CHAPTER 60
I forgot all about this talk of marriage. None of the young fellows around me, after all, had the air of responsible householders—all seemed their own men, individual and free of constraints. If I had penetrated below the apparent happiness, I might have found some whom family circumstance had already forced to marry, but I was too young and innocent to be aware of such things then. Besides, anyone who found himself in that kind of situation would have kept it to himself as far as possible, considering it private and quite irrelevant to a student’s life. I now realize that I was already in this category myself, but in my innocence I continued to pursue my studies contentedly.
At the end of the school year I once more packed my trunk and returned to the home that held my parents’ graves. Once again I found my uncle and aunt and their children in the house where my parents used to live. Nothing had changed. I breathed again the familiar scent of my home, a scent still filled with nostalgic memories. Needless to say, I also welcomed being back there as a relief from the monotony of the year’s studies.
But even as I breathed this scent, so redolent of the air I had grown up in, my uncle suddenly thrust the question of marriage under my nose again. He repeated his line from my previous visit, giving the same reason as before. But while the summer before he had had no particular woman in mind, this time I was disconcerted to learn that a prospective wife had been selected for me. She was my uncle’s daughter—in other words, my own cousin. Marrying her would suit both of us, he maintained, and furthermore my father had actually spoken of it before he died. Put this way, I supposed it was a suitable enough arrangement, and I easily accepted that my father could have had that conversation with my uncle. I was certainly rather surprised, since this was the first time I had heard of it. My uncle’s request seemed perfectly reasonable and comprehensible, however.
No doubt I should not have taken his words on faith. But what primarily concerned me was that I felt quite indifferent to this younger daughter of my uncle. We’d been close ever since childhood, when I had been a constant visitor at my uncle’s house in town, not only on day visits but also as an overnight guest. As you will know, romantic love never develops between siblings. I may be stretching the interpretation of this well-known fact, but it seems to me that between any male and female who have been close and in continual contact, such great intimacy rules out the fresh response necessary to stimulate feelings of romantic love. Just as you can only really smell incense in the first moments after it is lit, or taste wine in that instant of the first sip, the impulse of love springs from a single, perilous moment in time, I feel. If this moment slips casually by unnoticed, intimacy may grow as the two become accustomed to each other, but the impulse to romantic love will be numbed. And so, consider it as I might, I could not find it in me to marry my cousin.
My uncle said that if I wanted, I could put off the marriage until after my graduation. “But,” he went on, “we should ‘seize the day,’ as the saying goes, and perform the basic exchange of marriage cups as soon as possible.”1 The question of when it should happen was of no concern to me, since I felt no interest in the bride. I reiterated my refusal. My uncle looked unsatisfied, and my cousin wept. Hers were not tears of regret that she could not take her place beside me; they were the tears of a humiliated woman who has sought marriage and been rejected. I knew perfectly well that she loved me as little as I loved her. I went back to Tokyo.