Naoji as usual was off in Tokyo. It had already been more than ten days since he left. Alone and in an excess of depression, I wrote a postcard to my Uncle Wada informing him of the change in Mother’s health.
Some days later the village doctor ca
lled with the news that his stomach indisposition had at length passed.
He examined Mother’s chest with an expression of rapt concentration. Suddenly he cried, “Ah, I know what it is! I know what it is!” Again turning toward me, he intoned, “I have understood the cause of the fever. A seepage has developed in the left lung. Nevertheless, there is no need for anxiety. The fever will probably continue for the time being, but if your mother remains quiet, there is no cause for alarm.”
“I wonder,” I thought, but like a drowning man clutching at a straw, I took whatever comfort I could from his diagnosis.
After the doctor had made his departure, I exclaimed, “Isn’t that a relief, Mother? Just a little seepage—why, most people have that. As long as you can just keep your spirits up, you’ll be better in no time. The weather this summer has been so unseasonal. That’s where the trouble lies. I hate the summer. I hate summer flowers too.”
Mother, her eyes shut, smiled. “They say that people who like summer flowers die in the summer, and I was expecting to die this summer, perhaps, but now that Naoji has come home I have held on until autumn.”
It was painful for me to realize that Naoji, even such as he was, had become the mainstay of Mother’s pleasure in life.
“Well, then, since summer has passed, that means we’re over the hump of your danger period, doesn’t it? Mother, the bush clover is in bloom in the garden. And valerian, burnet, bellflowers, timothy—the whole garden reeks of autumn. I am sure that once it’s October your temperature will go down.”
I am praying that it will. What a relief it will be when the sticky, lingering September heat has passed! Then, when the chrysanthemums are in bloom and one day of bright Indian summer succeeds another, Mother’s fever will surely disappear. She will grow strong, and I will be able to see him. Perhaps my plans will come to magnificent flowering like some gigantic chrysanthemum. Oh, if only it were already October, and Mother’s fever were gone!
About a week after I wrote my uncle, he arranged for an old doctor named Miyake, who had once served as a court physician, to come from Tokyo to examine Mother.
Dr. Miyake had been an acquaintance of my father’s, and Mother looked delighted to see him. His rough manners and coarse speech, for which he had long been famous, also apparently endeared him to Mother. They had not got around to a formal examination, and the two of them were diverting themselves instead with an uninihibited bout of gossip. I went to the kitchen to make some pudding, and by the time it was ready to be served the examination had already been concluded. The doctor, his ausculator dangling from his shoulders like a necklace, slouched in a wicker chair.
“Fellows like myself go into some roadside joint to take a stand-up lunch of noodles. You never get anything good or—for that matter—really bad,” he was saying as I entered, and this, I suppose, was typical of their conversation. Mother was following his words with an unconstrained expression.
“It wasn’t anything after all!” I exclaimed to myself with a sigh of relief. Suddenly courage welled up in me and I asked, “How is she? The village doctor said there was a seepage in her left lung. Do you think so too?”
The doctor replied offhandedly, “What’s all that? She’s perfectly all right!”
“Oh, I’m so relieved, aren’t you, Mother?” I spoke to her, smiling from my heart. “He says you’re all right.”
Dr. Miyake at this point rose from his chair and walked into the Chinese room. He obviously had something to disclose to me. I tiptoed out of the room behind him.
He stopped when he reached the wall hanging and said, “I hear a funny sound.”
“It isn’t a seepage?”
“No.”
“Bronchitis?” I was already in tears as I asked.
“No.”
T.B. I didn’t want to think of it. I was sure that with my strength I could cure pneumonia or a seepage or bronchitis. But tuberculosis—perhaps it was already too late. I felt as if my legs were crumbling under me.
“Is the sound very bad, that funny sound you hear?” I was sobbing helplessly.
“Right and left both—the whole works!”
“But Mother’s still healthy! She enjoys her meals so!”
“It can’t be helped.”
“That’s not true. It can’t be. If she eats lots of butter, eggs, and milk, she’ll recover, won’t she? As long as she keeps up her resistance, the fever will go down, won’t it?”
“She should eat a lot of whatever she likes.”
“Isn’t that what I said? Every day she eats five tomatoes alone.”