Light and dark

[20]

FUJII WAS Tsuda’s father’s younger brother. Obliged by the life of a civil servant to be eternally on the move from one region to the next, three years in Hiroshima, two in Nagasaki, and so forth, Tsuda’s father, burdened by the necessity of dragging his son from post to post and sorely concerned that his education was being compromised as a consequence, had resolved early on to entrust the boy’s care entirely to his younger brother, who had managed to raise Tsuda without going to much trouble. Their relationship as a result went beyond the realm of normal uncle and nephew. To characterize them without reference to the difference in their temperaments and professions, they were more like parent and child than uncle and nephew. Perhaps it would be most appropriate to describe their relationship as, to coin a phrase, “a second father and son.”

Unlike Tsuda’s father, this uncle had lived his entire life without ever leaving Tokyo. In this regard alone, a comparison between them, Tsuda’s father having spent a goodly half of his life on the move, revealed a major difference. In Tsuda’s eyes at least, this appeared significant.

A dawdler along the road of life.

Among the expressions his uncle had employed to describe his father, these words for no particular reason had inscribed themselves in Tsuda’s mind, and he had quickly enough become certain that his father was indeed just such a man. The phrase remained with him even today. At the time, his young mind had failed to grasp its meaning, and even now he was none too clear about what his uncle had intended. It was simply that he recalled the words whenever he looked at his father’s face. It seemed to him that the fleshless, narrow face with a fortuneteller’s scraggily beard on the chin and his uncle’s description corresponded almost perfectly. Ten years ago, like a man suddenly fed up with a long pilgrimage, his father had withdrawn from government service and gone into business. After eight years in Kobe, he had built a house on land he had purchased in Kyoto in the meantime, and two years ago he had finally relocated there. Tsuda hadn’t realized that his father had settled on the secluded old capital as a retreat, or that it had transformed into the ground of his final days. At the time, his uncle had said to him, the sarcasm in his voice causing his nose to wrinkle, “It seems that big brother has managed to salt away some money. If that balloon bag isn’t floating off somewhere, you can bet it’s money that’s weighing him down.”

In his own case, money had never been a weight, no matter how much time passed, and even so he had never moved. He had always been in Tokyo and had always been poor. This was a man who had never to this day received a salary. It wasn’t necessarily that he disliked being paid; it might have been more accurate to say that he was so willful that no one wished to employ him. He was inclined to oppose anything bound by rules and regulations, and even as he aged and his thinking changed somewhat, he continued to assert his characteristic stubbornness. This was because he well understood that amending his attitude at this late date was likely to earn him only the contempt of others and would in no way inure to his benefit.

With no experience of having engaged with the real world, grappling with plain truths, it was only natural that his uncle should have been an unreliable, a slipshod life critic, but at the same time, in another sense, he was an acute observer, and his acuity had its source entirely in his negligence. To put it otherwise, it was negligence that enabled him to speak and act in startling and original ways.

His knowledge was scattered rather than deep. He tended, accordingly, to put in his two cents on a wide variety of subjects. But at no time was he able to free himself from the observer’s attitude. It wasn’t only his status that made this inevitable; it was also the effect of his personality. The man definitely had a head, but he had no hands. Or if he did have hands, he never essayed to use them. They were always thrust inside his kimono. With an inherent indolence to go along with his taste for study, he was destined in the end to make a living with pen and paper.