CHAPTER 55
I have had two or three letters from you this summer. I seem to remember that in the second or third you asked my aid in securing a suitable position. When I read this, I had the impulse to help in some way. At the very least I should have replied, and I felt bad that I did not. But I must confess that I made absolutely no effort in response to your request. Living, as you know, not so much in a confined social milieu as entirely cut off from the social world, I simply had no means of doing so.
But this was not my real problem. Truth to tell, I was just then struggling with the question of what to do about myself. Should I continue as I was, like a walking mummy doomed to remain in the human world, or . . . but whenever I whispered in my heart this or, a horror overcame me. I was like a man who rushes to the edge of a cliff and suddenly finds himself gazing down into a bottomless chasm. I was a coward, suffering precisely the agony that all cowards suffer. Sorry as I am to admit it, the simple truth is that your existence was the last thing on my mind. Indeed, to put it bluntly, the question of your work, of how you should earn a living, was utterly meaningless to me. I didn’t care. It was the least of my problems. I left your letter in the letter rack, folded my arms, and returned to my thoughts. Far from feeling sympathetic, I did no more than cast a bitter glance your way—a fellow from a family with a decent amount of property, only just graduated, and already making a fuss about a job! I confess this to you now by way of explanation for my unforgivable failure to respond. I am not being intentionally rude to stir your anger. I believe that as you read on, you will fully understand. At all events, I neglected to reply as I should have done, and I now apologize for my remissness.
Afterward I sent you a telegram. In truth I rather wanted to see you just then. I wanted to tell you the story of my past, as you had asked. When you replied that you could not come to Tokyo, I sat for a long time gazing at the telegram in disappointment. You must have felt that your brief response was not enough, for you then wrote me that long letter, from which I understood the circumstances that held you at home. I have no cause to consider you rude. How could you have left your dear sick father back at home and come? Indeed, it was wrong of me to have summoned you so high-handedly, ignoring the problem of your father’s health—I had forgotten about him when I sent that telegram, I must admit. This despite the fact that I was the one who so earnestly advised you to take good care of him and emphasized how dangerous his illness was. I am an inconsistent creature. Perhaps it is the pressure of my past, and not my own perverse mind, that has made me into this contradictory being. I am all too well aware of this fault in myself. You must forgive me.
When I read your letter—the last letter you wrote—I realized I had done wrong. I thought of writing to that effect, but I took up my pen, then laid it down again without writing a line. If I were to write to you, it must be this letter, you see, and the time for that had not yet quite come. That is why I sent the simple telegram saying you need not come.