To the Spring Equinox and Beyond (10 page)

He passed several days in a kind of daze. Suddenly he recalled a discourse he had heard in his school days, one delivered by a teacher of religion invited to the school. The man's circumstances had been such that he had no grievance against either his family or society, but of his own free will he had become a Buddhist monk. In the course of explaining his situation, he said he had chosen the religious life because he had been confronted by an inexplicable problem.

No matter how bright and clear the skies above him, he said he felt as if he were undergoing the torment of an imprisonment coming from every direction. Trees, houses, people walking along the street, all these were clearly visible to him, yet he constantly felt as if he alone had been put into a glass cage, separated from direct contact with the outside world until his pain became so excruciating that he felt he was suffocating.

After hearing the talk, Keitaro had suspected that the man had been victimized by a kind of neurosis, and with this reflection Keitaro gave no further concern to such a state of mind. But when he thought it over during these several days of worrisome idleness, he found some resemblances between himself—who had never once experienced the delight of completing anything—and the feelings of this religious man before he became a monk. Of course, since his own suffering was incomparably trivial and of an entirely different nature, he did not have to make the kind of great decision that the religious teacher had to make. If only he had learned how to brace himself a little more, how to exert himself just a bit, he might have been able to be more satisfied with himself, whether his aims were attained or not. Up to the present moment he had not given sufficient attention to this deficiency in himself.

Thinking alone in this way, Keitaro felt he had to make some headway in any direction whatsoever. On the other hand, it seemed that all his decisions had come too late, and he idled away the next days without any objective in mind. During this interval he had gone to see a play at the Yurakuza Theater, had heard comic tales told by professional storytellers at a variety hall, had chatted with friends, had walked the streets, and had done various other things. But in none of these activities could he lay hold of the world any more than he could hair on a bald head. It was as if, wanting to play
go
himself, he was forced to watch others at their game. And he wished, since he had to remain a mere spectator, to at least be watching a more exciting game full of critical moves.

This wish at once brought into his imagination the relationship between Sunaga and the woman seen from behind. He felt that their relationship was not likely to be as deeply constructed as his wild fancy had colored it, and even if it were, his interest would amount to no more than poking his nose into another's affair. He derided himself for his folly and considered all his interest absurd, yet right after such thoughts his curiosity was aroused, and the idea that something lay behind their relationship flashed through his mind from time to time as it had just then. These thoughts led him to the consideration that if he pushed himself further ahead along this route with a little more patience, he might come across something more romantic than he had yet experienced. He began to regard his own short temper, which had caused him to get angry at Taguchi's door and had made him give up his research on the woman, as a weakness unworthy of his own strong curiosity.

As for a job, he reflected that he ought not to have alienated himself from Taguchi by letting out, if even only a few words, a spiteful remark due to a trivial mishap. Those words had cut short a future that was still evolving, indefinite though it was about its success or failure. And so he had brought on himself an annoying dissatisfaction with his own irresolute self.

Sunaga's mother had assured him that Taguchi was of a kindlier disposition than his appearance suggested. If so, it might well be that he would condescend to see Keitaro again after returning from his trip. But it would be stupid to ask for a second interview and be scorned as someone who was deficient in common sense. Yet in order to at least take firm hold of the feeling of thoroughly proceeding toward some end, he perhaps had to push his way even to the extent of enduring the pain of being called fool.

In such ways did Keitaro's thoughts turn during those perplexing days.

But Keitaro's situation was quite different from the kind that demands an immediate decision on a question of the greatest importance to a person's life. In his mind something light and buoyant was hovering in spite of his apparent worry. Should he proceed along this route to the very end, or should he abandon it and make preparation to shift to something new? The question needed no real analysis, for from the very beginning it had been quite simple. The perplexity in his mind came not from the fear that once having drawn a losing lottery ticket, he would sink into depths from which he would not be able to emerge, but rather from the unconscious working of his idle thought that whatever the outcome, it would not ultimately affect him that much. Like a person who reads a book while feeling drowsy yet who tries to catch the clear meaning of the letters without making a conscious effort to resist that drowsiness, Keitaro was worried that the egg of prompt resolution warming in his rather easygoing bosom would not hatch properly.

Under the pretext that he had to free himself from his own irresolution, he tried to fan secretly the flame of his own love of curiosity. The idea occurred to him that he ought to size up his future by appealing to a fortuneteller. The education he had received was not that unscientific to make him fully believe in such things as incantations, prayers, charms against evil, exorcisms, or mediums, but he had retained from his boyhood years not a little interest in all these mysteries. His father had been a nervous man who had gone deeply into the study of directions and horoscopy. One Sunday, Keitaro, a primary school boy at the time, saw his father sally out into the garden, his kimono tucked up and a hoe on his shoulder. He wondered what his father was going to do and was about to follow when his father said, "Stay here and keep your eye on the clock. As soon as it begins to strike twelve, give a loud shout, and I'll start digging at the root of the plum tree standing to the northwest." Keitaro's boyhood mind took it as another of his father's cherished theories on the aspects of houses, and the moment the clock began striking, he cried aloud as commanded, "It's exactly noon!" Nothing amiss occurred at that moment. But Keitaro wondered why his father, so anxious to be punctual in the first digging with the hoe, had not taken care to set the clock right beforehand, for Keitaro knew that according to the clock in his school, theirs at home was wrong by about twenty minutes.

On a subsequent day when the family returned from a herb-gathering excursion, Keitaro was kicked by a horse and fell down an embankment. Strangely enough, no injury appeared anywhere on his body. Delighted, his grandmother said to him, "You've been saved by the grace of Jizo-sama, for he put himself in your place. Come see!" She led him to a stone image of the guardian-deity for children standing by the spot where the horse had been tied. The head of the stone Jizo-sama had broken off; only the traditional bib placed there by some mother remained around its neck. At that moment a cloud of strange hue drifted into Keitaro's mind. Though it varied in its density according to Keitaro's bodily condition or the circumstances surrounding him, quite evidently it had not slipped away even though he had grown to adulthood.

For this reason Keitaro always regarded a fortuneteller on the street, his paper lantern on a handle shaped like a bow, as belonging to one of the interesting professions handed down from past generations to the civilized world of Meiji. His belief, however, was not ardent enough to allow him to spend his money listening to the sounds of divining rods twirled in the hands of a fortune-teller, but often on his walks when he saw a woman standing forlornly before a diviner's stall, her chilled face illuminated by the lantern, he would half in fun, yet driven by curiosity, steal into the shadows to eavesdrop on what hopes, anxieties, fears, or assurances were being given to the helpless woman brooding over the gloom cast onto her future.

Once a friend of Keitaro's, despairing of his own talent, was troubled about whether to take his final examinations or to leave school. During a trip an acquaintance of this student had visited Zenkoji Temple and sent him a sacred Buddhist lot that he had drawn for him. This good luck fortune, numbered 55, contained such sentences as "The clouds are dispersed and the moon is bright again" and "The flowers are in bloom and prosperity returns." Encouraged by these words, Keitaro's friend undertook the examination as a trial and passed. This incident interested Keitaro so much that he went around to various shrines and randomly drew sacred lots, although at that time he had no particular objective in mind. So it could be said that even in ordinary times Keitaro had sufficient qualification to be a fortuneteller's client. On the other hand, even in the situation in which he now found himself, a considerable amount of frivolous pleasure was mixed into his idea of consulting an augury.

Keitaro searched his memory for a fortune-teller he could visit, but he couldn't come up with anyone. He had heard the names of some professional ones, one near Hakusan, another in Shiba Park, and still another in a certain block on the Ginza. Yet he could not bring himself to go to them because their very fame made him suspicious of quackery. Still less did he wish to fall prey to the impertinence of an imposter who would utter quite plausibly a random guess he actually knew was untrue. Keitaro hoped to find some old man with a generous growth of beard who, in a house not too crowded with clients, would get to the point in words that were succinct and epigrammatic. As he was thinking of such a fortuneteller, he recalled the image of the retired priest from Ipponji Temple in his hometown, a man his father used to visit for consultations.

Keitaro suddenly seemed to awaken from the foolish state he had been in, unable to tell exactly whether he had been meditating or merely sitting. So he put on his hat, thinking vaguely he would at least go out and perhaps be lured by destiny toward some fortune-teller's shingle.

It had been quite a while since he had last gone to Kurumazaka in the Shitaya district. He walked straight east along the street on both sides of which he saw temple gates, dealers in Buddhist articles, old-fashioned druggists, and shops which had heaps of junk handed down from the Tokugawa era lined up for sale, dust and all. He deliberately passed through the old grounds of Monzeki and came out at the corner where the Yakko, a restaurant famous for broiled eel, stood.

As a boy he had often heard about the prosperity of the temple in Asakusa dedicated to Kannon, his grandfather knowing this district quite well at the time Tokyo was called Edo. In the old man's stories were the names of such places as Nakamise, Okuyama, Namiki, Komagata, and even some little used by Tokyoites nowadays, where, his grandfather had told him, various delicacies could be found. There was, for example, an elegant restaurant on Hirokoji, the Sumiya, famous for its rice boiled with rape leaves and bean curd baked and coated with
miso,
and there was another famous freshwater-fish restaurant with its pretty rope curtains hanging at the entrance just opposite a shrine at Komagata. But what had impressed the young Keitaro most was the old man's account of the swordplay artistry of Hyosuke Nagai, the sword-swallowing magician Mamezo, and the dried-up bodies of big toads with four forelegs and six behind, apparently caught at the foot of Mount Ibuki in Omi Province.

Abundant explanations of these mysteries were conveniently offered to a child's imagination by the old picture books stowed away in a chest on the upper floor of the family storehouse. A man crouching on a small wooden table and wearing a pair of high clogs with only one thin support, his kimono sleeves tucked up with a sash as he was about to draw from its sheath a curved sword longer than his own height; Jiraiya, master of the occult sitting cross-legged on the back of a huge toad as he practiced the black arts; an ancient gray-bearded man at a Chinese desk holding a physiognomist's magnifying glass larger than his face, looking down through it at a man with a top-knot who was lying prostrate before him—most of these strange characters had come from those early picture books and had their existence in Keitaro's imaginary Asakusa.