CHAPTER 53
That day my father’s condition seemed particularly bad. At one point, when I left the room to go to the toilet, I ran into my brother in the corridor.
“Where are you off to?” he asked sharply, challenging me almost like a watch guard. “We must try to be constantly with him. He seems in bad shape.”
I thought so too and returned to the sickroom without touching the letter I had tucked away.
My father opened his eyes and asked my mother to tell him who was present. She carefully named us one by one, and at each name he nodded. If he failed to nod, she raised her voice and repeated the name, asking if he understood.
“Thank you all very much,” my father said with careful formality, then sank back into unconsciousness. Everyone gathered around his bed watched him in silence for a while. Finally someone got up and went into the next room. Then another left. I was the third to leave at last and go off to my room. I intended to open the letter I had earlier slipped into my breast. I could, of course, easily have done this at the bedside, but the letter was evidently so long that I couldn’t have read it all then and there, so I stole some special time to myself to devote to the task.
I tore roughly at the strong, fibrous paper that wrapped it. When I got it open, what emerged was a document written in a clear hand on ruled manuscript paper that had been folded in quarters to post. I bent back the kinks of the folds to straighten the pages for ease of reading.
My astonished heart wondered what this great bulk of pages and its inked writing might tell me. Simultaneously, I was anxious about what was happening in the sickroom. I was in no state of mind to settle down calmly and read Sensei’s letter—I had a strong foreboding that if I began it, something would have happened to my father before I finished, or at the least someone would call me to his bedside. Nervously, I ran my eye over the first page. This is what it said:
“When you asked me that day about my past, I had not the courage to reply, but I believe I have now achieved the freedom to lay the story clearly before you. This freedom, however, is merely circumstantial and will be lost if I wait until your return to Tokyo, and if I do not make use of it while I may, I will have forever missed the chance to present you with the story of my past, which will then become indirectly your own experience. If this opportunity is missed, that firm promise I made to you will have come to naught. Therefore, I must relate with my pen the words I should be speaking to you.”
Only when I had read this far did I fully understand why he had written this long missive. I had believed all along that he would not bother sending a letter on the trivial question of my future employment. But why should Sensei, who disliked writing, have felt the urge to write about the past at such length? Why had it been impossible for him to wait until I returned?
I am telling you because I am now free to. But that freedom will soon be lost forever. I turned the words over and over in my head, struggling to understand. Then a sudden anxiety flooded me. I returned to the letter, determined to read on, but at this moment there came a shout from my brother, calling to me from the sickroom. Startled, I jumped to my feet and ran down the corridor to join the others. I was prepared for this to be my father’s end.