make yourself at home. Father—you’ll have Mr. Mita to dinner, won’t
you?”
I looked at old Akifusa. It seemed as though the old man had nodded his
head on his pillow. Was he pleased that I had come? The whites of his eyes
were clouded and bleary, and there were smudges of yellow even in his
pupils, but it seemed that from the depths of those smudges his pupils were
glittering. It seemed that he would suffer his second stroke when those
glitterings burst into flame—it seemed it might happen at any moment—
and I felt uneasy.
“I’m afraid I’ll tire your father if I stay too long, and that might ...”
“No. My father doesn’t get tired,” Tomiko stated clearly. “I realize that
it’s unpleasant of me to keep you here with a man as sick as my father, but
he remembers that he’s a writer himself when there’s another writer here. . .
.”
“He—what?”
I was somewhat surprised by the change that had occurred in Tomiko’s
tone of voice, but I prepared myself to stay for a while.
“Surely your father is always aware that he’s a writer.”
“There’s a novel of my father’s that I’ve been thinking about a lot since
he became like this. He wrote about this young man who wanted to be a
writer—the boy had been sending strange letters to him pretty much every
day, and then he went completely mad and was sent off to a sanatorium.
Pens and inkpots are dangerous, and they said that pencils were dangerous
too, so they wouldn’t let him have them. Manuscript paper was the only
thing they would let him have in his room. Apparently he was always there
in front of that paper, writing . . . at least he thought he was writing. But the
paper stayed white. That much was true, the rest is my father’s novel.
Every time the boy’s mother came to visit, he would say—Mom, I wrote it,
Mom, will you read it? Mom, will you read it to me? His mother would
