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“You. What a surprise. You’ve been forgiven by your father, have you? Not yet?”
I was unable to confess that I had run away.
In my usual way I evaded the issue, though I was certain that Horiki soon, if not immediately, would grasp what had happened. “Things will take care of themselves, in one way or another.”
“Look here! It’s no laughing matter. Let me give you a word of advice—stop your foolishness here and now. I’ve got business today anyway. I’m awfully busy these days.”
“Business? What kind of business?”
“Hey! What are you doing there? Don’t tear the thread off the cushion!”
While we were talking I had unconsciously been fiddling with and twisting around my finger one of the tassel-like threads which protruded from the corners of the cushion on which I sat?
?binding-threads, I think they are called. Horiki had assumed a jealous possessiveness about everything in his house down to the last cushion thread, and he glared at me, seemingly quite unembarrassed by this attitude. When I think of it, Horiki’s acquaintanceship with me had cost him nothing.
Horiki’s aged mother brought in a tray with two dishes of jelly.
“What have we here?” Horiki asked his mother tenderly, in the tones of the truly dutiful son, continuing in language so polite it sounded quite unnatural. “Oh, I’m sorry. Have you made jelly? That’s terrific. You shouldn’t have bothered. I was just going out on some business. But it would be wicked not to eat your wonderful jelly after you’ve gone to all the trouble. Thank you so much.” Then, turning in my direction, “How about one for you? Mother made it specially. Ahh . . . this is delicious. Really terrific.”
He ate with a gusto, almost a rapture, which did not seem to be altogether play acting. I also spooned my bowl of jelly. It tasted watery, and when I came to the piece of fruit at the bottom, it was not fruit after all, but a substance I could not identify. I by no means despised their poverty. (At the time I didn’t think that the jelly tasted bad, and I was really grateful for the old woman’s kindness. It is true that I dread poverty, but I do not believe I ever have despised it.) The jelly and the way Horiki rejoiced over it taught me a lesson in the parsimoniousness of the city-dweller, and in what it is really like in a Tokyo household where the members divide their lives so sharply between what they do at home and what they do on the outside. I was filled with dismay at these signs that I, a fool rendered incapable by my perpetual flight from human society from distinguishing between “at home” and “on the outside,” was the only one completely left out, that I had been deserted even by Horiki. I should like to record that as I manipulated the peeling lacquer chopsticks to eat my jelly, I felt unbearably lonely.
“I’m sorry, but I’ve got an appointment today,” Horiki said, standing and putting on his jacket. “I’m going now. Sorry.”
At that moment a woman visitor arrived for Horiki. My fortunes thereby took a sudden turn.
Horiki at once became quite animated. “Oh, I am sorry. I was just on my way to your place when this fellow dropped in without warning. No, you’re not in the way at all. Please come in.”
He seemed rattled. I took the cushion from under me and turned it over before handing it to Horiki, but snatching it from my hands, he turned it over once more as he offered it to the woman. There was only that one cushion for guests, besides the cushion Horiki sat on.
The woman was a tall, thin person. She declined the cushion and sat demurely in a corner by the door.
I listened absent-mindedly to their conversation. The woman, evidently an employee of a magazine publisher, had commissioned an illustration from Horiki, and had come now to collect it.
“We’re in a terrible hurry,” she explained.
“It’s ready. It’s been ready for some time. Here you are.”
A messenger arrived with a telegram.
As Horiki read it I could see the good spirits on his face turn ugly. “Damn it, what have you been up to?”
The telegram was from Flatfish.
“You go back at once. I ought to take you there myself, I suppose, but I haven’t got the time now. Imagine—a runaway, and looking so smug!”
The woman asked, “Where do you live?”
“In Okubo,” I answered without thinking.
“That’s quite near my office.”
She was born in Koshu and was twenty-eight. She lived in an apartment in Koenji with her five-year-old girl. She told me that her husband had died three years before.
“You look like someone who’s had an unhappy childhood. You’re so sensitive—more’s the pity for you.”
I led for the first time the life of a kept man. After Shizuko (that was the name of the lady journalist) went out to work in the morning at the magazine publisher’s, her daughter Shigeko and I obediently looked after the apartment. Shigeko had always been left to play in the superintendent’s room while her mother was away, and now she seemed delighted that an interesting “uncle” had turned up as a new playmate.
For about a week I remained in a state of daze. Just outside the apartment window was a kite caught in the telegraph wires; blown about and ripped by the dusty spring wind, it nevertheless clung tenaciously to the wires, as if in affirmation of something. Every time I looked at the kite I had to smile with embarrassment and blush. It haunted me even in dreams.
