"I'm not that particular when I bathe; I just couldn't be bothered washing up when I come in the morning. Whether in or out of water, I'm idle. Compared to me, you're three times more industrious. You wash from head to toe and leave no part untouched. You even brush your teeth! I'm impressed by your thoroughness."
They left the bathhouse together. Morimoto wanted to buy a roll of writing paper from a shop on a nearby street, and Keitaro thought he might as well go along. Turning east at the corner of the side street, they found the main road in bad condition. With a kind of contempt over the traces of mud kneaded and splattered by horses and vehicles and pedestrians that had trampled the dirt soaked by last night's rain, the two walked on. The sun was high overhead, but the vapor rising from the earth still seemed to be drawing its waves on the horizon.
"A pity," Morimoto said, "that a late riser like you missed the sights we had early this morning. The sun was high, but there was a thick mist. You could make out all the streetcar passengers distinctly silhouetted like shadows on a screen. With the sunlight behind them, each looked like a grayish monster. It was the funniest sight, really extraordinary."
Morimoto went into the stationer's, leaving Keitaro waiting, and soon came back out, his hand keeping the envelopes and rolled writing paper from falling out of the front of his kimono. The two retraced their steps and returned to their boardinghouse, where they climbed the two flights of stairs to their floor, the padded sound of their slippers audible. Keitaro opened the shoji to his room and invited Morimoto in.
"But it's nearly lunchtime," Morimoto said, showing none of the hesitation his words implied and following Keitaro in as easily as if the room were his own. "You've got a fine view all the time," he commented as he opened the shoji window and put his wet towel on the wooden railing outside.
Keitaro had long been curious about this person who went to Shimbashi Station every day and who seldom fell ill despite his emaciated body. Over thirty and still a bachelor living in a boardinghouse, he was working at the station, but what he was in charge of or what actual work he was engaged in was all a blank to Keitaro, for he had never asked Morimoto about it, nor had the other mentioned it. When Keitaro occasionally went to the station to see someone off, he was too busy among the crowds even to associate the place with Morimoto, and there were no instances when Morimoto came into view to remind Keitaro of his existence. Their acquaintance was merely one which had begun by exchanges of greetings and talk on everyday topics simply because of their lodging in the same house for a long time or because of a mutual sympathy shared by such men.
This being their relationship, Keitaro's curiosity about Morimoto was perhaps less in terms of Morimoto's present state of affairs than his past. He had once heard from Morimoto about his having been an honest husband whose wife had given birth to a child who had later died. Keitaro still remembered being amused by the words the other had spoken at the time: "I guess you could say that my kid's death rescued me — I was in great fear, you know, of my sanjin's curses." Keitaro had not even known what a sanjin was. Morimoto informed him, "It's only 'mountain god' pronounced in the Chinese way." In recollecting what Morimoto had told him, Keitaro felt the man's past had in it a touch of romanticism which emitted a light as mysterious as a comet's tail.
In addition to anecdotes about women joined to or separated from him, Morimoto was the hero of various adventures. Apparently he had not yet gone seal hunting with a gun on Kaihyo Island, but it seemed certain he had once made a fortune from salmon fishing somewhere in Hokkaido. And it was undoubtedly a fact, since Morimoto had himself confessed it, that he had started a rumor about a vein of antimony in a mountain in Shikoku from which no antimony had yet been extracted. But the most extraordinary event of all was his plan to establish a company for manufacturing taps. He said he had hit on the idea out of the fact that few craftsmen in Tokyo were making these for sake casks, but to his lasting regret, a quarrel with an artisan he had summoned from Osaka had ruined the entire scheme.
When it came to stories outside his business dealings, he easily proved himself in possession of a rich stock of material. That he saw many a bear taking a nap on its back on rocks in the mountains beyond the upper part of the Chikuma River in Shinano Province was the least extraordinary part of one of his tales. He proceeded to tell a still more unusual story concerning his having been surprised by a blind man climbing to the summit of Mount Togakushi, which is too steep even for ordinary men. A pilgrim aiming to get to the sanctuary at Togakushi Shrine is compelled, no matter how strong his legs, to spend a night on the path. About halfway up, Morimoto was passing the night by a fire he had made to ward off the chill. Suddenly he caught the tinkling sound of a bell below. He was wondering about it as it drew nearer until all at once a blind man appeared. And, what was more, the blind man wished him a good night and went on his way. On being questioned by Keitaro, who found the story a bit unbelievable, Morimoto explained that the blind man had a guide with a bell tied to his belt and that he could follow the route by the sound. Though partly satisfied with this explanation, Keitaro still considered the story rather strange.
Morimoto proceeded still further with his odd tales. What might almost be called a mystery emerged in full detail from those lips under the drooping moustache. He had once visited Yabakei Valley and Rakanji Temple there. It was already dark when he had come down from the temple along a road lined with huge cedar trees.
Suddenly a woman went by — a woman dressed in a long-sleeved kimono and a rich sash, her face powdered and rouged, her hair done up as if for a wedding ceremony. She was walking all alone in sandals toward the temple. It was hardly possible that she had any business there, since the gate of the temple would have already been closed by that time. Yet the woman in full dress, Morimoto had said, was going up that dark way all by herself.
Whenever Keitaro heard such stories, he could not help smiling with incredulity and saying, "Really!" Nevertheless, he was eager to give a willing ear to Morimoto's eloquent narratives.
That day too it was with just such an expectation that Keitaro had accompanied him from the bathhouse, even taking a roundabout way back. Morimoto was not much older than the other, but to Keitaro, fresh out of school, the experiences of a man who seemed to have gone through all sorts of barriers in the world were not only interesting but, if properly considered, profitable.
Moreover, Keitaro was a youth with a romantic cast to his personality and a hatred of mediocrity. When tales of a certain Otomatsu Kodama appeared serially in the Asahi newspaper, he read them each morning with the zeal of a middle school boy. He was especially interested in those passages describing Otomatsu's fight with an octopus monster that had leaped from its den. Keitaro had enthusiastically repeated the story to a student in his department — how the hero had fired his revolver at the huge octopus head, all to no avail because it was so slippery that the bullets merely slid away. Eventually small octopuses that had come out after their leader formed a ring around the man. The hero wondered what they were going to do; it turned out that they were spectators eager to see which party would win. The friend to whom Keitaro had told the story said half in jest, "You're quite a character! I suppose you'll never be content to take the higher civil service exams and pursue a steady career. When you graduate, you'd be better off heading for the South Seas to hunt octopuses, since you seem to like them so much!" Among Keitaro's friends the phrase "Tagawa's octopus-hunting" became fashionable. Whenever they met him in his search for entrance into the world, walking himself lame since his graduation that summer, they asked him, "Well, have you been successful on your octopus hunt?"