To the Spring Equinox and Beyond by Natsume Sōseki Read Free Book Online Page B

fancy a strange hue. He had, out of curiosity, willingly sought to shake hands with this shady-eccentric, the result being that he had nearly gotten involved in troubles he least expected. Fortunately. Keitaro's landlord believed in his integrity. If the landlord had had any mistrust in him, Keitaro might have been summoned to the police, his situation open to suspicion. The moment he thought of this possibility, the romantic dream he had been building suddenly lost its warmth and broke away meaninglessly like a bank of clouds made up of ugly fancies. But behind this ruin persisted the image of Morimoto's lean face with its double eyelids and its disheveled drooping moustache. Keitaro felt a certain fondness for that nondescript face, as well as contempt and pity; it seemed to him that behind it there loomed something mysterious. And with all these thoughts he associated that queer walking stick Morimoto had given him as a token of their friendship.
    It was a rather simple bamboo cane, its root curving into the handle. It was different from ordinary canes in only one respect: the handle was carved into the shape of a snake. Unlike the vulgar canes with the whole length of a curved snake winding round and round the stick, the kind often exported, his had only a carved snakehead. And that head, with its mouth open as if it were about to swallow something, served as the handle. But what the mouth was about to swallow, whether a frog or an egg or whatever, no one could tell, because the very tip of the handle had been carved round and smooth. Morimoto had said he had cut and carved the cane himself.

    On entering his boardinghouse, Keitaro turned his attention first of all to this walking stick. Rather, it was the associations made on his way home that caused his eyes to turn toward the porcelain umbrella-stand as soon as he had opened the glass door at the entrance. As a matter of fact, from the day he had received Morimoto's letter, the sight of the cane had always given him a queer feeling that he could not explain, so much so that in coming and going he had tried to avert his eyes from it as much as possible. But then passing the umbrella stand and pretending not to see it had begun to so worry him that he came to feel, though only to a slight degree, haunted by the weird cane. He finally started wondering about his nerves.
    It was certainly weak of him to be unable to tell the landlord and his wife Morimoto's address and his message to them because he had feared, out of his own self-interest, a return of that suspicion about his and Morimoto's past relationship. Not that this weakness was one that cast the least shadow on his conscience though. It was unpleasant, of course, not to accept a gift kindly offered as a token, for that was to bring another's generosity to naught. But this too did not cause him much concern.
    Suppose, however, that Morimoto's earthly life reached its end in the near future—perhaps he would be found dying in some roadside ditch. And in anticipation of that miserable end, suppose the walking stick remained in the umbrella stand, its bodiless snakehead carved by the versatile man forever attached to the end of the bamboo cane, its wide-open mouth about to swallow something and yet not swallowing it, or about to vomit something and yet not vomiting. When Morimoto's fate and the snakehead representing that fate were thus combined in Keitaro's thoughts, and when Keitaro realized that he had been asked by this very man about to die on the road to walk every day with the snakehead clutched in his hand, it was at just such moments that he had that queer sensation. The fact that he could neither take the cane from the umbrella stand nor order the landlord to put it away out of sight was, while an exaggeration of a sort, a kind of destiny. But as colors heightened by poetry are not always pervasive enough to be incorporated into the prose of the real world, it must be admitted that Keitaro had not found the