CHAPTER 68
I would sigh with relief after Ojōsan left my room, but I also felt a certain dissatisfaction and regret. Perhaps there was something girlish in me. I imagine a modern youth such as you would certainly think so. But in those days this was the way most of us were.
Okusan rarely left the house, and on the few occasions when she did, she never left me alone with her daughter. I can’t judge whether this was intentional. It may be out of place for me to say this, but after careful observation I could only conclude that Okusan wanted to bring us closer, yet at other times she seemed secretly guarded. I had never been in such a situation, and it often made me uncomfortable.
I needed Okusan to make her position clear. Rationally speaking, her attitudes were clearly contradictory. But with the memory of my uncle’s deceitfulness still so fresh, I could not repress another suspicion—that one of her two conflicting attitudes must be fake. I was at a loss to decide which was the real one, and I could make no sense of why she behaved so strangely. At times I chose simply to lay the fault entirely at the door of womanhood itself. When it comes down to it, I told myself, she’s acting this way because she’s a woman, and women are stupid. Whenever my cogitations arrived at a dead end, this answer was the one I reached for.
Yet although I despised women, I could not find it in me to despise Ojōsan. Faced with her, my theorizing lost its power. I felt for her a love that was close to pious faith. You may find it odd that I use a specifically religious word to describe my feelings for a young woman, but real love, I firmly believe, is not so different from the religious impulse. Whenever I saw her face, I felt that I myself had become beautiful. At the mere thought of her, I felt elevated by contact with her nobility. If this strange phenomenon we call Love can be said to have two poles, the higher of which is a sense of holiness and the baser the impulse of sexual desire, this love of mine was undoubtedly in the grip of Love’s higher realm. Being human, of course, I could not leave my fleshly self behind, yet the eyes that beheld her, the heart that treasured thoughts of her, knew nothing of the reek of the physical.
My love for the daughter grew as my antipathy toward the mother increased, and so the relationship among the three of us ceased to be the simple thing it had once been. This change was largely internal, mind you. On the surface all was the same.
Then some little thing made me begin to wonder if I had misunderstood Okusan. I now revised my idea that one of her two contradictory attitudes toward me and her daughter must be false. They did not inhabit her heart by turns, I decided—they were both there together. Despite the apparent contradiction, I realized, her careful watchfulness did not mean she had forgotten or reconsidered her urge to bring us closer. Her wariness surely sprang from the worrying possibility that we might become more intimate than she considered proper. Her anxiety seemed to me quite unnecessary, since I felt not the slightest physical urge toward her daughter, but I now ceased to think badly of Okusan’s motives.