CHAPTER 59
The first time I returned from Tokyo for the summer holidays, my uncle and aunt had moved into the house where I had suffered through the death of my parents, and were now ensconced there. This had been decided on before I left for Tokyo. It was the only thing to be done, since I was the only remaining person in our family, and no longer living there myself.
My uncle, I recall, was involved with a number of companies in the town at the time. When we were discussing how to arrange things so that I would be free to go to Tokyo, he had remarked half-jokingly that it would actually be more convenient for him to stay in his home in town to attend to his work, rather than move out to this house five miles away. My family home was an old and important one in the area, fairly well known to the local people. As you probably know, to demolish or sell an old house with a history when there is an heir who could live there is a serious matter. Nowadays I would not let such things bother me, but I was still essentially a child. The problem of leaving the house empty while I was living in Tokyo was a great worry for me.
My uncle grudgingly agreed to move into the empty house that now belonged to me. But he insisted he would need to keep his house in town and move to and fro between the two as the need arose. I was, of course, in no position to object. I was happy to accept any conditions as long as I could get to Tokyo.
Child that I still was, I looked back with a warm nostalgia on the house I had now left. I felt about it as a traveler feels about the home to which he will one day return. For all that I had longed to leave it for Tokyo, I had a strong compulsion to go back there when the summer holidays came, and I often had dreams of the house I would return to after the hard study and fun of the term were over.
I do not know just how my uncle divided his time between the two places while I was away, but when I arrived in the summer, the whole family was gathered there under a single roof. I imagine that the children were there for the holidays, although they would have lived in town for most of the year to attend school.
Everyone was delighted to see me, and I was happy to find the house so much livelier and more cheerful than it had been in my parents’ day. My uncle moved his eldest son out of the room that had been mine so that I could occupy it again. There were quite enough rooms to go around, and at first I demurred, saying I didn’t mind where I slept. But he would not hear of it. “It’s your house,” he told me.
Recollections of my dead mother and father were all that disturbed the pleasure of the summer I spent with my uncle’s family before returning to Tokyo. But one event did cast a faint shadow across my heart. Although I had barely begun my college life, my uncle and aunt both urged me to consider marrying. They must have repeated it three or four times. The first time they brought up the subject, it was so unexpected that I was no more than taken aback. The second time I made my refusal clear. When they brought it up a third time, I was forced to ask their reasons for pressing marriage on me in this way. Their answer was brief and straightforward. They simply wanted me to make an early marriage so that I could come back to live in the house and become my father’s heir.
Personally, all I wanted to do was to come back during vacations. I was familiar enough with country ways to understand this talk of succeeding my father and the consequent need for a wife, of course, and I was not even really against the idea. But I had only just gone to Tokyo to pursue my studies, and to me it was all in some distant future landscape, seen as it were through a telescope. I left the house without consenting to my uncle’s wish.