CHAPTER 96
I walked along beside him, ready, or perhaps better to say lying in wait, for what he would say next. I felt quite prepared to spring an underhanded attack on him if need be. But I also had the conscience that education had instilled in me. If someone had appeared at my side and whispered “Coward!” I would surely have come to myself with a start. And if that man had been K, I would have blushed before him. But K was far too honest to reproach me, far too pure-hearted, too good. In the blind urgency of the moment, however, I failed to honor this in him. Instead I struck home. I used his own virtue to defeat him.
After a while K spoke my name and turned to look at me. This time it was I who stopped in my tracks. K halted too. At last I was able to I look him directly in the eye. His superior height forced me to look up at him, but I did so with the heart of a wolf crouching before an innocent lamb.
“Let’s not talk about it anymore,” he said. There was a strange grief both in his voice and in the expression in his eyes. I could say nothing in reply. “Please stop,” he said again, pleading now.
My answer was cruel. I leaped like a wolf upon the lamb’s throat. “I wasn’t the one who brought it up, you know. You began it. If you want to stop, that’s fine by me. But there’s no point in just shutting up. You have to resolve to put a stop to it in your heart as well. What about all those fine principles of yours? Where’s your moral fiber?”
At these words, his tall frame seemed to shrink and dwindle before my eyes. He was, as I have said, incredibly obstinate and headstrong, yet he was also far too honest to be able to shrug it off if his own inconsistency was forcefully brought home to him. Seeing him cowed, I at last breathed a sigh of relief. Then he said suddenly, “Resolve?” Before I could respond, he went on, “Resolve—well, I’m not without resolve.” He spoke as if to himself, or as if in a trance.
Our conversation came to a halt, and we turned toward home. It was a fairly warm and windless day, but nevertheless it was winter, and the leafless park felt desolate. I turned once to look back at the russet shapes of the frost-burned cedars, their tips neatly aligned against the gloomy sky, and felt the cold sink its teeth into my back. We hurried on in the dusk over Hongō Hill and dipped into the valley below Koishikawa. Only now did I at last feel the beginnings of a glow of warmth inside my overcoat.
We barely spoke on our way home, though our haste might explain this silence. When we were back and seated at the dinner table, Okusan asked why we had been late. I replied that K had invited me out, and we had gone to Ueno. On such a cold day? said Okusan in surprise. Ojōsan wondered what had taken us there. Nothing, I replied simply, we had just gone for a walk. Always taciturn, K now spoke even less than usual. He failed to make the slightest response to Okusan’s cajolings and Ojōsan’s smiles. He gulped down his food, and retired to his room while I was still at the table.