Light and dark

[28]

IN THE small tatami room at the rear of the house, Makoto, who had been reviewing his lessons with O-Kin, began abruptly to recite from his reader French sentences incomprehensible to her, purposely interposing between each syllable a long interval: je-suis-poli, tu-es-mal-ade, and so forth. Tsuda was listening with his usual amusement to the shrill second-grader’s voice when this time the pendulum clock on the wall above his head spoke up, sounding the hour. Taking from the folds of his kimono where he had deposited it the bottle of castor oil, he examined the color of the viscous liquid with a look of distaste. Just then his uncle spoke as though he had been prompted even in the drawing room by the sound of the clock.

“Let’s join the others.”

With Kobayashi in tow, he came along the engawa into the sitting room. Tsuda, straightening where he sat, paid his respects to his uncle and turned at once toward Kobayashi.

“You certainly appear to be doing well. That’s quite a suit you’ve had made.”

Kobayashi’s jacket was a coarse fabric that might have been homespun. And no one could have failed to see from the sharp crease in his trousers, a striking contrast to his habitual rumpled look, that they had just come from the tailor. He sat down facing Tsuda with his feet beneath him as if to conceal the odd color of his socks.

“Are you kidding? You’re the one who’s doing well.”

Noticing the tag attached to a three-piece suit hanging in some department store window, he had ordered one made for himself at exactly the same price.

“This cost me twenty-six yen, a real bargain. I don’t know how it looks to a big spender like you, but I can tell you it’s plenty good enough for the likes of me.”

In the presence of his aunt, Tsuda lacked the courage to disparage Kobayashi further. He held his tongue and, asking for a teacup, drank down the castor oil with a shudder. All present in the room observed him wonderingly.

“What’s that garbage you’re drinking? Is that supposed to be medicine?”

Tsuda’s uncle hadn’t been sick a day in his life, and his ignorance where medicine was concerned was extraordinary. Even castor oil was a mystery to him. When Tsuda proceeded to explain his current situation, using words like “surgery” and “out-patient procedure,” his uncle, who had no experience negotiating with illness, appeared unmoved.

“You came all the way over here to tell us that?”

With an expression on his face that might have been saying “You needn’t have bothered,” he stroked his salt-and-pepper beard. It was a beard that appeared to be growing by itself more than being grown, a garden untended by a gardener, and sprouting wildly here and there on his face it made him look like an old man.

“Young people these days are mostly unhealthy. Always sick with some crazy thing.”

His aunt glanced at Tsuda and smirked. Tsuda, familiar with the history that preceded his uncle’s recent harping on “young people these days” as if it were a verbal tic, returned her grin. He had grown up on old saws like “ill body, sick mind” and “illness is the legacy of the father’s sins”; understanding now that they could be interpreted as expressions of his uncle’s pride in himself for never falling ill, he was the more amused. With a half smile still on his face, he turned to Kobayashi. Kobayashi spoke up at once, but what he said was the opposite of Tsuda’s expectation.

“There are some young people these days who don’t get sick. Take me; I haven’t had to stay in bed once recently. It appears to me that people don’t get sick if they’re poor.”

Tsuda was annoyed.

“Hogwash!”

“I beg your pardon — you’re sick as often as you are because you can afford it.”

The seriousness of the speaker propounding this illogical conclusion made Tsuda want to laugh in his face. Whereupon his uncle chimed in with his ratification.

“You’re right about that. What’s more, once you’re sick all you can do is lie there and suffer.”

In the growing dimness of the room, his uncle’s face appeared darkest of all. Tsuda rose and switched on the light.