Light and dark

[115]

TO THE doctor, Tsuda appeared beside himself with boredom. As their eyes met he inquired, “How are you doing?” and added at once, consolingly, “It shouldn’t be much longer.” Then he changed the dressing on the wound.

“You still have to be careful not to disturb the incision or it could be dangerous.”

With this warning he informed Tsuda that blood had oozed from the wound when he had loosened just a little the gauze that was packed against it. Only a portion of the dressing had been changed. So long as there was a possibility of hemorrhage if the underlayer of gauze was peeled away, Tsuda mustn’t even think of dragging himself out of bed and going home.

“I’m afraid you’re going to need the full week of bed rest I predicted.”

The doctor looked sorry for Tsuda.

“But of course your progress could always accelerate.”

But the doctor’s attitude suggested he considered Tsuda a privileged patient for whom time and expense mattered little.

“I assume you don’t have any pressing business?”

“I think I can manage a week here. But something a little out of the ordinary has come up.”

“I see. Well, you’ll be on your way soon enough — be patient a little longer.”

Having nothing more to say about this, the doctor sat down and, possibly because outpatients hadn’t begun to arrive as yet, beguiled Tsuda with a few anecdotes. One of the stories from the doctor’s days as an intern at a large hospital made him laugh in spite of himself. Someone had stormed into the director’s office accusing a nurse of having killed a patient by administering the wrong medicine and demanding that she should be “beaten within an inch of her life!” The story struck Tsuda, whose disposition was exactly opposite the angry protagonist’s, as a ludicrous example of the ridiculous and little else. To put it plainly, his attention was focused exclusively on the plaintiff’s shortcomings. At the same time, on the obverse side of these faults, he strung his own virtues like lights beneath the eaves and congratulated himself on them. The exercise reduced to something very like evidence of his inability under any circumstances to register his own shortcomings.

When the doctor had finished his examination, Tsuda was inclined to despondency at the prospect of being condemned by a nasty condition to bed rest for an entire week. Perhaps it was his mood; the current moment felt inestimably precious. He even regretted a little not having postponed the surgery.

He began thinking about Madam Yoshikawa again. If only there were some way to lure her to the clinic, he had been thinking, and now, gradually, he began instead to hope that she would visit him of her own accord. Though he normally deprecated O-Nobu’s intuition because it so often led her to see through him, there was a place inside him now that hoped, in this exceptional situation only, that she had hit the mark.

He withdrew a volume from the pile O-Nobu had left. There was evidence here and there of a sensibility that made it clear why Okamoto would have added such a volume to his library. Unfortunately Tsuda wasn’t good at understanding humor. The meaning of the words printed on the page made sense to his mind but had scant impact on his feelings. And he encountered one passage after the other that he couldn’t decipher at all. With no commitment to the book, he skimmed it for something he could handle, skipping pages at a time, until the following passage caught his eye:

When a young woman’s father turned to a youth and inquired of him, “Do you love my daughter?” the youth replied: “It’s no longer a question of loving or not loving: I would happily die for the young lady. I would die in return for a single tender glance from those precious eyes of hers. I would have you watch me hurl myself from yon cliff, fall to the rocks below, and be smashed thereon to a bloody pulp.” Shaking his head, the father spoke: “The truth is, I’m also disposed to indulge in an occasional lie, and having two liars in a family as small as mine is something I’ll have to think about.”

Today, the word “liar” made Tsuda more uncomfortable than usual in an ironic way. He was a man who affirmed the liar in himself. A man who fundamentally recognized the lies of others. Even so, he wasn’t inclined even a little to turn his back on life. On the contrary, he was a man who went so far as to believe that lies were necessary if life from day to day was to be managed. Without knowing it, he had conducted his own life until now according to this vague view of humanity. He had simply lived. As a consequence, when he thought about things at some depth he managed only to confuse himself about where he stood.

Love and falsehood.

The anecdote he had just read had evoked these two words, but he was at a loss to explain the connection between them. He felt bewildered, possessed by a grave problem that clamored for resolution, but until he could find an opportunity to experiment, his only choice was to turn it unavailingly in his mind. He was not a philosopher; even a properly systematic approach to examining the view of life he had lived until now exceeded his ability.