?”
“Yes.”
“What answer have you to make?”
“I don’t like the aristocracy. There’s always a kind of offensive arrogance hovering around them. Your brother Naoji is a great success for an aristocrat, but every now and then even he displays an affectation I simply can’t put up with. I am a farmer’s boy, and I never go by a stream like this one without an almost painfully sharp recollection of the days when I used to fish for silver carp or scoop up