The Setting Sun

Why must I go on living after what has happened? It’s useless. I am going to die. I have a poison that kills without pain. I got it when I was a soldier and have kept it ever since.

Kazuko, you are beautiful (I have always been proud of my beautiful mother and sister) and you are intelligent. I haven’t any worries about you. I lack even the qualifications to worry. I can only blush—like a robber who sympathizes with his victim! I feel sure that you will marry, have children, and manage to survive through your husband.

Kazuko.

I have a secret.

I have concealed it for a long, long time. Even when I was on the battlefield, I brooded over it and dreamed of her. I can’t tell you how many times I awoke only to find I had wept in my sleep.

I shall never be able to reveal her name to anyone, but I thought that I would at least tell you, my sister, everything about her, since I am now on the point of death. I discover, however, that I am still so terribly afraid that I dare not speak her name.

And yet I feel that if I die keeping the secret absolute and leave the world with it locked within my breast undisclosed, when my body is cremated the insides of my breast will remain dank-smelling and unburned. This thought so disquiets me that I must tell you, and only you, about it—indirectly, imprecisely, as if I were relating some odd bit of fiction. And even if I call it fiction you will, I am sure, recognize immediately of whom I write. It is less fiction than a kind of thin disguise achieved by the use of false names.

Do you know, I wonder?

I imagine that you do know about her, although you probably have never met. She is a little older than you. Her eyes are the true Japanese shape, like an almond, and she always wears her hair (which has never been subjected to a permanent) in a very conservative Japanese style, tightly pulled back from her face. Her clothes are shabby but spotless and worn with a real distinction. She is the wife of a certain middle-aged painter who won sudden fame after the war by producing a rapid succession of paintings in a new idiom. The painter is very wild and dissipated, but his wife always goes about with a gentle smile on her face, pretending to be undisturbed by his behavior.

I stood up. “I must be going now.”

She also rose and walked, with no suggestion of reserve, to my side. “Why?” she asked, looking at my face. Her voice had quite its ordinary timbre. She held her head a little to the side, as if really in doubt, and looked me straight in the eyes. In her eyes there was neither malice nor pretence. Normally, if my eyes had met hers, I would have averted them in confusion, but that one time I felt not the least particle of shyness. For sixty seconds or more, our faces about a foot apart, I stared into her eyes, feeling terribly happy. I finally said with a smile, “But—”

“He’ll be back soon,” she said, her face grave.

It suddenly occurred to me that what people call “honesty” might well refer to just such an expression. I wondered if what the word originally meant was not something lovable like that expression, rather than the stern virtue smelling of textbooks of morality.

“I’ll come again.”

“Do.”

Our whole conversation from beginning to end was completely unimportant. One summer afternoon I had called at the painter’s apartment. He was out, but expected back at any moment. His wife suggested that I wait, and for half an hour I had read magazines. When there were still no signs of his returning, I got up to take my leave. That was all there was to it, but I fell painfully in love with her eyes as they were that day.

You might even describe them as “noble.” I can only say with certainty that none of the aristocrats among whom we lived—leaving Mama aside—was capable of that unguarded expression of “honesty.”

Then it happened one winter evening that I was struck by her profile. I had been drinking since morning with the painter in his apartment, and we had roared with laughter as we

abused the so-called “Japanese men of culture.” The artist fell asleep and soon was loudly snoring. I was also dozing off when a blanket was gently thrown over me. I opened my eyes a crack and saw her sitting quietly with her daughter in her arms next to the apartment window, against the clear blue sky of a Tokyo winter’s evening. Her regular profile, its outlines clear-cut with the brilliance of a Renaissance portrait, floated against the background of the pale blue of the distant sky. There was nothing of coquetry or desire in the kindness which had impelled her to throw the blanket over me. Might not the word “humanity” be revived to use of such a moment? She had acted almost without consciousness of what she did, as a natural gesture of sympathy for another person, and now she was staring at the distant sky, in an atmosphere of stillness exactly like a painting.

I shut my eyes. I felt sweep over me a wave of love and longing. Tears forced their way through my eyelids, and I pulled the blanket over my head.

Kazuko.

At first I used to visit the painter’s house because I was intoxicated by the unique idiom of his works and the fanatical passion hidden in them, but as I grew more intimate, his lack of culture, his irresponsibility, and his dirtiness disillusioned me. I was drawn in inverse proportion to the beauty of feeling of his wife. No, it was rather that I was in love with someone of true affections. I came to visit the painter’s house solely in the hope of getting a glimpse of his wife.

I am convinced that if anything at all of artistic nobility is discoverable in the painter’s works, it is most probably a reflection of his wife’s gentle spirit.

The painter—I will now come out with exactly what I feel—is nothing but a clever businessman with a great capacity for drink and debauchery. When he needs money for his pleasures, he daubs something together which he sells at a high price by posing as a great artist and by taking advantage of the current fads. His only assets are the shamelessness of the country boor, a stupid confidence, and a sharp talent for business.

He probably has no comprehension whatsoever of the paintings of other artists, foreign or Japanese, and I doubt whether he even understands what his own pictures are all about. What it amounts to is that when driven by financial pressure he frantically splashes paint onto a canvas.

Incredibly enough, he apparently has no doubts, shame, or fears about the rubbish he produces. In fact, he is quite puffed up about it. And, given that he is the kind of man who does not understand what he himself has painted, one cannot expect him to appreciate other people’s work. Far from it—all he does is carp and rail.

In other words, although he is fond of ranting on about the agonies he suffers in his life of decadence, in point of fact he is just a stupid country bumpkin who realized his dreams by coming to the big city and scoring a success on a scale quite unimagined even to himself. This so inflated his ego that now he spends his time in one round of pleasure after another.

Once I said to him, “It makes me feel so embarrassed and afraid if, when all my friends are out amusing themselves, I study by myself, that I can’t do a thing. That’s why, even when I don’t feel the least like going out, I join the crowd.”

The middle-aged artist answered, “What! That’s what they mean, I suppose, by an aristocratic disposition. It turns my stomach. When I see some people having a good time, I think what I’m missing if I don’t do the same, and I really throw myself into it.”

His answer was so pat that it made me despise him from the heart. No suffering lies behind his dissipation. On the contrary, he takes pride in his stupid pleasures. A genuine idiot-hedonist.