“My dear friend, what does any point of view matter to me when we are concerned with a thing of beauty and a story attached to it? I shall be very grateful to you if you will relate everything to me regardless of the colour of my skin and of the date of this day.”
And so Kumamoto told the rest of the story without further apologies, but as disjointedly as if he were tearing each word from the bottom of his heart.
***
Although my host did not mention again with a single word the uncomeliness of his father, I could imagine more and more vividly, looking at him and at the tree, the almost grotesque ungliness which seemed to have condemned Kumamoto senior to painful loneliness. Not that Kumamoto junior was ugly; except for the fact that his eyes bulged in a strange way behind his black glasses, he was a rather handsome young man with a clear complexion, lips of almost feminine delicacy, and a forehead, nose, chin, and ears that had all the characterestics of a refined race, as had likewise his sensitive, small, and shapely hands. Nevertheless there was something in his features which one could imagine transposed into the pathetic ugliness that doubtless had been the allotment of his father.
For during twenty years, the tokoniwa remained a garden of unfulfilled desire and Kumamotó’s father went his way in life alone, oppressed by solitude. He made offerings to the gods before the tiny temple he had built and whose thatched roof was already mossgrown with age; he carefully attended to the garden and to his friend the tree; but so far he had received not even the slightest sign which could strengthen his hope for the fulfillment of his desire. He was almost forty years old, and his ugliness must have grown ever more grotesque, but his hope remained steadfast, amounting almost to certainty. “I must confess,” said Kumamoto haltingly, “that his neighbors always looked upon my father as a little . . . queer.”
The recluse yearly set out upon pilgrimages to renowned temples of the deities to whom his little garden was dedicated, and to whom he looked for the final fulfillment of his longing for love, for a gentle companion in life, which hitherto had brought him so little warmth and happiness. And on one of those pilgrimages he found in the midst of a sacred grove on the steps leading to a temple a dying cicada.
