The Youth of Things: Life and Death in the Age of Kajii Motojiro

The Past

163 The Past The children stood outside with their father and grandmother, waiting for their mother to turn off the light and come out. When they left, not a single person came to see them off. The dishes theyatetheirfinaldinneron,thelamptheykeptonuntilthelastmoment: these had been promised to the greengrocer and would remain there in the empty house until the following morning when he came to pick them up. The light was extinguished. Mother emerged in a mantle of darkness. Five young children, their parents, and grandmother all set off in a noisy but cheerless procession. More than ten years had passed since then. He was one of those five siblings, and now he’d returned to the big city where he was attending college. He didn’t remember any of the districts. Go parlors. Billiard rooms. Archery halls. Coffee shops. Inns. He’d moved to the suburbs for a less-restricted view. Quite by chance, it was close to the district where he once lived. The smell of melting frost and icy evenings carried memories. Onemonthpassed,andthenanother.Hislifewascharmed,fullofsunlight and walks, but at some point he lapsed into an unsettling sense that things were not quite right. The faces of his distant parents and brothers 164 Kajii Motojirō acquired the hint of something ominous in a way he’d never experienced before. This disturbed him. He was afraid of the man who delivered telegrams. His room got a lot of sunlight, and one morning he was airing the cushion he usually sat on. The cushion was linked to memories from the time he was a child. His bedding had been made from the same material. The worn, striped cushion gave off the smell of sunshine and began to puff up. His eyes opened wide. What was it? It was all so unclear. But look at those stripes. How sad the journey was. . . . The day finally came when he decided to take a walk around the district where he used to live. He was worried that the old name of the place might have changed, so he asked people for directions on the way. The district was still there. As he got closer, his heart grew heavier. One or two houses, unchanged from the past, remained squeezed between new homes. There were moments when he felt his heart give a start. But no, that wasn’t the house. No doubt, this was the right area. There was the house of a childhood friend. With a change in generation, it now bore his friend’s name. Someone—the mother, perhaps—poked her head out from the kitchen, but he avoided her eyes. If it was possible to find that house, he could remember the way to his old home. He set off again in the same direction. He stood rooted to the spot in the street. There he was, thirteen years ago, running along the street! Oblivious, the child turned a corner and disappeared from view. His eyes were brimming with tears. How sad the journey was! He was almost sobbing now. One night, he went out for a walk. And before he knew it, he’d lost his way on an unfamiliar road. It was a huge expanse of darkness, without path or light. Sometimes his feet stumbled into hollows as they felt their way forward. Such moments brought him close to tears. And the cold went right through his clothing. It felt incredibly late, but at the same time not so late. He wasn’t even clear where he’d first gone wrong on the road. His mind was a total blank. All he felt was the cold. He tried to take a box of matches from his kimono sleeve. His arms were still folded, with his right hand thrust into the left sleeve and his left hand in the right sleeve. He found the matches. He was clutching them 165 with his hand. But he wasn’t sure which hand had hold of them, or how to take them out. The light that he struck in the dark was the same light struck in the blankness of his mind. He knew how it felt to be human. For the first time he realized how much power the illuminating fire of a single match had over darkness, even after its flame had died and turned into charcoal fire. The match was completely extinguished, but for a brief moment its afterimage...