it rather amused me once to learn that carp in a fishing pond follow fixed and invariable paths. The working man is very much like the carp. He is most reluctant to move from the familiar rut. Except for pressing business or an emergency, he has no wish to change his route to work, even though he ought to be thoroughly sick of it.
If it were suggested that X’s ritual was unhealthy, I think we could answer that he shared a disease from which all working men suffer to some extent.
X was living in a suburb of Tokyo.
He was ten minutes’ walk from the station. At Shibuya he changed from the suburban electric to the government line, which took him to a certain middle school in the heart of the city.
As if pressed from a die, his teaching life had now gone on for seven or eight years since he bought his house on royalties from Examinations Made Easy, and we may therefore say that his everyday routine, of a sort that the reader will have no trouble in imagining from his own school days, had been rather a long one. If I had feared having X come into the mind as a stereotype, I could have used an opening from a short story I happened to have on hand, by M. de Maupassant:
“Old M. Taille had three daughters: the oldest, Anna, of whom the family seldom spoke; Rose, the second, aged eighteen; and Claire, the youngest, a child of barely fifteen.
“M. Taille, a widower, was master mechanic in M. Lebrument’s button factory. He was much respected, very honest, and very sober, a sort of model workman. The family live on the Rue d’Angoulême in Le Havre.”
Indeed it would have done my story no harm to be transported to a small city in France or America.
If, having come upon them, I had made use of these random sentences, I would have found that remark about honesty and sobriety quite appropriate. One is not to suppose, however, that X had three daughters, Anna, Rose and Claire.
X was not my teacher, and it was by accident that I moved
