Is there life beyond?
I remembered the courage of his atheism. How often we argued of the future in which one of us must live alone! For it would have been too good to be possible that we should die at the same moment and hand in hand cross the invincible barrier. I had known for years that it would be I who would be left, I with the heritage of long-living ancestors on both sides of my family. The question was should I remind myself of the possibility of life beyond or thrust it aside and live as though eternity were now — which it is, in one sense, there being no beginning or end in the endlessness of all things. So what then is the present solitude in which I am living? Is it an end to what once was, or is it a beginning to something I do not yet comprehend?
Did he know I was here in Japan? Was he still hovering about the house at home, the essence of himself, and were I there would I perceive his presence? Lying there on my Japanese bed, the sound of the rising sea mingling with the rain on the tiled roof, I fought off the mighty yearning to go in search of him, wherever he was. For surely he was looking for me, too. We were ill at ease, always, when apart. But what are the pathways?
I remembered an evening at Sardi’s, in New York. I was with a friend from Hollywood, and for the first time I met his wife. While her husband talked shop with other guests, this woman talked to me rather shyly, a pleasant Midwestern woman, not at all of Hollywood. She was timid at first and then upon some impulse she lowered her voice to tell me that she wanted some “real talk” with me. She had had, it seemed, a strange personal development in recent months. Her father, to whom she was very close, had lived with her for many years after her mother died, but had himself recently died. She worried about him, wondering if he were still himself somewhere, and if so, if he were happy, and in such worry she became depressed and was joyless.
One evening, she said, when her husband was delayed at work, she was sitting alone at her crocheting, a pastime to which she was addicted, and as usual, grieving over her father. Suddenly she heard him call her name, and looking up she saw him quite clearly across the room.
“You must stop this worrying about me,” he had said in his usual practical voice. “I am all right — happy, in fact.”
“Were you afraid?” I asked her.
“Afraid of my father? No!”
“But was he the same?”
“Exactly the same,” she said, and then added, half puzzled, “Except I knew that, though he was there, his body wasn’t.
“And have you seen him again?”
“Yes,” she said, “several times, though I don’t worry any more. Sometimes when Jack and I are just sitting at home quietly of an evening, he reading and I crocheting, I’ll feel somebody else is there and I’ll see my father smiling at us.”
“Does Jack see him?” I asked.
“I asked him once, ‘Jack, do you see Dad over there?’ He said no, he didn’t see him, but he believed I did, because in the old country where he came from there were people like me who could see beyond.”
Yes, and remembering, I thought of what my fourteen-year-old daughter told me the day after the funeral. She had wanted his room after it was empty because it was next to mine and she slept there quite peacefully the first night, I remember, for I had asked her if she really wanted to sleep there so soon.
“I don’t want the room to be empty,” she said.
The next morning she said entirely naturally at breakfast, “Daddy came in last night. He looked wonderful — all well again and so cheerful. He just came back to see that everything was all right.”
I restrained incredibility. “Did he speak to you?”
“No, just smiled.”
“And what was he wearing?” I asked.
“I think it was his red velvet smoking jacket,” she said.
But the red smoking jacket, though his favorite, had been laid away five years ago when he forgot about smoking.
Do I believe? If I do it is only because I believe that some day we shall know as we are known, and communications will be clear, the laws of science revealing to us the laws that govern the creating universe. Religion calls the creative force by a name, God for whom we wait. En attendant Godot!
There in the darkness of the night by the Japanese sea, I besought him to let me know by some true sign that he lived somewhere, only to tell me that he was. He made no sign. Yet silence is not finality. It may be only definition. He is there, I am here. We do not have the same wave length yet. Is that faith? I dare not call it so. I am trained in science. There are two schools in the approach. One is to believe the impossible an absolute unless and until it is proved the possible. The other is to believe the possible an absolute unless and until it is proved the impossible. I belong to the latter school. Therefore all things are possible until they are proved impossible — and even the impossible may only be so, as of now.
In this way my life continued to be lived on two separate levels, one by day, the other by night; one upon Earth, the other in search of a habitation not made with hands.
The rains fell, it seemed endlessly. It poured for three days without letting up. The mountains were hidden in rain and the sea roared against the rocks. We looked at one another in alarm. What if this went on and on?
“I thought you said June was the rainy season and this is September,” the American said to me reproachfully.
I myself was somewhat startled by the downpour, and referred the matter to the Japanese maître d’hôtel, who said that June was always the rainy season.
“Then what is this?” I asked.
“It is just rain,” the Japanese replied.
No one could deny the fact and so we passed on to more disputable matters. We decided to work on the script, planning each day’s schedule, in case the rain stopped some day. Scene by scene and shot by shot we planned and we planned. It was necessary and constructive work, and I also learned what I did not know before, that for a motion picture one does not tell the story in time sequence. One shoots all the scenes at each location, regardless of where these belong in the narrative. Thus for the first four days we would stay at the farmhouse, shooting everything that had to do with the farmhouse and its family of four, Father, Mother, Yukio and Setsu. This seemed a confusing business to me, but I could see its logic.
We sat around the long low Japanese table together with our cameraman and our Japanese sound man and assistant to the director. We sat on the floor, of course, and the cameraman was so unwise as to choose one end of the low table. I say unwise because he has long legs, very long, and he could not stretch his legs out when he was tired of sitting on them, because I had already grown tired and my legs were already stretched out, crosswise, under the table.
Here I pause for a moment to discuss the matter of sitting on one’s folded legs. Before I came to Japan this year, after so long a time away, I practiced faithfully every day folding my legs and sitting on my feet. It is not easy and at first I could only do it for three minutes and at best only got to twenty minutes, which does not last through a Japanese dinner, at least not the kind my friends give me. I was ashamed, but it was the best I could do. What was my pleasure, therefore, to discover that in the years I had been away, the Japanese have all but given up prolonged sitting on their legs! Instead they sit on chairs whenever possible, and the children, many of them, do not sit on their legs at all and even my friend said frankly that she could not sit for long in the Japanese fashion and anyway she thought it bad for the circulation. She attributed the surprising increase in height of this generation of young adults to the fact that they have not had to sit for hours on their folded legs. It may be the reason. Certainly I noticed the new height of the Japanese. The people are better looking and they have straighter legs.