Blue Bamboo: Tales by Dazai Osamu Read Free Page B

it’s all right.” Suddenly he was losing his grasp on the subject. He felt terribly alone. He thought of the textbook by Professor Takagi sitting on the desk in his room, but he could hardly stop here and go get it. Everything was explained clearly in the book. He was on the verge of tears. His voice faltered, his breast was trembling, and in a tone so shrill it resembled a shriek he said: “ In short... ”
    The brothers and sisters all sat with bowed heads, giggling to themselves.
    “In short,” he said again, suppressing a sob, “the problem with tradition is that it can cause even an error of great magnitude to go unnoticed, but there are a lot of problematic little details involved that we don’t have time to go into here. In any case, I would like to express my fervent wish for the publication of an introduction to mathematical analysis that has a freer point of view and is more accessible to the layman.”
    And here the youngest son’s part of the story ended. What a mess. A chill had even fallen over the room. There was simply no way to continue the story, nothing to graft onto. Everyone seemed lost in morbid contemplation. The elder daughter, however, being the compassionate person she was, wanted to come to her youngest sibling’s aid. She stifled a final giggle, composed herself, and began to speak in a quiet voice.
    “As the preceding discussion has amply demonstrated, our elderly professor is a man of lofty character. A lofty character is always shadowed by adversity. This is a rule with no exceptions. The old professor doesn’t fit in. Forever regarded as strange or eccentric by his neighbors, he can’t help but feel miserably lonely at times, and on this particular night he is, as usual, alone, as he picks up his walking stick and heads for Shinjuku.
    “Our story takes place in summer. Great crowds of people throng the streets of Shinjuku. The professor presents a heartrending sight in his old, wrinkled, cotton yukata , with the sash tied high above his waist and the loose ends dangling down almost to his heels, like the tail of a rat. What makes things worse is that, although the professor is a man who perspires a great deal, he has forgotten his handkerchief. At first he wipes his brow with the palm of his hand, but this method proves no match for such a prodigious amount of sweat. It gushes from his forehead like water overflowing a mountain pool, streaming down his nose and temples, washing over the entire surface of his face, and dripping from his chin to his chest, and he feels perfectly wretched, as if he’s had a jug of sticky camellia oil dumped over his head. He finally begins to use the sleeves of his yukata, swiftly passing one sleeve over his face, walking a few steps, then surreptitiously doing the same with the other sleeve, and before long both sleeves are drenched. The professor is by nature indifferent to appearances, but this flood of perspiration is just too much for him, and at last he decides to take refuge in a beer hall.
    “Inside, the air being pushed around by the fans is warm and damp, but at least his perspiration subsides somewhat. The radio in the beer hall is blaring a lecture on current affairs, and suddenly the professor takes notice of the voice delivering the lecture. It’s a voice he’s heard before. It sounds like that weasel , he thinks, and sure enough, when the lecture ends, the announcer comes on to pronounce the name of ‘that weasel,’ attaching the honorific title ‘His Excellency.’ The professor wishes he could wash out his ears. The weasel is a man who studied alongside the professor throughout higher school and university—a calculating schemer who climbed to a lofty position in the Ministry of Education. Now and then the professor and the weasel have occasion to come face to face at class reunions or academic conferences, and each time they meet, the weasel heaps gratuitous derision upon him. He delivers a series of boorish, banal jibes, and