CHAPTER 77
From the entrance hall the only access to my room was through a little four-mat room that lay between. This anteroom, in effect a passageway, was virtually useless for practical purposes. This is where I put K. At first I re-created our previous arrangement, placing two desks side by side in my own larger room, with the idea that we would also share the small one. But K chose to make the small room exclusively his, declaring that he was happier alone no matter how cramped the space.
As I mentioned, Okusan initially opposed my plan to bring K in at all. In an ordinary lodging house, she agreed, it made sense for two to share, and still better three, but she wasn’t doing this as a business, she said, and urged me to reconsider. I told her K would be no trouble. Even so, she replied, she did not like the idea of housing someone she didn’t know. In that case, I pointed out, she should have objected to me as well. But she countered with the statement that she had known and trusted me from the beginning. I smiled wryly. At this point she changed her tactics. Bringing in someone like K, she said, would be bad for me. When I asked why, it was her turn to smile.
To tell the truth, there was no real necessity for me to live with K. But if I had tried to give him a monthly cash allowance, I felt sure, he would have been very reluctant to accept it. He was a fiercely independent man. Better to let him live with me, while I secretly gave Okusan money enough to feed us both. Nevertheless, I had no desire to reveal K’s dire financial situation to her. I did, however, talk about his precarious state of health. If left to himself, I told her, he would only grow more perverse and eccentric. I went on to describe his strained relations with his adoptive parents and his severance from his original family. By attempting to help him, I said, I was grasping a drowning man, desperate to infuse in him my own living heat. I begged Okusan and Ojōsan to help by warmly accepting him. Okusan finally relented.
K knew nothing of this discussion, and I was satisfied that he remain ignorant. When he came stolidly into the house with his bags, I greeted him with an innocent air.
Okusan and Ojōsan kindly helped him unpack and settle in. I was delighted, interpreting each generous gesture as an expression of their friendship for me. K, however, remained his usual dour self.
When I asked what he thought of his new home, he replied with a simple “Not bad.” This brief response was a wild understatement, I felt. Until then he had been living in a dank, grimy little north-facing room, where the food was of a piece with the lodging. The move to my place was, as the old saying goes, “from deep ravine to treetop high.” It was partly sheer obstinacy that caused him to make light of the new place, but partly principle as well. His Buddhist upbringing had led him to think that paying attention to comfort in the basic needs of life was immoral. Brought up on tales of worthy monks and saints, he tended to consider flesh and spirit as separate entities; in fact, he may well have felt that to mortify the flesh was to exalt the soul.
I decided to do my best not to argue, however. My aim was to apply a sunny warmth that would thaw his ice. Once the melted water began to trickle, I thought, he would sooner or later come to his senses.