I dialled the telephone. My intention was to ask the tailor I usually used to bring over some suitable fabrics. The telephone was answered by a woman I took to be his wife.
"This is Miura . . . the Miura in Ota-ku . . ."
I wasn't an unusually good customer, but since I'd known him for over 10 years, his wife ought to have known my name. And even if she didn't, it would be usual to give the phone to her husband at that point. Despite that, the voice on the telephone showed no sign of retreating. She did not say anything, but seemed to be clutching the receiver while searching for words.
"Uh, I want to ask Mr. Oshita for another overcoat, but . . ."
"Uh, this summer my husband . . . he passed away on August 12th. It was stomach cancer. Not to notify you when you have helped us for so long was . . ."
"Not at all. Such a thing . . . well, then."
I hung up without making the proper expressions of condolence. That was because I felt as though I had been very discourteous and heartless to order an overcoat without even knowing he was dead.
I had known of this tailor in the Koenji neighborhood since my student days. Right after the war, half of a used book store run by a widow had been fixed up with veneer panelling to make a tailor shop a few yards square. The family consisted of a man in his 30's who appeared to be a demobilized soldier, his wife, and a daughter about four years old. There was one sewing machine and one dressmaker's dummy. That's all there was to the shop. My memory is that the husband was always working the treadle of the sewing machine or, if there were no jobs, cleaning the front of the shop. At least, when I think of the name of that shop, all I can remember is the husband either working or cleaning. Similarly, in my memory the still-young wife is wearing a red sweater with dark trousers, playing with the child in front of the shop.
Of course, I didn't have a suit made by the Oshita Tailor Shop until several years later when I decided to marry. Coincidentally, my wife's father had known Oshita when he was in the service and had always gotten his suits there, and so I also took my order to his shop. When I first decided to have a suit made, the shop was no longer rented from the used book store. It was a high-class tailor shop which he had purchased and decorated with red brick and transparent glass. Oshita still operated the sewing machine, but he no longer cleaned the front of the shop. As I recall, there were three young employees.
In any case, this Oshita had died, and the shop was probably empty. The employees may well have gone into business by opening small shops somewhere with one sewing machine and one dummy, as Oshita had done long ago. And like Oshita back then, when there were no jobs to do they probably polished the store from morning to night.
When I thought about it, Oshita had had severe halitosis lately. It was hard to have him measure me without grimacing. Since he had covered his mouth like a woman when he laughed, he was apparently conscious of his own bad breath. I didn't say, "You know, you've got really bad breath," but there were times that I unthinkingly suppressed my breathing. That may have been a symptom of stomach cancer. Just the same, even though he had died, the suits he had made remained. I opened my western wardrobe and looked. The suits hanging there were all ones he had made-- or that employees had made under his direction. Now that I knew that the maker had died, they seemed like the cast-off skins of a snake, hanging there in a row.
On the 12th of August this year I had been in the town of Zamboanga at the southern tip of the Philippines.
"Tomorrow is the 13th, so there will be passengers who cancel their reservations." I had been worried that I wouldn't be able to get a seat on a flight returning to Manila, and a hotel employee comforted me with that statement. Oh really? Is tomorrow the 13th? I remember thinking that and looking around the bright hotel garden with a sense of being a little superstitious. The suit I was wearing at that time was one made by Oshita.
The hotel garden fronted on the sea, in which floated a canoe with large shells lined up along its gunwhale. The Moro tribesman in the canoe, when he made eye contact with a hotel guest, would raise his hand and beckon to him in an effort to sell white shells the size of a man's head.
Not quite so far off a huge silk tree spread its branches, beneath which bricks had been laid and a bar had been built. Guests awakening from mid-day naps would vacantly sip brandy, or gaze past their Coca-Cola cups at the whitish horizon.
As I looked at the bright tropical sea and the red jacaranda flowers, a grey shadow of misfortune suddenly passed across my heart, and I couldn't help shivering. The image of Oshita breathing his last at just that moment is perhaps overly superstitious. In my future memories, however, Oshita's death will always be kept linked with the mid-day omen I sensed at the hotel in Zamboanga. More than that, every time a bar hostess makes an insincere compliment like "That's a nice suit," even as I am replying "The man who made it, you know, is dead. Cancer," I will remember that tropical town, with its Spanish-style fort and government buildings, lying as if dead.
"Father! Father!"
My son was calling from outside the window. Lost in thought, I was standing in front of the western wardrobe and gazing at the black telephone.
"Umm, this dog followed me home!"
The boy was pouting as a matter of form, but he certainly wasn't unhappy. His eyes were wide, and he couldn't hide his inward excitement.
"I tried to chase him off, and I took a really long way home, but he followed me everywhere. If I run at him he just wags his tail, and if I stop walking he stops too."
I poked my head out the window, and saw at my son's feet a dog with a truly good-natured face looking intently up at me. It was an unusual looking dog; below the neck it was covered with long white hair, but the head-- what would be the part above the suit collar in human terms-- was the color of chocolate. The dog stretched out its front paws with the posture of a Muslim kneeling and bowing toward Mecca, but wagged its tail violently. This was apparently the dog's only bit of coquetry; every time my son said something to the dog and stuck out his hand, the dog assumed this same posture.
"I think it must be hungry."
My son looked up at me with a worried expression. He had often said he wanted a dog, but the adults in the family took the view that a dog would be a lot of trouble, and would tear up the garden, so his requests had failed.
"Go to the kitchen and ask for something to give it."
"Okay."
My son may have thought he had received permission to have a dog; he jumped up and ran off. Seeing that, the dog took the guise of a wild beast pursuing a small animal, and chased after my son. When I though of his submissive attitude a moment earlier, a single 'ha!' burst out of me. In appearance, I thought, it looked too stupid to survive as a wild dog, but in reality that might be a sham to a surprising extent.
When I went to the kitchen to check a little later, my son was picking fleas from the dog. When he had rubbed DDT powder into the dog's long hair, the brown fleas had come up to the surface of its coat like a group of divers rising to the surface of the sea. The dog made little sneezes when the powder got into its nose, but it was surprisingly quiet and remained where it was put. It was attached to the clothesline pole by a piece of paper twine and could easily have gotten away if it had tried to snap it, but perhaps the dog regarded this paper twine as a valuable certificate guaranteeing its own life; even if it squirmed, there was not enough violence to snap the twine.
"Mother said it was covered with fleas."
When he could catch a flea on a concrete block, he would smash it with a hammer.
"But you know, dog fleas don't get on people, so it's all right."
A cornered flea had jumped onto my son's face; the startled boy fell on his backside, but gave that argument in the dog's defense. My wife heard my voice and came out.
"Look, now, it's gotten into the mesh of your sweater!"
"It's all right."
My son stopped hammering and glared at his mother. I noticed that the boy and the dog had the same kite-colored eyes. My wife looked away and started rubbing DDT powder into the dog's coat.
"Mr. Oshita died. It was cancer. This summer."
The hand in which my wife held the DDT can paused. When she started again, she said, "What will you do about the overcoat? I have no idea of another tailor."
The dog seemed to have attached itself to the family. Perhaps because whenever he saw a person he made his courteous, Muslim-style greeting, there were comments like:
"The dog may be a little crazy. You shouldn't wear rubber zori like that."
"The other day the man from the gas company came to read the meter, and it treated him like an old friend."
"It would probably do the same even with a burglar."
A superficial analysis of these criticisms might be that the dog had a bad reputation, but those in the family tended to say bad things about the dog as expressions of affection. Or rather, the more we discovered the dog's defects, the more we played up the intensity of our contact with the dog. Before long it was given shots for prevention of rabies, and came to be called "Boko." Boko was short for the word "bonkura" [shiftless].
It was a nuisance that the dog wagged his tail at pushy salesmen, but it never barked at guests, so Boko wasn't driven out of our home. There were times, though, when it would bark two or three times early in the morning, while I was still asleep. My sleep ended, I would mutter, "That stupid dog . . ." but I couldn't get seriously angry at it. I assumed that the peevish howl early in the morning meant it was hungry and wanted someone to get up.
However, one day when I was awake very early, I went to the postbox at the front gate to retrieve the newspaper. As I looked at the dried out lawn from the shadow of the wooden gate, a dog came along from somewhere and half sat in the middle of the grass, ready to do his daily business. As I looked around for a pebble or something to drive it away with, there was a harsh bark from Boko. At that, the dog that had been squatting on the lawn slunk off and escaped through a gap in the hedge. Boko sniffed around where the dog had been, its hackles raised and looking quite upset. In human terms, it had the ugly look of a gangster whose territory had been infringed; it ran around the yard with its tail dangling down. This was a stiff aspect it had not shown to people on that first day when it followed my son home. When Boko finally noticed me, however, it started to wag its tail immediately, did it's Muslim bow, and scratched at the lawn.
I was displeased to see the dog's quick change of attitude. But in a sense, I had shown the same inconstancy with regard to Oshita. That is, I had started going to the university without my overcoat. Instead of the overcoat, I wore a Burberry raincoat with a wool muffler. If someone asked about it, I replied that my tailor of the past 10 years had died, and that since he had made all my clothes for me I hadn't really felt like ordering from a different tailor. There was an undertone of vanity in this, since saying that he made them was the same as saying I had them made, but it's not that I was saying anything untrue. I did look at ready-made overcoats as a stopgap, but the drape of the collar and length of the sleeve of the overcoat didn't go well with the suit. It may have been the way I was built, or the way Oshita made suits, but I certainly sensed the inconvenience that the measurements would be different if I casually ordered from a different tailor.
But if, speaking of Oshita, I blustered that I had known him over 20 years, that we had first met when he returned from the war so it wasn't just a matter of his being skillful or not, then I would remember Boko's Muslim greeting and my heart would ache. Still, to wear an overcoat made by someone else over a suit made by Oshita inevitably felt like disrespect to the dead. If Oshita were still alive, ordering from another tailor would feel like betrayal; now that he was dead I could only feel that to nonchalantly have an overcoat made would be cause for divine retribution.
One day I was at home with no classes to teach; Yokoyama, a colleague from the university came over in the evening and, looking at my face in the entryway, said "I went to Kuroda's dorm thinking he had a bad cold, and his face was bloated. I put him in the hospital and came over here."
He removed his shoes without waiting to be asked in, and entered my study. He sat down at the low table with his legs under the kotatsu./1
"What? It's cold," he said. He switched on the electric kotatsu, and motioned with his chin toward a furoshiki he had brought in.
"I brought the clothes he was wearing. Come to think of it, I could have left them in the hospital room, I suppose. It wouldn't do any good to take them to my place, so I'll leave them with you."
This Kuroda was an assistant in our research office, and had been out of school for about 20 days, so Yokoyama had apparently gotten worried and gone to see him. I made some black tea. Yokoyama sipped his without adding sugar.
"The doctor said it was a good thing he was still alive. Apparently it's serious. It's his kidneys. And he said there's no good medicine for it."
"There's no point in exaggerating," I said.
"Huh. Just for the brain and nerves and the kidneys, there's no good medicine. When we were working on that reference book he got acute nephritis. He didn't recuperate fully at that time, and so it became chronic. In other words, since you and I assign tasks to Kuroda . . ."
"Did the doctor say that?"
"No. He said there were many reasons for becoming chronic, but often the reason is inadequate treatment or care. And so Kuroda is just this side of uremia. If he gets uremia he'll be beyond help. The doctor said so."
"Well, then, if that happens what is our responsibility?"
Yokoyama didn't answer that, but sat silent and puffed a cigarette. About two years earlier Yokoyama and I had put together a reference book for the grammar and literature portion of university entrance examinations. I say we put it together, but the two of us set the overall policies and selected the materials, and Kuroda had the bother of gathering the materials and drafting the annotation and such. At the time he was a graduate student and probably wanted the money, and he certainly wanted to impress us and ensure a position as our assistant. And since we didn't know that nephritis was that much of an illness, as soon as he got out of the hospital we had him get right back to the reference book, since it was work he could do at home.
"I didn't know it was that serious a disease," Yokoyama muttered. As I looked at his expression, I was finally convinced that Kuroda did have a life-threatening illness. Since the Oshita matter, I had apparently become more sensitive to the idea that there is no forewarning or order in life and death.
"In any case, can't we do something to help him get better? If money would do the trick, then 500,000 or 1,000,000 . . ."/2
"Yeah. I said as much to the doctor." Yokoyama gazed through the sliding glass doors at the garden, where nightfall was approaching.
"Hey, are you people raising a dog now?" The voice of my son and the bark of the dog came from the garden.
"Yeah. We haven't registered with the ward office yet, but its name is Boko."
"The dog doesn't enjoy that. Won't it run away if you do that?"
At Yokoyama's words, I looked around and saw that my son was trying to ride the dog. What looked like a hibachi cushion was draped over the dog's back as a saddle. But Boko, when my son tried to straddle him, would drop its belly to the ground and try to crawl out as though it were crawling through the hedge. But after crawling out it didn't try to run away; it would jump at my son and lick his face, so the boy would grab Boko again and try to get on him.
"That's a strange-looking dog, with just its head brown." Yokoyama was looking in my direction again.
"But do you suppose it's really Kuroda Fumio?"
Yokoyama blinked at my question. "Umm, I hadn't thought of that. Since they're identical twins, I suppose Takeo could have nephritis too, now that you mention it."
Kuroda had a twin brother named Takeo. By the time they got to high school they had come to dislike being together, so they went to different schools. They went to different universities too, but both were in the Japanese literature department. I had suspected at times that Fumio and Takeo took advantage of the fact that they went to different universities to write their papers jointly and submit each one to both schools.
In fact, Kuroda had cheerfully said once that, "In high school we sometimes switched uniforms and went to each other's schools. That was interesting, since I didn't know where the toilets were, and the morning ceremonies were different. We were never caught, but I didn't know either teachers or friends, by name or by face. That was a problem."
Now Takeo was working for a Japanese literature publisher in the Kansai region. Since hearing his story about switching, I had sometimes wondered whether Kuroda was really the Kuroda we knew. Their specialties and jobs were similar, so if the two changed work places it might seem strange for two or three months, but after half a year Takeo would have become Fumio and Fumio would be Takeo, I felt. And so when Kuroda came to school with a different haircut, I would test him to be sure. I had been joking about the sick man being Takeo, but since our responsibility for the nephritis would disappear if that were the case, I rather hoped that was the case.
"Takeo may have helped with the reference book as well, though. The manuscript seemed a little too journalistic for Fumio."
Saying that, Yokoyama gave me Kuroda's clothes and left. I hung his suit in the western wardrobe. Even hanging on the hanger, the jacket curved at the elbows and collar to just like Kuroda's body. Neither Yokoyama nor I had ever met Takeo, but it was eerie to think he was a man that suit would fit exactly. There among the suits Oshita made for me, this one suit had a foreign air about it.
I made two or three sickroom visits to Kuroda. Except for his bloated, yellow face and his lack of energy, he didn't seem much different from usual. Kuroda himself said his face was yellow because of the urine circulating in his body-- with his head steeped in urine there was nothing that could be done.
Kuroda got up to wash an apple for me. I stopped him and made him go back to bed. The bloating and skin color were signs of sickness, but his expression and head movements did not suggest a man close to death. He laughed and chatted as usual, and I stared at his cheerful face. I was searching for the shadow of death.
"What are you doing, sir? It's creepy," Kuroda said. I laughed and said I had seen the mark of misfortune on his face and would be uneasy if I didn't ascertain that it was not on my face as well-- the reason I wanted to help him and didn't think he would die was not that I hadn't found the mark, but that impatience was there too.
However much Kuroda may have known about his own appearance, he talked cheerfully about current affairs, matters in our research office, and the thesis he had been writing.
The doctor in charge was an uncommunicative man, and only said that there was no help if his kidney function didn't recover, so they would use an artificial kidney to clean his blood and wait for the function of his weakened kidneys to return.
I went to meet Katsushima, a doctor friend. He specialized in internal medicine at a quite large hospital. We had been quite close friends in our college days even though we had different courses of study. Katsushima was in a small office that contained a large, computer-like machine that produced electrocardiograms. He was studying the waveforms traced by the machine, but pushed them aside and listened to me. Then he said, simply, "My specialty is the heart and I don't know much about that area, but in this case you should, well, give it up. To worry about every little thing would just make it harder for you, so just give it up."
"Is it that bad, then?"
"That differs case by case, but chronic kidney problems mean early death. In one case I know about, the man became chronic after he graduated and started work. He was hospitalized several times, just short of uremia, and then it ended when he was a little over 50, just a few years short of retirement. That was a record for longevity. Depending on your assistant's residual nitrogen . . ."
"What's that? The whatever nitrogen?"
"It's a quantitative measure of contamination of the blood. If you don't know, it doesn't matter."
Katsushima looked outside the office, then closed the door again and locked it.
"There's a woman I used to like that rejected me. That was when I finally finished my internship. She married an ex-rugby player. This guy looked like a gorilla. The beauty and the beast. This beast played rugby in the middle of the winter for some reason. He caught a cold and wasn't doing well, but he played in an old boys game and developed acute nephritis. He had confidence in his body and asked too much of it. It became chronic, and he came to this hospital. The guy in charge said he didn't have long, so it would be better not to have a baby. I was an old friend, so I told her that. But the stupid woman went ahead and got pregnant. Then her husband went out without seeing his own child's face."
"Maybe they knew he didn't have a chance, so she wanted to have her husband's baby and he wanted his wife to have a baby."
"That's why they say sentimentalism is no good in the literature department. A year after the husband died, I went to see the woman. She was a beauty, just the same. I kept ringing the bell, but she didn't answer, even though it was three in the afternoon. When I looked, I saw the nameplate of some man I'd never heard of next to hers. I bought some cigarettes at the tobacco shop next door and asked about it. They said she couldn't pay off the mortgage on her house, so the president of the construction company-- some old builder, anyway-- made her his mistress. While I was standing there a man that must have been him came out of the house, and she saw him off very respectfully. I came home without saying anything, and never went back."
"Haven't you exaggerated a little?"
"People like you only know high-class books and people, so you might say that's crazy, but when you work as a doctor you see all the stupidity, evil and tragedy you find in paper plays/3 and television dramas. It's no lie."
"I just meant that a plain man like you sees life as a paper play. It may be that the relationship between the builder and the woman may not have been one of piteous tears because she had no money. The child may not have been the husband's to start with."
"It was, but in any case she would have done better to listen to her doctor. Then she wouldn't have any children and she could have gotten remarried. In your case, there's no sentimentalism regarding your assistant. He was told to write a reference book, and ultimately it was him that that didn't take care of himself. He should have known from what his doctor told him. About the disease of uremia. He was a college graduate, even if it was in literature. So the best course for you is to give up on him, and prepare assistant candidates that can do your legwork for you. In any case, you can plot his kidney activity and blood contamination on a graph and understand clearly just how many months till he dies."
What Katsushima said shocked me. In the old days he had been more materialistic than a Communist, and once when he was lodging with my family he had brought home a human brain in his lunchbox. After fainting when he showed her, my sister would shudder at just hearing the name Katsushima, and since we hadn't received any money to put him up in the first place, we made up a suitable excuse and put him out of the house.
For that reason, however, I trusted in the objectivity of his judgement in many respects. It was quite a blow to hear from his mouth that there was no hope for Kuroda. According to Katsushima, Kuroda was the same as condemned to die. In that sense, however, there is is no one who is not condemned to die; it was just that in Kuroda's case the schedule for carrying out the execution was more or less established. Katsushima might still die before Kuroda, in a traffic accident.
"In any case," Katsushima said repeatedly, "I don't worry about it. I forget it and think of happy things. Otherwise I couldn't work as a doctor."
Once when we were in college I had looked at a medical reference book he had. It listed many diseases I didn't know about. First was the name of the disease, then the Latin name, the cause, the organ affected, and the course of the disease. The condition became increasingly serious, and the last thing written would be "terminates in death." In other words, the illness ended only when the patient died.
This stated the course the disease followed under ideal (?) circumstances; no medicine or therapy was described. It appeared to be the natural order that humans are beset by all kinds of illness; they are driven into a corner and their lives are snatched from them.
Katsushima had filled the margins with notes and underlined parts in red and blue. This was evidence that he had thoroughly read, understood, and learned it by heart. That was undoubtedly what had formed his basic thinking on illness. That is, in principle man is defeated by disease. It is only if the human body is strong, and medical treatment and medicines are good that disease is defeated by man.
Accordingly, when there was no medicine or absolute method of therapy, he would just say "give it up." But that is difficult for soft-hearted people like me even when it is a clear-cut matter. Even with matters like clothing, when one's tailor dies it is hard to go look for a replacement. When it's a person one works with and sees everyday, it's impossible to discard him like a worn pen nib and look for a replacement. This wasn't a matter of thinking I was responsible because his condition became chronic when I had him write a reference book. If you force the logic then that is one factor, but it was to help Kuroda that Yokoyama and I undertook the job of writing the reference book in the first place. It was because we thought he was looking for part-time work to provide a little money.
Yokoyama and I both thought Kuroda was the most promising of our graduate students, so we did that for him and we recommended him to the lead professor as an assistant. It is unthinkable that he took on the job just as a ploy to get the assistantship. Or rather, I did not want to think that. It is for that very reason that I had been shocked then Kuroda said he and his twin brother had changed places and gone to each other's schools.
If they were wearing the same clothes-- clothing that I was familiar with-- I would be unable to distinguish between Kuroda Takeo and Fumio. If I knew them both I might be able to compare them and find points of difference, but if I just knew one and one day the person wearing the clothes was suddenly switched, I probably wouldn't notice the change.
Or rather, it was quite possible Takeo had already come to school in place of Fumio a number of times. When would that be? There had been a plan to start a publishing department at the school, and a committee was created that included Kuroda and us. At one of its meetings, Kuroda had presented some extremely good ideas and prolonged the meeting. When Yokoyama had praised Kuroda, he had replied, "Actually, my little brother is at a publishing company; he came up to Tokyo yesterday, so I took some time in the evening to ask his views." Was that Kuroda actually Fumio? Or could it have been Takeo?
We strove to come up with some amount of mony, and in the end, fortunately, Kuroda got a considerable sum from his health insurance and condolence money from the school. It was decided to cleanse his blood and do surgery to lighten the load on his kidneys. Kuroda's family was contacted and Takeo came up from the publishing house in Kyoto.
When I went to visit Fumio, as soon as I saw the young man eating instant ramen in the sick room I knew it was Takeo. I couldn't imagine two people who looked more alike; this couldn't be anyone other than Takeo, I thought. But in a certain sense, the two looked surprisingly dissimilar. It would be difficult to point out what was different, but my general impression was that Fumio was more nonchalant and Takeo was more restless. For example, his hand movements and the noise as he sucked up his ramen showed Takeo was a focussed noodle eater, completely unlike the Fumio I had often seen eating in our research office. He ate noodles with other university papers propped in front of the bowl, flipping the pages between mouthfuls.
Aside from the tempo of his movements, there was something sharper about the way Takeo wore his suit. Judging from that, there would be no danger of mistaking the two even if they switched clothes.
"You look surprisingly dissimilar," I said.
"In my high teens I got tired of hearing that we looked alike, and made a point of looking different. You too, right?" Fumio said, turning his bloated, yellow face toward Takeo.
"Exactly," Takeo said. "I didn't want to share the illness of my elder brother. We were always arguing, in high school. We didn't want to look alike, so we developed differences, including different high schools and different textbooks. We argued about who was softer, and beat each other up."
That evening I went out drinking with Takeo. It didn't look like there would be any sudden change in Fumio's condition, so on our first meeting I wanted to raise the subject of the reference book in a casual setting, and then apologize to the extent that there was anything to apologize for.
When we began drinking with a nabe/4 between us Takeo was a nearly unknown young man, but when he was chatting with some alcohol inside him, Takeo's resemblence to Fumio was almost frightening. The way they brushed back their hair and the way they worked their mouths a little before speaking were exactly alike. Even if the two could be distinguished when they were sober, when they were drunk they reverted to their prototype as twins and became identical. When we spoke of recent trends in Japanese literature, Takeo said just what Fumio would say. When the talk turned to Fumio's illness, Takeo moistened his lips and did all the talking. I had intended to raise the matter of the reference book first, but it was hard to get started, and Takeo spoke first while I was still stammering.
"To tell the truth, we are both short-tempered. Whatever the reality, he's still the big brother so he takes a nonchalant pose, but in actuality he is very fidgety and not the type that could placidly convalesce. Before when the illness was acute the family told him to recuperate more, but he wouldn't listen. He said he wanted to write a reference book . . ."
"Umm, that's true, but . . ." I tried to explain, a few words at a time, the circumstances of asking Fumio to draft it.
But Takeo wrested control of the conversation. "Yes, that reference book-- he would say he couldn't sleep because he was working on that, but that was just an excuse. As soon as he got out of the hospital he went to eat sushi. Both soy sauce and wasabi are bad for the kidneys, they say."
"I've never seen anyone so reckless," I said.
Takeo, intoxicated, licked lips which had turned as red as raw beef, and rattled on. "If you ask me, the guy's high-handed because he thinks big brothers should be. Even though we were born at the same time, with the same length and weight, he's the big brother somehow, and takes precedence in everything. That's because 'bunbu' is a word and 'bubun' isn't."/5
According to Takeo, his becoming a fussy person was due to Fumio. Fumio was calmer, brighter and more popular with the opposite sex. Takeo, while begrudging Fumio his flamboyant manner of relaxation, was still always attentive to the views of his parents and public opinion, he said.
"It was that way even with employment. At a university, it wouldn't matter what public opinion thought once he finally became a professor. In my world of journalism, though, even if it's just publishing moldy books, you have to be very careful about what the public thinks."
Takeo talked freely, probably because of intoxication. And so he told me of a romance involving Fumio that we had not been aware of.
The two had shared lodgings at one point when they were undergraduates. One morning Takeo had gone out to get the newspaper and had found a woman with no overcoat in pain before their gate. When she saw Takeo's face, she groaned with a look of great distress and stretched her hand toward him. This was the wife of the family with which Fumio had previously lodged; Takeo knew her face. He knew intuitively that she had mistaken him for Fumio. Fumio had lodged in her house until recently, but had suddenly moved in with Takeo. Although he had never been given a clear reason for the move, as soon as he saw her face Takeo grasped the reason for Fumio's leaving his former lodging. And looking at her pain, he knew she had swallowed poison.
"When a person has taken poison, you can tell without even looking, can't you? I dialled 119 and asked for an ambulance before saying anything to my brother. Treatment comes first, and of course I didn't want my brother involved in the incident at all."
The yosenabe was boiling down. Takeo stirred it around with his chopsticks, and finally pulled out a piece of tofu. He placed it on a saucer in front of him, but left it there and resumed talking.
My brother was called in by the police, but she escaped death for a time. I had to make the sickroom visits. My brother said it would be uncomfortable for him to meet the husband or children. But one thing about being a twin is that saying "I'm not him" doesn't persuade anyone at a time like that. I was beaten two or three times. She never actually died of poisoning, but the poison weakened her kidneys-- her face was very bloated, and extremely yellow. It was a terrible face. Within about half a year she did die, though. I think that my brother developing kidney trouble was a curse from that woman. Because he never once went to see her."
As I listened to Takeo I had no feeling that he was complaining about Fumio. I thought he was trying to accept the serious illness that had suddenly come on his brother. I had just reached middle age, and had not grown used to people dying. Every time I heard of someone who had died or who might die, I would find it hard to believe, and would search for some special reason to explain such an unusal happening. The idea that Kuroda Fumio's serious illness was due to that reference book was another effort to explain the discomfort I felt. In Takeo's case, if he did not criticize his brother by calling it the woman's curse, he would be unable to erase his anger that the acute nephritis had been neglected and left to reach such a bad state.
As we got drunk we became more subdued and settled. On noticing that, we extinguished the flame under the nabe and started to pick out the scattered vegetables with our chopsticks and arrange them on a plate.
Takeo looked at the plate through narrowed eyes and said, as if to himself, "The operation will be tomorrow, but I think it would be just as well if my brother died. I've been teased about being a twin since I was little. I'm tired of saying my brother and I are different people. If one of us died that wouldn't be necessary, and I could become myself instead of half of a set of twins."
I thought it better to hold off sickroom visits for a few days after the operation, and didn't go to the hospital even though I was concerned. Takeo gave me a medical status report each day by telephone; the course of recovery was orderly. But apparently Takeo's absence from his company was nominally a business trip to Tokyo, and so he had assignments to contact authors in Tokyo-- along with giving me a status report he asked me for directions to several universities.
When Takeo's phone calls grew increasingly peevish and I could sense the fatigue in his voice, I made a visit along with Yokoyama. Takeo's face was still bloated, but his color seemed somewhat better. Rather than yellow, it was increasingly colored by red blood. The doctor we met before entering the sickroom cheerfully reported that if things continued as they had, one more operation might check the illness. It was Takeo who seemed to have gotten weaker. Having said that it would be better if Fumio died, when the time came Takeo apparently had been unable to sleep; his face was puffy and his eyes were bloodshot.
Takeo said, "Thanks to you, it looks like he'll recover somehow." He seemed too tired to think of any other words, and repeated that phrase with bleary eyes.
After leaving Yokoyama, I felt myself floating. Of course I felt happy that it looked like Kuroda would recover, but it wasn't so much because I liked Kuroda as because I felt the issue of death, which had flickered around me since Oshita's death, receding into the distance. That's right, man was not born to die. And although death would come to me, it would be far in the future. I had become able to think such thoughts.
I suddenly remembered Boko. My son had asked me to buy a collar, but I had always given him a non-commital answer. At times I had thought I would buy one to take home, but on the way to school, but the matter of Kuroda had settled to the bottom of my consciousness, and even though I didn't intend to take it so personally, that problem had such intensity that I would forget about Boko's collar. Now that I could more or less relax in regad to Kuroda, it was as if a trump card had been dealt me and I remembered Boko.
When I asked for a collar and chain, the pet shop clerk asked me the breed of the dog. That must have been in order to determine the size, but as the owner of what could only be called a mongrel, I could only mumble, "well, you know."
"It's about this size, with a brown head . . ."
The clerk cut me off and said, "Is it a shepherd? In that case, this would do," and suggested a chain and heavy looking collar covered with silvery hobnails.
When I got home with the package, my son's sobs were echoing through the house.
"What's the matter?"
"Boko has disappeared," my wife replied, looking as if she had burnt her hand. "I bicycled to Shibuya to go shopping. Boko followed along and I told him to go home, but he wouldn't, the stupid dog. On his way back he wandered off."
"The dog is probably in front of Hachiko's statue/6 right now, waiting for you. Then it'll turn to a statue himself."
"It's not a joke." She gestured with her jaw in the direction of the sobs.
My son, his face red, screamed out, "Mother's the stupid one. She abandoned Boko and came home. Go find him now!"
He was sweaty all over and out of breath as though he'd been exercising vigorously. Only a child with a strong heart could cry so hard. An adult like myself could never survive such intense sorrow or joy. I gave up the idea of consoling my son. Since it now looked like Kuroda would recover, it was a happy moment for me. I did not have the strength to console my son's violent sorrow. I felt that even if Fumio had died, Takeo might not lament that much. My son, unlike us adults, would be unable to discover any reason to accept the sudden passing of someone he loved. He was sad and angry that even though he had said to go find Boko immediately, his mother had not done so. I noticed I was still holding the collar and chain, wrapped in paper, and felt that I had to hide them from my son.
When I pushed the parcel into the darkness at the back of the western wardrobe, something brushed against my head. Kuroda's suit was still hanging there. Lined up quietly beside it were hangers with suits and the overcoat made by Oshita. I closed the wardrobe with a creak that sounded like the lid of a coffin in a western horror story, and then smiled as an image of Boko came to my mind. Without doubt, that stupid dog was at that very moment using his Moslem bow to ingratiate himself with a family somewhere.
3. Kamishibai: Basically a story told with visual aids, in the form of pictures displayed by turns in a frame. The story tellers used to travel from village to village by foot or bicycle; now kamishibai are mostly used at home for children's stories, with the frame built to look like the front of a TV set (many of the pictures on Kevin's quilt were taken from paper plays of that sort), but Dr. Katsushima is clearly talking about pre-soap soap operas for adults.
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4. Nabe: Basically a cooking pot, either of cast iron like a dutch oven or a stoneware casserole. It holds a broth in which are cooked whatever meat or seafoods (and vegetables, maybe noodles as well-- the ingredients of sukiyaki would make a good nabeyaki too) appeal to you. The pot sits over a flame in the middle and the diners dish out individual portions as they go along. In this case the food is just an excuse to drink and the drink is an excuse to talk; the proprietor will usually expect to make more profit on the drink than on the food.
Wasabi: This is the greenish horseradish placed between the rice and fish of a piece of sushi. A little soy sauce is also put on the fish. That's done with a brush in Kansai-- in Tokyo the sushi is inverted and dipped lightly in the sauce, so I do better with fingers than chopsticks.
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5. Bunbu: Wenmu in Chinese-- it refers to literary and military arts, or civilian and military affairs. In the simplest of Chinese cabinets there would be minister of civil affairs and a minister of war, with the civilian side being senior, of course. The characters bun and bu also have the Japanese readings fumi and take (the o being a male suffix), so Fumio and Takeo are names that naturally go together. And of course Fumio would be the older brother. Takeo always refers to Fumio as his big brother, using the standard niisan when he first meets Miura, but later switching to aniki, which is more respectful in form, but chummier in actual usage.
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6. The faithful dog Hachiko waited each day at Shibuya station for his master's return. His master died at work one day in 1925, but Hachiko continued to wait each day until his own death in 1935. A statue was erected at the station, and it naturally became a popular place to wait for friends-- so popular that there is now a fair-sized plaza there with dogs of all breeds painted in bright colors on the walls.
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