To the Spring Equinox and Beyond Read Free

going past him on his walks raised in him the suspicion that each of them might be concealing under his mantle or in the sleeve of her overcoat something out of the ordinary. And it was his wish to turn that mantle or overcoat inside out to catch a glimpse of that uncommonness, and then, having viewed it, to resume an air of indifference.
    This bent in Keitaro seemed to have started to assert itself forcibly during his high school days. A teacher of English at his school used Stevenson's New Arabian Nights as the class text. Until then Keitaro had a strong dislike of English, but the book so interested him that he never failed to prepare his lessons, and each time the teacher called on him, he stood and translated the assigned passage. Once he was so excited by the story that, forgetting the distinction between fiction and reality, he asked the teacher quite seriously, "Did such things really happen in nineteenth-century London?"
    A recent returnee from England, the teacher drew a linen handkerchief from a hip pocket under his black melton morning coat and, patting his nose, replied, "Possibly, and not only in the nineteenth century, but at present as well. London is really the strangest city."
    This reply caused Keitaro's eyes to sparkle.
    "But," the teacher went on, rising from his chair, "our writer is, as you know, noted for his original observations, and naturally his view of events is different from that of ordinary men, which might be why he came up with such stories. He was the type who even found romance in a hansom moving along the street."
    Keitaro could not understand how a hansom and romance could be linked, so he ventured to ask. The teacher's explanation satisfied him.
    Since that time, whenever he saw a rickshaw—that most commonplace vehicle in the most commonplace city of Tokyo—waiting for hire, he thought that perhaps this same one the night before had had in it a man carrying a kitchen knife to be used in committing a murder, or that it might have transported a beautiful woman under its hood, bringing her to some station to catch a train that would take her in the opposite direction from the one in which her pursuers thought she was going. In this way Keitaro often amused himself with imaginary terrors and delights.
    As he indulged in such fantasies, there arose in him the idea that in so complicated a world something ought to happen to him that would send a fresh stimulus through his nerves, something unusual, even though it might not be exactly what he anticipated. Ever since he had left school, however, his life consisted of merely going about on streetcars and visiting strangers with letters of introduction, so there was nothing in it particularly like a novel. He was bored to death each day to see the same face of the boardinghouse maid and to eat the meals she served him. If a possibility to work for the Manchurian Railway or the Governor General of Korea had been realized, it would have at least relieved him of boredom, providing stimulus of a sort as well as a livelihood. But a few days ago it had become quite evident that he had little chance for such a job, so he had fallen into a listlessness which made him feel that the common-placeness around him was closely related to his own incompetence. He even lost the courage to make one of his desultory explorations of human lives on streetcars, which could be done as easily as walking in search of small coins fallen on the road. Still less could he bring himself to run about looking for some means of earning a living. And so in spite of having no real desire to, he had consumed a large volume of beer the previous night and had gone to bed early.
    On such occasions it was a kind of stimulation for Keitaro to look at the face of a Morimoto, who could only be described as a commonplace type with an abundance of uncommon experiences. It was for this reason that Keitaro had invited Morimoto into his room, even going so far as to accompany him to a shop