Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories

And yet I sensed the presence of something comical within my own anxiety. Before I knew it, I was smiling.

Feeling a kind of salvation, I determined that I would sit and wait for the night to end, just as a sick old man waits quietly for death after long years of intense suffering.

I began to feel that anything and everything was a lie. Politics, business, art, science: all seemed just a mottled layer of enamel covering over this life in all its horror.I felt more and more as if I were suffocating.I opened the taxi window as wide as possible, but the constriction around my heart would not give way.

The Table of Contents listed one chapter as “The Four Fearsome Enemies—Doubt, Fear, Arrogance, Sensual Desire.” When I saw this, I felt still more defiant: these so-called “enemies” were, at least to my mind, simply different names for sensitivity and intellect.

Compared with him, I felt like such an idiot that it brought tears to my eyes—which, in turn, lent me a degree of peace. That did not last long.

I believed that I had committed every sin known to man, but they went on calling me “Sensei” whenever they had the chance, as if I were some sort of guru.I couldn’t help but feel in this the presence of something mocking me.“The presence of something”? But my materialism could only reject such mysticism.

While waiting, we talked about things such as the faltering economy. He, of course, knew a lot more about such matters than I did, but one of his powerful-looking fingers bore a turquoise ring that had nothing to do with hard economic times.

He envied medieval men’s ability to find strength in God.

He looked away from her in silence, but in his heart he wanted to strangle her.

Back at the hospital, I found my father eagerly awaiting my return. He sent everyone else outside the two-panel folding screen by the bed, and, gripping and caressing my hand, he began to talk about long-ago matters that I had never known—things from the time when he married my mother. They were inconsequential things—how he and she had gone to shop for a storage chest, or how they had eaten home-delivered sushi—but before I knew it my eyelids were growing hot inside, and down my father’s wasted cheeks, too, tears were flowing.