Morning Mist 291
into a house very near his in the last years of his life. This little story really begins with a visit to his house at the invitation of his son, who had been a friend and classmate through high school and college, and whom I chanced to meet, for the first time in some years, on the platform of his suburban station. The war had just begun.
On the appointed Sunday afternoon, I was shown into the sitting room by the old wife. She said that her son would be home shortly. I was much impressed with her close-knit tidiness; then, when the husband sat facing me, I was still more impressed, somehow, by the simple fact that age had come upon him. It was not an impression of unhealthiness. It was a feeling of, literally, age. A general slackening had come over the well-fleshed and rather large figure.
Apart from that, the careful politeness of his speech was at least twice as pronounced as I had remembered.
“You know Mr Iké,” said the wife. “He used to come often. A friend of Yoshihidé’s.”
“Is that so, is that so? It was extremely good of you to come. Yoshihidé is deeply in debt to you.”
His place by a window seat had a well-used look about it.
Clearly it was where the old man sat. Neatly piled by the wall in yellowed bindings were several of the familiar quick courses in mathematics of which he was the author, membership lists for academic societies, alumni registers for middle and high schools, and the like. But even more familiar was the black briefcase, showing some wear, it was true, but none the less staunch on the window seat where he could reach it, and puffed like a small pig, just as I had seen it the day before.
The wife said that he had resigned from a certain middle school three or four years earlier, and that he had now also given up his mathematics courses in Kanda.
During this brisk narrative, X sat with rigid formality, slightly bowed, hands on knees.
When his wife left the room, I had no choice but to talk as
