# Tayama Katai and His Novel Entitled Futon/Futon/Chapter 3

III
Since then one year and a half had passed until the present event occurred.
During that time Yoshiko had returned twice to her home. In the meantime she wrote five short stories, one long novel, and scores of literary essays, as well as some new-style poems [free verse]. She excelled in English at the women's college, and she bought the complete works of Turgenev, selected by Tokio, from the Maruzen Bookstore. Her first visit to her home was during the summer vacation; the second visit was on the advice of a doctor to recuperate from a nervous breakdown in the quiet mountain village of her home.
The house where Yoshiko stayed was located at Dote Sanban-Chō in Kōjimachi, close to the dyke where the Kōbu Line passed. Her study was a room of eight mats. It was the inner guest room of the house, but the neighborhood was quite noisy, as the house faced a heavily travelled street where men were passing by and children played noisily. In her room, there was a bookcase, which was smaller than Tokio's bookcase that was used for western books in his study. By her bookcase there was a desk of lacquered papier-maché, and on it was a mirror, a powder plate, a bottle of white lotion, as well as a large bottle containing potassium bromide, which, according to her, was used to cure nagging headaches that were caused by her nervousness. In her bookcase, one could find the complete works of Kōyō, the ballad dramas of Chikamatsu, and some English textbooks; particularly noticeable were the complete works of Turgenev which she had recently bought. ​And, as soon as Yoshiko, a prospective woman novelist, returned from school, she spent most of her time writing letters instead of turning out compositions. This resulted in her having many boy friends. It was noticed that a large number of the letters she received were in masculine handwriting. A student of a teachers' college and a student of Waseda University, among her boy friends, were said to have occasionally visited her lodgings.
In the section of Dote Sanban-Chō in Kōjimachi where Yoshiko lived, there were not many girl students who were as stylish as Yoshiko. In this neighborhood there were many old-fashioned merchants' daughters. Some distance from Yoshiko's present lodging, in the direction of Ichigaya Mitsuke, Tokio's wife's parents lived. Therefore, Yoshiko's modern style that she had learned in Kobe, had all her neighbors raising their eyebrows. Tokio often heard about Yoshiko's behavior from his wife who quoted her sister as follows:
"Today my sister was telling me again that Yoshiko-san is such a troublemaker. She doesn't mind her boy friends coming to see her but she says they go out together to visit the temple of Fudō [Acala] in the evening, and she doesn't return home until late at night. . . . Of course, Yoshiko-san won't misbehave, but she can't stand the neighbor's gossiping, she says."
Whenever Tokio heard this sort of grumbling, he always took Yoshiko's side replying, "Such old-fashioned persons as you just can't understand Yoshiko's feelings. People seem to think it suspicious if they see a man and woman so much as strolling or talking together, but, after all, thinking or speaking like that is in itself old-fashioned. ​Nowadays since women are self-aware, once they have made up their minds to do something, they just go ahead and do as they please."
Tokio proudly lectured Yoshiko on his views relating to this controversy, "It's time women should be aware. It's no good for a woman still to be so weak-minded as to depend too much on others. As Sudermann's Magda said, if a woman is so lacking in courage as to allow herself to be transferred immediately from the hands of her father into the hands of her future husband, she is worthless. As one of Japan's newly awakened women you must think and act on your own initiative." Tokio advised her along these lines, and further explained his point of view by taking as examples Ibsen's Nora and Turgenev's Elena to illustrate how Russian and German women had an abundance of volition and emotion. Then, Tokio paused a moment and further cautioned Yoshiko by saying, "But, when I speak of self-awareness, it also includes self-examination. That is, I don't mean that you can indiscreetly persist in your own ways. You must be prepared to take upon yourself all responsibility for whatever you do...."
This lecture by Tokio sounded more meaningful to Yoshiko than anything else, and her esteem for him increased. It seemed to her that his teaching was more liberal and authoritative than that of the Bible.
​For a student at a woman's college, Yoshiko's attire was too flashy. Her slender figure was tied with a beautiful obi which was of the latest fashion, a gold ring adorned one of her fingers and her overall appearance was enough to attract people's attention when she was walking on the street. Her face could not be considered so beautiful as it was expressive. Sometimes it seemed extremely beautiful, but at other times it seemed somewhat plain. Her eyes twinkled expressively and they were constantly on the move. Women up until four or five years ago could only express their feelings when they were upset, or when they were smiling, and so forth. They were limited to three or at the most four facial expressions. Now however, the number of women who expressed their emotions had increased. Tokio thought that Yoshiko was one of these modern women.
The relationship between Tokio and Yoshiko was too familiar for simply that of a mentor and a pupil. A woman who could not mind her own business had observed Yoshiko and Tokio and said to his wife, "Tokio-san has completely changed since Yoshiko-san came to your home. Looking at the way these two people are behaving, it would seem as if their two souls are absorbed in each other. You had better be on your guard." There was no doubt, of course, that this affair would look that way seen from the outside. But were they actually so intimate?
Young women's hearts are easily carried away. One minute they seem to be gay but the next minute they are depressed. They are easily excited by trifling things, and equally readily hurt by matters of no importance. Tokio was ceaselessly perplexed over Yoshiko's gentle attitude that neither seemed to be one of love, nor yet not of love. ​The power of morals and the restraints of customs can be more easily destroyed than torn cloth, given the opportunity. What does not come readily is the opportunity.
Tokio thought in his heart that such an opportunity had come close at least twice during this year. One time was when Yoshiko sent him a thick letter in which she had written, in tears, that she was so incompetent, and that she could not reciprocate her mentor's great kindness, and that she was going home to become a farmer's wife, and retire to the country. The second chance was one night when Tokio dropped in unexpectedly on Yoshiko who was alone taking charge of the house during the landlady's absence. The first time, when Tokio received the letter from her, he understood clearly the significance of her letter. He did not sleep all night worrying how he should write a reply. Glancing several times at the face of his wife who was sleeping peacefully, he censured himself as to how badly his own conscience had been paralyzed. And, as a consequence, the letter he mailed the next morning revealed the attitude of a strict teacher. The second time was on a spring night about two months after the first chance, when he unexpectedly dropped in to see her. Yoshiko was sitting all alone in front of a hibachi, her face beautifully made up with white liquid make-up.
"What's the matter?" Tokio asked.
"I'm taking charge of the house."
"Where's my sister-in-law?"
"She went shopping at Yotsuya," she said and gazed at Tokio's face. She looked very bewitching. Tokio's heart leaped with ​excitement, helpless before the power of her glance. Although they exchanged a few words about unimportant matters, they both seemed to realize that their idle chatter was not so idle at all. What would have happened to them, if they had kept on talking together for another fifteen minutes? Her expressive eyes twinkled; her words were captivating; and her deportment was indeed extraordinary.
"You are made up very prettily tonight, aren't you?" He said deliberately.
"Thank you, I just had my bath a short time ago."
"No, I mean your face is made up so white. . . ."
"Oh! Please stop joking, Sensei!" she smiled coquettishly inclining her body.
Soon Tokio left. Yoshiko asked him to stay a little longer, but as he insisted on going home, she regretfully saw him off, accompanying him for a short distance under the moonlight. He was sure that her white face reflected something mysterious and profound.
Sometime in April Yoshiko turned pale from an illness and developed an extreme case of nerves. She complained that she could not sleep well, even though she was taking large quantities of potassium bromide. Ceaseless desires and the force for reproduction entice a marriageable woman without let up. Yoshiko made a habitual practice of taking various kinds of medicine.
She returned home in late April, then came back to Tokyo in September. It was then that the event of present concern took place.
What is called the event of present concern is nothing more than that Yoshiko found a lover. On her return to Tokyo, she had ​stopped over together with her lover for two days at Saga in Kyoto. As the two days' journey did not tally with the number of days that she should have taken between her departure date from Bitchū and her arrival date in Tokyo, Tokio, after an exchange of correspondence with her parents in Bitchū, interrogated her and found the reason for her delay. Yoshiko told Tokio that she and her sweetheart were in love, she meant pure love. They had never committed any sin, however, in the near future they hoped at all costs to get married. Tokio, as her mentor, now knowing of their affair, was obliged to play the role of a go-between.
Yoshiko's lover was a student at Dōshisha University and was a promising young man who attended the Kobe church. His name was Tanaka Hideo. He was twenty-one years of age.
Yoshiko gave her solemn word in front of her mentor that she had not committed any sinful act. She defiantly denied having ever being engaged in any disgraceful acts although her parents back home accused her of a debased mind saying that she, who was still a student, had secretly stayed for two days with a man at Saga. She said it was after they had parted at Kyoto that they mutually realized that they were in love. On her return to Tokyo, she found an ardent letter from him. And only then did she promise him that she would marry him some time in the future; therefore, she said to Tokio in tears, she had not misbehaved. Tokio had no choice but to help them succeed in what they claimed to be their sacred love, although in his heart he felt it an extremely great sacrifice on his part.
Tokio suffered intense agony. Being deprived of what he had ​loved depressed him to the highest degree. Of course, he had had no intention to set out to make his girl student his lover. If he had had such definite intentions, he would not have been reluctant to grasp at the two opportunities which had already come within his reach. But, how could he bear to have his beloved student, this Yoshiko who had added beautiful colors and endless vitality to his lonely life, be suddenly snatched away by another? Although he had hesitated to grasp at the opportunities twice, he was waiting for a faint hope, in the bottom-most reaches of his heart, of the possibility of a third or a fourth opportunity, then starting a new life. Tokio was distressed and distracted. Feelings of jealousy, pity and regret blended together, swirling around in his brain like a cyclone. Mixed with these feelings, was a sense of his moral responsibility as a teacher which erupted into a fit of brief madness. Apart from these feelings, a sense of sacrifice for the sake of his beloved pupil's happiness, all the more distracted his mind. As a result, he consumed a large amount of saké at dinner from which he fell into a sleep.
The next day was a rainy Sunday. The noise of rain pattering on the grove in the backyard caused him to feel more forlorn. He could not help but wonder at the density of the rain falling against the old zelkova tree and how long it lasted falling boundlessly from the sky. Tokio had neither the spirit to read nor to pick up his pen. It was now autumn and while he lay on a rattan chair which felt chilly to his back and watched looking at the downpour he reflected upon his past life leading to this recent affair. He had gone through several such experiences before. He constantly tasted the bitterness of the ​lonely anguish of always being one step away from being able to enter the realm of fortune and being left standing outside. It was thus for him the case when he realized that socially. Love! love! love! To think that even now he was at the mercy of such a passive fate; his heart ached to the core at his lack of spirit and his hapless destiny. It occurred to him that he was Turgenev's so-called "superfluous man" and thought of the hero's empty life.
Being unable to stand his desolation, he began to ask for saké in the afternoon. Complaining that his wife was slow in preparations and the side dish for saké on the table did not taste good, he got angry and drank in desperation. Emptying one saké bottle after another, Tokio, in no time, got drunk as a stone. He stopped complaining about his wife. He only hollered "saké, saké" whenever the jug became empty, then, he emptied the new container, gulping the saké down. The timid maid looked aghast at her master, wondering what had gone wrong with him. At first, he had been fondly hugging, patting, and kissing his five-year old son, but when the child, for some reason, began to cry, Tokio lost his temper and spanked him on his buttocks. Three of his children were afraid and perplexed looking at the red face of their father who was not like the father that they used to know. After drinking nearly a shō he finally sprawled out drunk, not caring even when he overturned the table, and he then began to sing slowly, with an odd beat, a puerile free verse poem which had been popular some ten years before.
You must think that it was only a windstorm That swirled alone in front of your gate
Blowing up dust from off the street, More violent than the windstorm More turblent than the dust Goes a broken-hearted corpse Wondering through at break of day.
He stopped in the middle of the tune, and suddenly stood up, still covered with the futon which his wife had placed over him, and went like a small moving hill into a drawing room. His wife followed him asking "Where are you going? Where are you going to go?" but he ignored her and tried to enter the privy without removing the futon. She said in consternation, "I don't like you drunk. Do you know that you are in the lavatory?"
Suddenly she pulled the futon from behind, and it was left in her hands at the entrance of the lavatory. Tokio staggered dangerously as he relieved himself, but as soon as he was done he suddenly lay down and fell asleep. His wife, scandalized, tried over and over again by shaking to wake him up, but Tokio made no effort to move or to stand up. In reality, he was not asleep but was gazing at the pouring rain outside, with his big sharp eyes wide open in a face like red clay.
* ↑ A heroine in Herman Sudermann's drama, Heimat.
* ↑ A heroine in Henrik Ibsen's drama, Et dukkehjem ("A Doll's House").
* ↑ A heroine in Ivan Turgenev's novel, Nakanune ("On the Eve").
* ↑ One shō equalls 1.92 U.S. quarts.