The Setting Sun

“You’re exhausted. It’s nervous exhaustion.”

“You may be right.” At this moment, as I stood on the verge of tears, the words “realism” and “romanticism” welled up within me. I have no sense of realism. And that this very fact might be what permits me to go on living sends cold chills through my whole body. Mother is half an invalid and spends as much time in bed as up. Naoji, as you know, is mentally very sick. While he is here he spends most of his time at the local drinking place, and once every couple of days he takes whatever money we have from selling our clothes and goes off to Tokyo. But that is not what hurts me. I am afraid because I can so clearly foresee my own life rotting away of itself, like a leaf that rots without falling, while I pursue my round of existence from day to day. That is what I find impossible to bear, and why I must escape from my present life, even if it means violating the whole code of young ladies’ etiquette. And now I am asking your advice.

I want now to make an open declaration to my mother and to Naoji. I want to state with absolute clarity that I have been in love for some time with a certain man, and that I intend in the future to live as his mistress. I am quite sure you know who it is. His initials are M.C. Whenever anything painful comes up, I am seized with the desire to rush to his house and die of love with him.

M.C., like yourself, has a wife and child. He also seems to have women friends more beautiful and younger than I. But I feel that I cannot go on living except by going to him. I have never met M.C.’s wife, but I hear that she is a very sweet and good person. Whenever I think of her, I seem in my own eyes a dreadful woman. I feel, though, that my present life is even more dreadful, and no consideration can make me refrain from appealing to M.C. I would like to fulfill my love “wise as the serpent and harmless as the dove,” but I am sure that no one, not my mother or Naoji or the rest of the world, will approve of me. I wonder about you. In short, I have no choice but to think things out myself and act however it seems best to me. The thought brings tears. This is the first thing I have ever had, and I wonder if there is a way to carry it through to the congratulations of those around me. I have strained my mental powers as if I were trying to think of the answer to some terribly complicated problem in algebra, until at last I have come to feel that there is a single point where the whole thing may be unraveled, and suddenly I have become cheerful.

But what does my precious M.C. think of me? That’s a disheartening question. You might call me a self-styled—what shall I say, I can’t say self-styled wife—perhaps a “self-styled lover.” With that the situation, if M.C. says he really can’t endure me, I have nothing more to say. I have a favor to ask of you. Could you please ask him? One day six years ago a faint pale rainbow formed in my breast. It was not love or passion, but the colors of the rainbow have deepened and intensified as time has gone by. Never once have I lost it from sight. The rainbow that spans the sky when it clears after a shower soon fades away, but the rainbow in a person’s heart does not seem to disappear that way. Please ask him. I wonder what he really thinks of me. I wonder if he has thought of me as of a rainbow in the sky after a shower. And has it already faded away?

If it has, I must erase my own rainbow. But unless I first erase my life, the rainbow in my breast will not fade away.

I pray for an answer.

To Mr. Uehara Jiro . (My Chekhov. M.C.)

P.S. I have recently been putting on a little weight. I think it is less that I am turning into a brute creature than that I have at last become human. This summer I read a novel (just one) by D. H. Lawrence.

No answer has come from you, and I am writing again. The letter I sent the other day was underhanded and full of snares. I suppose that you saw through every one of them. Yes, it’s true. I tried to insert a maximum of cunning into every line of the letter. I imagine that you thought that my purpose was merely to elicit money from you to save my life. I don’t deny this. However, I would like you to know, if you’ll excuse me for saying so, that if my only wish was for a patron I should not have chosen you especially. I have the impression that quite a few rich old men would be willing to care for me. As a matter of fact, not long ago I had something like a proposal. You may even know the gentleman’s name—he is a widower over sixty, a member of the Academy of Arts, I believe; this great artist came here to the mountains in order to ask my hand. He used to be a neighbor of ours when we lived in Nishikata Street, and we met him occasionally at neighborhood meetings. Once, it was an evening in autumn as I recall, when Mother and I passed in our car in front of this artist’s house, he was standing absent-mindedly by his gate. Mother nodded slightly to him from the car window, at which his peevish, sallow face suddenly turned a brilliant red.

“I wonder if it can be love,” I said playfully. “He’s in love with you, Mother!”

“No,” Mother calmly answered, as if to herself. “He’s a great man.”

It seems to be our family’s custom to honor artists.

The artist sent a proposal for my hand to Mother, by way of a certain prince, one of Uncle Wada’s cronies, explaining that he had lost his wife some years ago. Mother suggested that I make a direct reply to the artist in whatever way I saw fit. Without giving it very much thought, I dashed off a note to the effect that I had at present no intention of remarrying.

“You don’t mind if I refuse?” I asked Mother.

“I didn’t myself think it was a likely match.”

I sent my letter of refusal to the artist at his villa in the Japan Alps. Two days later he turned up without warning, having no knowledge of my answer because he had left before my letter reached him. He sent word that he was on his way to a hot spring in Izu and asked to pay a brief call. Artists, whatever their age, seem to indulge in the most childish, irresponsible pranks.

Mother was not feeling well, and I myself received him in the Chinese room. I said while pouring tea, “I imagine that my letter of refusal must have reached your house by now. I carefully considered your offer, but it somehow didn’t seem possible.”

“Indeed?” he said with some impatience. He wiped away the perspiration. “I hope that you will reconsider. Perhaps I can’t—how shall I say it—give you what might be called spiritual happiness, but I can on the other hand make you very happy in a material way. That at least I can assure you. I hope I don’t speak too bluntly….”

“I don’t understand that happiness you speak of. It may seem very impertinent, but I can only answer, ‘No, thank you.’ I am what Nietzche described as ‘a woman who wants to give birth to a child.’ I want a child. Happiness does not interest me. I do want money too, but just enough to be able to bring up my child.”

The artist gave an odd smile. “You are a very unusual woman. You can put into words what everyone has thought. To live with you might cause fresh inspiration to come into my work.”

He said this rather affected thing in a manner quite unlike an old man. The thought occurred to me that if through my strength the work of so great an artist could really be rejuvenated, this too would certainly be a reason to go on living. But no stretch of the imagination enabled me to visualize myself in the artist’s arms.

I asked with a little smile, “Doesn’t it make any difference to you that I don’t love you?”

He answered seriously, “It doesn’t matter for a woman. A woman can be vague.”

“But a woman like myself cannot think of marriage without love. I am fully grown. Next year I will be thirty.” I was taken aback at my own words.

Thirty. “Something of the maiden’s fragrance lingers with a woman until she is twenty-nine, but nothing is left about the body of the woman of thirty years.” At the sudden recollection of these words from a French novel I had read long ago, I was assailed by a melancholy I could not drive away. I looked outside. The sea, bathed in the noon glare, glittered with the dazzling intensity of bits of broken glass. I remembered that when I had read those words in the novel, I had lightly assented, thinking them probably true. I felt a sharp nostalgia for those days when I could think with equanimity that a woman’s life was over at thirty. I wondered if the maiden fragrance of my body was fading away with each bracelet, necklace, and dress that I sold. A wretched, middle-aged woman. And yet, even a middle-aged woman’s life contains a woman’s life, doesn’t it? That is what I have come of late to understand. I remember what my teacher, an Englishwoman, said to me, then aged nineteen, when she was about to return to her country.

“You should never fall in love. Love will bring you unhappiness. If you must love, let it be when you are older, after you are thirty.”

Her words could only arouse in me a dumb incredulity. It was quite impossible for me at the time even to imagine life after thirty.

The artist suddenly spoke, his voice edged with spite, “I’ve heard a rumor that you are selling the house. I wonder if it’s true.”

I laughed. “Excuse me, but I just remembered The Cherry