LITMIR.BIZ

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actuality, this so-called discipline had succeeded only in slowly cooling the warm sentiments binding father and son. At least Daisuke thought so. His father had completely reversed this interpretation. No matter what happened, they were of the same flesh and blood. The sentiment that a child felt toward a parent was endowed by heaven and could not possibly be altered by the parent’s treatment of the child. There might have been some excesses, but these had occurred in the name of discipline, and their results could not touch the bond of affection between father and son: so Daisuke’s father, influenced by the teachings of Confucianism, firmly believed. Convinced that the simple fact of bestowing life upon Daisuke permanently guaranteed him grateful love in the face of any unpleasantness or pain, his father had pushed his way. And in the end, he had produced a son who was coldly indifferent to him. Admittedly, his attitudes had changed considerably since Daisuke finished school. He was even surprisingly lenient in some areas. Still, this was only part of the program designed at the moment Daisuke was delivered into this world, and it could not be construed as a response to whatever inner changes the father might have perceived in his son. To this day he was completely unaware of the negative results his plan of education had yielded.

      His father was enormously proud of having gone to war. Given the slightest opportunity, he was apt to dismiss the likes of Daisuke with sweeping scorn; they were useless, those fellows, because they had never fought; they had no nerve. He spoke as if “nerve” were man’s most glorious attribute. Daisuke felt an unpleasant taste in his mouth every time he had to listen to such speeches. Courage might well have been an important prerequisite to survival in the barbaric days of his father’s youth, when life was taken right and left, but in this civilized day and age, Daisuke regarded it as a piece of equipment primitive as the bow and arrow. Indeed, it seemed plausible to him that many qualities incompatible with courage were to be valued far above it. After his father’s last lecture Daisuke had laughed about it with his sister-in-law, saying that according to their father’s theory, a stone statue would have to be admired above all else.

      Needless to say, Daisuke was cowardly. He could feel no shame in this. There were even occasions when he proudly styled himself a coward. Once, as a child, at his father’s instigation he had gone to the cemetery in Aoyama all by himself in the middle of the night. He had withstood the eeriness of the place for one hour, then, unable to endure it any longer, had come home pale as a sheet. At the time he himself was somewhat chagrined. The next morning, when his father laughed at him, he found the old man hateful. According to his father, it had been customary for the boys of his day, as part of their training, to get up in the middle of the night and set out all alone for Sword’s Peak, some two and a half miles north of the castle, where they climbed to the top and waited in a small temple to greet the sunrise. “In those days we started out with a different understanding from young people nowadays,” he observed.

      The old man who had uttered such words, who even now might utter them again, cut a pitiful figure in Daisuke’s eyes. Daisuke disliked earthquakes. There were times when, seated quietly in his study, he could feel their approach far in the distance. Then he would begin to think that everything—the cushion beneath him, the floor, and even the main pillar—was shaking. Daisuke believed that for him, this was the natural response. People like his father were either primitives with undeveloped nervous systems or fools who persisted in deceiving themselves.

      Now Daisuke sat face to face with his father. The small room had extended eaves, so that as one looked out upon the garden while seated, the edge of the eaves seemed to cut off the view. At least, the sky did not look very wide from this room. But it was a quiet room, where one could settle down.

      His father was smoking cut tobacco and had drawn a longhandled brazier close to him. From time to time he tapped off the ashes and the sound echoed pleasantly in the quiet garden. Daisuke arranged four or five gold cigarette holders in the hand brazier; he had tired of blowing the smoke through his nostrils, so he sat with folded arms, studying his father’s face. For all the years, there was a considerable amount of flesh left to that face. Yet the cheeks were sunken and the skin on the eyes sagged beneath the heavy brows. The hair was yellow rather than snowy white. When he addressed someone, he had a habit of distributing his glances equally between the listener’s face and his knees. These eye movements made the whites flash from time to time, producing a peculiar sensation in his listener.

      The old man was holding forth: “Man must not think of himself alone. There’s society. There’s country. Without doing a few things for others, one doesn’t feel right. Take you, for instance, you can’t possibly feel very good just loafing around. Of course, it would be different with an uneducated, lower-class sort, but there’s no reason why a man who has received the highest education should be able to enjoy doing nothing. What one has learned becomes interesting only when applied to actual practice.’’

      “Yes, that’s right,” Daisuke had been answering. Being hard pressed to respond to his father’s sermons, Daisuke had made it his practice to give vague, perfunctory answers. As far as he was concerned, his father’s ideas were always but half thought out. Having resolved a given question to his liking, he would launch out from that point; thus there was not an ounce of significance to what he said. Furthermore, though he might seem to be arguing for altruism as the guiding principle one minute, he would switch to the protection of self-interest the next. His words flowed abundantly, with an air of great importance, but their content was worth hardly a moment of their listener’s reflection. To attack his logic at its foundations and bring it tumbling down would have been an enormously difficult task, and what was more, an impossible one; Daisuke had concluded it was preferable to leave it untouched altogether. His father, however, starting from the premise that Daisuke belonged to his solar system, assumed that it was his right to determine every inch of his son’s orbit. Hence, Daisuke had no choice but to revolve politely around the sun that was his father.

      “If you don’t like business, that’s that. Making money is surely not the only way to serve Japan. I won’t object if you don’t earn any money. I can understand that you wouldn’t take it well if I meddled in your affairs merely for the sake of money. As far as money is concerned, I will continue to support you as I always have. I don’t know how many years are left me, and I can’t take it with me when I die. Your monthly allowance is no problem. So stand up and do something. Do your duty as a citizen. You’re thirty now, aren’t you?”

      “Yes.”

      “It is unseemly to be idle and unemployed at thirty.” Daisuke had never considered himself idle. He simply regarded himself as one of those higher beings who disposed of a large number of hours unsullied by an occupation. Whenever his father started in this vein, Daisuke felt sorry for him. The crystallization of heightened intellectual and esthetic sentiments—the fruit of all those days and months spent in meaningful pursuits—none of this would register on his father’s infantile mind. Since there was nothing else to be said, Daisuke answered seriously, “Yes, it is a problem.” The old man could not for a moment cease to regard Daisuke as a child, and since in fact his responses invariably had a childlike air about them, being simple and unworldly, the old man was scornful, and complained that little gentlemen were useless even when they grew up. If, on the other hand, Daisuke’s tone was cool, restrained, unabashed, and totally nonchalant, he became annoyed that perhaps this son had gone beyond his reach.

      “You’re in good health?”

      “I haven’t caught a cold in the past two or three years.”

      “You don’t seem to be on the stupid side, either. Didn’t you have a fairly strong record at school?’’

      “Well, yes.”

      “Then it’s a shame to play around like this. What was his name— you know, the fellow who used to come over to talk with you? I saw him two or three times myself.”

      “Do you mean Hiraoka?”

      “That’s the one, Hiraoka. Now, he didn’t have much, but didn’t he go somewhere right after graduation?”

      “But he blundered and came back.”

      The old man could not suppress a sardonic smile. “Why?” “Why? Probably because he works to eat.”

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