Beautiful Town: Stories and Essays

The Fingerprint

The Fingerprint Shimon, 1918 THE MYSTERIOUS TALE OF THE LIFE OF MY UNFORTUNATE FRIEND N1 was my only close friend from childhood. At twenty he went abroad to observe more widely the arts that he loved. I well remember his interesting letters sent to me now and then over several years from Paris, Florence, and London. (They are among the most masterly writings I have seen in the Japanese language.) The last to come was a postcard dated August 11, l907, two years after he went to London and six years after he left Japan. His letters gradually became shorter; then suddenly they stopped. I kept on writing in the hope of not losing contact . Probably he saw my letters. Not one ever came back to me as sender. But there was never an answer. For a while I lost track of my only close friend. In case you wonder, his mother had died before he went abroad and he had no relatives. As he was not writing me, it was inconceivable that he was writing anyone in Japan. I imagined that he might have fallen in love there in that strange land. If so, I thought maybe he would write me about it, but that was a vain hope. I could think only of the old saying “Out of sight, out of mind.” Then four years later a postcard arrived with a London cancellation of July 11, 1911 (he put no date on it himself). It was addressed to me out of the blue and it reported merely that he was returning home. After that, picture postcards with no message arrived from Cairo, from Singapore, from Hong Kong, from Shanghai. Finally, late in 1912, a year and a half after his card from London reporting his intent to return, he appeared, a sudden and unexpected visitor at my door. The moment I The Fingerprint 65 saw him I thought, “My, how his health has failed!” He looked like someone who had exhausted his vitality. It could not be attributed solely to the fatigue of travel. He in no way looked like a man of thirty. It was a strange kind of ageing, like an old man but also like a man in his prime. His expression was dull; only the light in his eyes shone brightly like a jewel. From this description you may not clearly picture his appearance at the time. You can guess that it was not a very happy look. I’ll be satisfied to leave it at that for now. Meeting again after more than ten years, he would not talk very cheerfully with me. I thought back on what a brilliant conversationalist he had been when we were boys, and I wondered that a man could change so much. To my questioning he replied only in a weary tone. When I asked him if his health had suffered (to tell the truth, I imagined he had syphilis), he answered in a word, “I’m okay.” I did not think it was good, though, to doubt his friendship for me. At least he had come to see me straightaway on arriving in Japan. That was not all that I failed to understand. Although he said he “intended to live in Tokyo,” within two or three days he suddenly told me unexpectedly that he was leaving for Nagasaki. At first I interpreted this to mean “I’m going on a trip to Nagasaki.” Nagasaki was his old hometown, after all. Then, when he corrected himself to say that he would live in Nagasaki, I felt that for no clear reason I failed to understand him. He was born in Nagasaki but he had been raised in Tokyo since he was an infant. He had some unpleasant relatives in Nagasaki, but he had broken all contact with them, he said. He used to hate the very soil of that town. He left hastily for Nagasaki. I received notice of his arrival. I had no cause to write, however. He broke his departure promise and failed to send me his address. My friend who had been very open with me ten years ago was a puzzle to me now. If I had not seen him later and had only the impression he left at that time, I would have thought that for several days I had been living unawares with the ghost of my best friend, perhaps through the medium of some spiritualist. Somehow I had to feel...