The Setting Sun

The workmen came every day to our house from then on, and packing for the move began. Uncle Wada also paid us a visit and made the necessary arrangements so that everything which was to be sold could be disposed of. Okimi, the maid, and I were busy with such tasks as putting the clothes in order and burning rubbish in the garden, but Mother gave us not the slightest assistance. She spent every day in ber room dilly-dallying over something.

Once I screwed up the courage to ask her, a little sharply, “What’s the matter? Don’t you

feel at all like going to Izu?”

“No,” was all she answered, a vague look on her face.

It took about ten days to complete the removal preparations. One evening when I was out in the garden with Okimi burning some waste-paper and straw, Mother emerged from her room and stood on the porch, silently watching the blazing fire. A cold greyish wind from the west was blowing, and the smoke crawled over the ground. I happened to look up at Mother’s face and was startled to see how poor her coloring was, worse than I had ever seen it before.

“Mother, you don’t look well!” I cried. Mother answered with a wan smile, “It’s nothing.” She moved soundlessly back to her room.

That night, because our bedding had already been packed, Okimi slept on a sofa while Mother and I slept together in her room on bedding borrowed from a neighbor.

Mother said in a voice which sounded so old and weak that it frightened me, “I am going to Izu because you are with me, because I have you.”

I was taken aback by this unexpected remark. “And what if you didn’t have me?” I asked in spite of myself.

Mother suddenly burst into tears. “The best thing for me would be to die. I wish I could die in this house where your father died.” She spoke in broken accents, weeping more and more convulsively.

Never had Mother spoken to me in such a feeble voice, and never before had she let me see her weeping with such abandon. Not even when my father died, or when I was married, or when I came back to Mother pregnant, or when the baby was stillborn in the hospital, or when later I was sick and confined to my bed, or, for that matter, when Naoji had done something bad—never had she shown such weakness. During the ten years since Father’s death, Mother had been just as easy-going and gentle as while he was alive. Naoji and I had taken advantage of her to grow up without concerning ourselves about anything. Now Mother no longer had any money. She had spent it all on us, on Naoji and myself, without begrudging us a penny, and she was being forced to leave the house where she had passed so many years to enter on a life of misery in a cottage without a single servant. If Mother had been mean and stingy and scolded us, or had been the kind of person who secretly devises ways to increase her fortune, she would never have wished for death that way, no matter how much times had changed. For the first time in my life I realized what a horrible, miserable, salvationless hell it is to be without money. My heart filled with emotion, but I was in such anguish that the tears would not come. I wondered if the feeling I experienced then was what people mean by the well-worn phrase “dignity of human life.” I lay there, staring at the ceiling, feeling incapable of the slightest motion, my body stiff as a stone.

The next day, as I had expected, Mother seemed definitely ill. She lingered over one thing and another as if every additional minute she could remain in the house was precious to her, but Uncle Wada came to inform us that we had to leave that day for Izu. Almost all the luggage had already been dispatched. Mother with obvious reluctance put on her coat, and bowing without a word to Okimi and the other people in our employ who had come to say good-bye, she walked out of our house in Nishikata Street.

The train was comparatively empty, and we were all able to find seats. My uncle was in extremely good spirits and hummed passages from the No plays, among other things. Mother, pale and with her eyes downcast, looked very cold. We changed at Nagaoka for a bus, rode for about a quarter of an hour, got off, and began to walk toward the mountains. We climbed a gently sloping rise as far as a little village, just outside which was a Chinese-style villa, built with some taste.

“It’s a pleasanter place than I had imagined, Mother,” I said, still gasping for breath from the climb.

Mother stood in front of the entrance of the cottage. “Yes it is,” she answered, a happy expression coming into her eyes for a moment.

“To begin with, the air is good. Fresh air,” declared my uncle with evident self-satisfaction.

“It really is,” Mother smiled. “It’s delicious. The air here is delicious.”

We all three laughed.

Inside we found our belongings arrived from Tokyo. The front of the house was piled high with crates.

“Next, there is a fine view from the sitting-room.” My uncle, quite carried away, dragged us there and made us sit down to admire it.

It was about three in the afternoon, and the winter sun was gently striking the garden lawn. At the foot of a flight of stairs that led from the lawn, there was a little pond surrounded by plum trees, and beyond the garden, an orchard of tangerine trees. A village road, rice fields, a grove of pines, and, in the distance, the sea could also be discerned. As I sat in the drawing-room, the sea appeared to be just on a level with my breasts.

“It’s a gentle landscape,” Mother said dully.

“It must be because of the air. The sunlight here is entirely different from Tokyo sunlight, isn’t it? It’s as if the rays were strained through silk,” I answered with excessive gaiety.

On the ground floor were two fairly good-sized rooms, a Chinese-style reception room, a hall, and a bathroom, then the dining-room and kitchen. Upstairs was a foreign-style room with a big bed. This was the whole house, but I thought that it would not be especially cramped for two of us, or even for three if Naoji returned.

My uncle went out to the only inn in the village to arrange about a meal for us. A lunch was presently delivered which he spread out in the sitting-room and began to eat. Some whisky he had brought served to wash it down. He was very cheerful and insisted on relating his adventures in China with Viscount Kawata, the former owner of the house. Mother barely touched the food, and soon afterwards, when it started to grow dark, she murmured, “I’d like to lie down for a bit.”

I extracted the bedding from our baggage and helped Mother spread it. Something about her worried me so much that I ferreted out the thermometer to take her temperature. It was 102 degrees.

Even my uncle seemed upset. At any rate, he went off to the village in search of a doctor. When I called to Mother, she merely nodded drowsily.

I pressed Mother’s little hand in mine and began to sob. She was so pitiful, so terribly pitiful—no, we were both pitiful. The tears would not stop. I thought as I wept that I would like to die on the spot with Mother, that we had nothing to hope for any longer, that our lives had ended when we left the house in Nishikata Street.

Some two hours later my uncle returned with the village doctor. He seemed quite an old man and was dressed in formal, rather old-fashioned Japanese costume.

“It may possibly develop into pneumonia. However, even if pneumonia develops, there is no occasion for anxiety.” With this rather vague pronouncement, he gave Mother an injection and departed.