CHAPTER 105
On the way back from K’s funeral, one of his friends asked me why I thought he had killed himself. This question had been dogging me ever since his suicide. Okusan, Ojōsan, K’s father and brother, acquaintances whom I had informed, even unknown newspaper reporters—all had asked me the same thing. Every time someone asked, my conscience smarted painfully, and I heard behind the words a voice say, Quick, confess that it was you who killed him.
My answer to everyone was the same. I simply repeated the words of his final letter to me and made no further statement. The fellow who had asked me on our way back from the funeral, and received the same answer, now took from his pocket a newspaper cutting and handed it to me. I read the piece he indicated as we walked on. It said that K had killed himself from despair at being disinherited. I folded the page and returned it to him without comment. He told me that another paper had reported that K had gone mad and killed himself. I had been too preoccupied to look at newspapers and so was quite ignorant of all this, although I had all along been concerned about what they might write. Above all, I feared that something unpleasant or disturbing for Okusan and Ojōsan might appear there. It particularly tortured me to think that Ojōsan might be so much as mentioned in passing. I asked this friend if anything else had been written in the papers. These two references were all he had seen, he told me.
Soon after this I moved into the house where I still live. Both Okusan and Ojōsan disliked the thought of staying in their old house, while every evening I found myself reliving the memory of that night. After some discussion, therefore, we decided to find somewhere else.
After two months I graduated from the university. Six months later Ojōsan and I finally married. On the face of things I could congratulate myself on all having gone according to plan. Both Okusan and Ojōsan seemed wonderfully happy, and so indeed was I. But a black shadow hovered behind my happiness. This very happiness, it seemed to me, could well be a fuse that drew the flame of my life toward a bitter fate.
Once married, Ojōsan—but I should now begin to call her “my wife”—my wife for some reason suggested that we visit K’s grave together. This jolted me. Why had she suddenly come up with such an idea? I inquired. She replied that it would surely please K if we visited him together. I stared hard at her guileless face, until she asked why I was looking at her like that.
I agreed to her request, and together we went to Zōshigaya. I poured water over K’s fresh grave and washed it. My wife placed incense and flowers before it. We both bowed our heads and placed our hands together in prayer. No doubt she wished to receive K’s blessing from beyond the grave by conveying to him the news of our marriage. As for me, the words I was to blame, I was to blame were going around and around in my head.
My wife stroked K’s headstone and declared it a fine one. It was not particularly impressive, but she probably felt the need to praise it because I had personally gone to the stonemason and chosen it. Privately, I balanced in my mind the images of this new grave, my new wife, and K’s new white bones lying buried at my feet, and a sense of the cold mockery of fate crept over me. I vowed then that I would never come here with her again.