CHAPTER 109
Though I had resolved to live as if I were dead, some external stimulus would occasionally set my heart dancing. But the moment I felt the urge to break through my deathly impasse and act, a terrible force would rise up out of nowhere and press me fiercely back into immobility. A voice would bear down on me with the words You have no right, and I would instantly wilt and go limp. When a little later I tried to rise again, again this force would press me back. I ground my teeth in impotent rage. “Why do you stand in my way like this?” I would cry. The strange force would laugh coldly back at me and reply, You know very well why. And again my will would collapse.
You must understand that during all these long years of seemingly uneventful and monotonous peace, this grueling battle has been raging endlessly inside me. If my wife was vexed by my state, I was far, far more mortified by it myself. Eventually, when I could no longer bear to be immobilized inside this prison, and all my desperate attempts to break its bars proved futile, I began to feel that my easiest option really was suicide. “But why?” I hear you ask in astonished disbelief. The fact is, this strange and terrifying force within me had paralyzed my heart with its iron grip, blocking every exit route bar one—the way to death alone lay open and free for the taking. If I were to break this deadlock and move in any way, my steps could only carry me down that path.
Two or three times before now I have been poised to set off along the road to death that my destiny has laid before me so beguilingly. But each time my wife held my heart back. Needless to say, I have not had the courage to take her with me—I have been too cowardly even to confess my story to her, heaven knows, and the merest thought of inflicting double suicide on her and making her a cruel sacrifice to my own fate filled me with horror. My karma is my own, after all, and hers is hers. To cast our two lives into the flames together would not only be against nature, it would break the heart.
And yet it filled me with pity to think of her alone after I was gone. Those words she had spoken after her mother’s death—that I was all she had left in life to trust and depend on—were seared into my breast. I hung in a constant state of indecision. Sometimes, seeing her face, I felt glad that I had not acted. Then I would quail and cower again. From time to time she would turn on me a look that bespoke sorrowing disappointment.
Remember, this is how my life has been lived. My state of mind was much the same the day we first met at Kamakura and that day we walked together beyond the town. A black shadow was constantly at my back. I was dragging out my life on this earth for the sake of my wife. That evening after you graduated was no different. I meant it when I promised to meet you again come September. I fully intended to see you once more. Autumn ended, winter came, and even as spring drew in, I was still looking forward to our next meeting.
And then, at the height of the summer, Emperor Meiji passed away.1 I felt then that as the spirit of the Meiji era had begun with him, so it had ended with his death. I was struck with an overwhelming sense that my generation, we who had felt Meiji’s influence most deeply, were doomed to linger on simply as anachronisms as long as we remained alive. When I said this in so many words to my wife, she laughed it off. But then for some reason she added teasingly, “Well, then, you could follow the old style and die with your lord, couldn’t you.”