Even at Sunaga's house when he saw some useless pine tree guarded against snowfall by straw ropes or the small garden over which dead pine needles had been strewn with excessive scrupulousness, he could not help associating these things with the image of the young master of the house raised tenderly in the bosom of that delicate civilization of Old Edo. For one thing, Sunaga's habit of wearing a stiff sash tightly bound round his kimono waist and his way of sitting squarely on his seat seemed strange to Keitaro. Sometimes Sunaga's mother would come in and join them in their talk. Sunaga had told him she was fond of reciting the classical epic songs, and when Keitaro listened to the words spoken in her sweet, engaging manner, words mellifluous yet quite articulate, he felt in them a delicious refinement not found in ready-made speech, as though they had just been brought from a cellar where they had been kept in storage for ages. He did not of course think that her speech was made up of hackneyed and set phrases, but he could not help recognizing that hidden beneath their surface was the deftness of an age-long practice in phraseology.
In short, Keitaro wanted something freer, something more off the beaten track. However, on that particular day he hadn't been his usual self, at least not in his imagined fancies. He wished he had been brought up in a house of his own inherited from his father, a house along some back street where rows of black-walled residences built in the warehouse style stood with that moist atmosphere of the Tokugawa period still lingering over them. In that neighborhood playmates would have gently called out, "Kei-chan, come and play with us," and they would have played at gangsters or soldiers. Once a month he might have lit a sacred fire as he visited Suitengu Shrine in Kakigaracho or Fudo Temple in the Fukagawa district. (Indeed, Sunaga automatically accompanied his mother in observing this old-fashioned practice.) He might have worn a plain iron-blue haori and walked in ecstasy along streets imbued with the atmosphere of the Kabuki world modified by modern taste, discovering some amorous intrigues bound up in the conventions but at the same time vaulting over them.
All at once the name Morimoto came to him, and it turned Keitaro's fancy a strange hue. He had, out of curiosity, willingly sought to shake hands with this shady-eccentric, the result being that he had nearly gotten involved in troubles he least expected. Fortunately. Keitaro's landlord believed in his integrity. If the landlord had had any mistrust in him, Keitaro might have been summoned to the police, his situation open to suspicion. The moment he thought of this possibility, the romantic dream he had been building suddenly lost its warmth and broke away meaninglessly like a bank of clouds made up of ugly fancies. But behind this ruin persisted the image of Morimoto's lean face with its double eyelids and its disheveled drooping moustache. Keitaro felt a certain fondness for that nondescript face, as well as contempt and pity; it seemed to him that behind it there loomed something mysterious. And with all these thoughts he associated that queer walking stick Morimoto had given him as a token of their friendship.
It was a rather simple bamboo cane, its root curving into the handle. It was different from ordinary canes in only one respect: the handle was carved into the shape of a snake. Unlike the vulgar canes with the whole length of a curved snake winding round and round the stick, the kind often exported, his had only a carved snakehead. And that head, with its mouth open as if it were about to swallow something, served as the handle. But what the mouth was about to swallow, whether a frog or an egg or whatever, no one could tell, because the very tip of the handle had been carved round and smooth. Morimoto had said he had cut and carved the cane himself.
On entering his boardinghouse, Keitaro turned his attention first of all to this walking stick. Rather, it was the associations made on his way home that caused his eyes to turn toward the porcelain umbrella-stand as soon as he had opened the glass door at the entrance. As a matter of fact, from the day he had received Morimoto's letter, the sight of the cane had always given him a queer feeling that he could not explain, so much so that in coming and going he had tried to avert his eyes from it as much as possible. But then passing the umbrella stand and pretending not to see it had begun to so worry him that he came to feel, though only to a slight degree, haunted by the weird cane. He finally started wondering about his nerves.
It was certainly weak of him to be unable to tell the landlord and his wife Morimoto's address and his message to them because he had feared, out of his own self-interest, a return of that suspicion about his and Morimoto's past relationship. Not that this weakness was one that cast the least shadow on his conscience though. It was unpleasant, of course, not to accept a gift kindly offered as a token, for that was to bring another's generosity to naught. But this too did not cause him much concern.
Suppose, however, that Morimoto's earthly life reached its end in the near future — perhaps he would be found dying in some roadside ditch. And in anticipation of that miserable end, suppose the walking stick remained in the umbrella stand, its bodiless snakehead carved by the versatile man forever attached to the end of the bamboo cane, its wide-open mouth about to swallow something and yet not swallowing it, or about to vomit something and yet not vomiting. When Morimoto's fate and the snakehead representing that fate were thus combined in Keitaro's thoughts, and when Keitaro realized that he had been asked by this very man about to die on the road to walk every day with the snakehead clutched in his hand, it was at just such moments that he had that queer sensation. The fact that he could neither take the cane from the umbrella stand nor order the landlord to put it away out of sight was, while an exaggeration of a sort, a kind of destiny. But as colors heightened by poetry are not always pervasive enough to be incorporated into the prose of the real world, it must be admitted that Keitaro had not found the walking stick sufficiently worrisome to cause him to change his lodgings.
On that day as usual, the walking stick was in the umbrella stand, its snakehead turned toward the clog box. Looking sideways at it, Keitaro went up to his room. Presently, he sat down at his desk and began writing to Morimoto. First he thanked him for his letter, then wanted to add a few lines to explain why he had not replied sooner. But if he were to state the reason point-blank, he would have had to write that he could not bring himself to correspond due to the dishonor attached to having among his acquaintances a vagabond like him. Since that obviously would not do, he glossed everything over by writing simply that he had been too busy running around for what Morimoto knew only too well. Next, Keitaro put in a few congratulatory words on Morimoto's finding a good position in Dairen, and he followed these with the considerate remark: "At this time when Tokyo is getting colder by the day, how difficult the frost and wind in Manchuria must be. I imagine it is quite trying physically. Please take every precaution against illness."
As far as Keitaro was concerned, this last part was actually his main reason for writing. Therefore, he wanted to so word it aptly and in as many lines as possible so that it would convey sympathy to the person addressed and seem quite sincere to whoever happened to read it. On rereading his words, however, he was somewhat disappointed to find them as stale as those used by common people in offering compliments of the season. But as he had known beforehand, it was only-natural that they lacked the passionate warmth with which a love letter to one's sweetheart is phrased. So under the pretext that he was a poor writer and that no amount of revision could improve it, he let it stand and continued.