CHAPTER 73
I will call this friend of mine K. We had been friends since childhood. As you will no doubt realize from this, our native place was a bond between us. K was the son of a Pure Land Buddhist priest—but not the eldest son and heir, I should add, which is how he came to be adopted by a doctor’s family. The Hongan subsect had a very powerful presence in my home district, and its priests were better off than others. If the priest had a daughter of marriageable age, for instance, one of his parishioners would help to find her a suitable match, and the wedding expenses would of course not come out of his own pocket. Pure Land temple families were thus generally quite wealthy.
K’s home temple was a prosperous one. Even so, the family may not have had the funds to send him to Tokyo for his education. Did they decide to have him adopted into the other family because the other family had the means to educate him? I have no way of knowing. I only know that the doctor’s family adopted him while we were still middle-school students. I still remember the surprise I felt when the teacher called the roll one day and I realized K’s name had suddenly changed.
His new family was also fairly wealthy, and they paid for him to go to Tokyo for his studies. I left before he did, but he moved into the same dormitory when he arrived. K and I shared a room—in those days it was common for two or three students to study and sleep together in the one room. We lived huddled together like wild animals trapped in a cage, hugging each other and glaring out at the world. Tokyo and its inhabitants frightened us both. There in our little room, however, we spoke with contempt of the world at large.
But we were in earnest, and determined one day to become great. K’s willpower was particularly strong. Son of a temple family that he was, he was in the habit of talking in terms of the Buddhist concept of dedicated self-discipline, and his behavior certainly seemed to me to epitomize this ideal. In my heart, I stood in awe of him.
Ever since our middle-school days, K had bewildered me with difficult discussions on religion and philosophy. I do not know whether his father had inspired this interest, or whether the atmosphere peculiar to temple buildings had infected him as a child. In any event, K seemed to me far more monkish than the average monk. His adoptive family had sent him to Tokyo to study medicine. In his stubborn way, however, he had decided before he arrived that he would not become a doctor. I reproached him, pointing out that he was in effect deceiving his adoptive parents, and he brashly agreed that he was. Such deception did not bother him, he said, since it was in the cause of his “chosen path.” I doubt if even he understood precisely what he meant by this phrase. I certainly had no idea. But we were young, and this vague abstraction had for us a hallowed ring. Comprehension was beside the point. I could not but admire these lofty sentiments that governed and impelled him. I accepted his argument. I do not know how important my agreement may have been for K, but he would surely have gone his way, stubbornly, regardless of any protest I made.
Child though I still was, however, I was prepared to accept that by going along with him, I would bear some responsibility if problems ever arose. Even if I could not quite summon such resolve at the time, nevertheless I spoke my words of encouragement to him firm in the belief that if in later life I ever had cause to look back on this moment, I would properly acknowledge the degree of responsibility I bore.