"Imagine the difficulty of making your way by cutting a path through bamboo twenty feet high!" He held his hand above his head to show how high the bamboo grew and then proceeded to tell about seeing coiled adders lying on either side of the newly cut path, enjoying the morning sun shining on their scales. From a safe distance, one of Morimoto's companions would hold down an adder with a long stick while another man beat it to death. "Then they'd broil the flesh and eat it."
"How did it taste?" asked Keitaro.
"I don't remember that well," he replied, "but it was sort of between fish and meat."
At night they would fling their exhausted bodies under thick piles of bamboo leaves and twigs with which they had covered the ground inside the tent. But sometimes they spent the night around a fire they had made outside, and on such occasions they often saw huge bears right before their eyes. The group always used a mosquito net to ward off the numerous insects. Once they took it down to a stream in a valley and caught fish with it. That night and some nights thereafter they were troubled by a fishy smell from the net. All this was part of what Morimoto had called his carefree life.
He also talked about trying every kind of edible mushroom. One called masu-dake was as big as a large tray, and when cut into pieces and boiled in miso soup, it tasted exactly like fishpaste; another called tsukimi-dake was a monster of a mushroom, huge as a circle made by two outstretched arms, but to the regret of the party inedible; and then there was one called nezumi-dake, which was pretty, like trefoil root. Of these mushrooms Morimoto gave detailed accounts. He also added that he used to pick wild grapes, put them in a large hat, and eat so many so often that he roughened his tongue to the point where he couldn't even eat rice.
Morimoto's story did not end with his episode of eating. He also recounted the miserable experience of his party's having no food for an entire week. This had occurred when the carriers had gone down to a village for rice. The route lay along the bottom of a ravine, and after the party had descended, heavy rains suddenly filled the valley with flood-like torrents, making it impossible for the carriers to ascend with heavy loads of rice on their backs. Almost starving to death, Morimoto lay stretched out, simply gazing upward at the sky until he became so dazed he could no longer tell day from night.
"When you don't eat or drink that long, you have no excrement, I suppose?" Keitaro asked.
"Well yes, I still had some," Morimoto answered in an easy tone.
Keitaro couldn't help smiling. But what was even more humorous was Morimoto's description of the heavy winds he had experienced. While on this surveying trip through a wild tract thick with pampas grass, his party had once been caught in a gale so violent they couldn't hold their faces against it. They had crept on all fours into a dense wood nearby. Huge trees measuring a few arm spans around were being whipped and swayed by these gusts, boughs and branches making tremendous sounds. The trees were shaking even to their roots, the result being that the ground the party was creeping along shook as if from an earthquake.
"Then you weren't able to keep standing even sheltered in the woods?" asked Keitaro.
"We were lying flat on the ground!" Morimoto replied.
Keitaro burst out laughing in spite of himself, for he could not believe that even such violent winds could have been powerful enough to cause an earthquake by moving the roots of huge trees extended deeply underground. Morimoto also began laughing aloud as if the story were someone else's, but when he finished laughing, he suddenly turned serious, his hand stretched out as if to stop Keitaro's mouth.
"It may sound funny, but it is true. I know I'm a crude person, one who's had some rather out-of-the-ordinary experiences — things that are not up to common sense— yet it's true, although I must admit that it might seem quite unbelievable to you with all your learning. But let me tell you, Tagawa-san, there are many odd things in this world besides the gale I just spoke about, and although you seem to be hankering after such things, you must give them up. You're a university graduate, you know. And when the time comes, in nine cases out of ten you'll only think of your own status anyway. Even if you are determined to lower it, none of you students nowadays have that much curiosity to throw away your positions to go wandering about in the world as they did in the old days to avenge a parent's murder or something. In fact, you're safe from such whims because the people around you won't allow you to carry them out."
To Keitaro, these words sounded like those of a man in exultation as well as adversity. He thought a life so removed from the beaten track might, as Morimoto had asserted, be impossible for an ordinary university graduate. But not content to admit it, he said in a deliberately contradictory tone, "Yes, I am a university graduate. Yet I haven't yet found any of those positions you make so much of. In fact, I'm tired of looking around for one."
When Keitaro spoke as if he were abandoning his efforts, Morimoto put on a rather more solemn look than usual. "You don't have a position and yet you do. I have a position and yet I don't. That's the difference between us," he said as if expostulating to an inexperienced youth.
This oracular sentence did not make much sense to Keitaro. For a while they smoked on silently.
"I too — I too," Morimoto said, beginning again, "am tired of the railway job I've been at now for nearly three years, and soon I'm going to quit. If I don't, I'm sure they'll fire me. Three years at one job is a long time for me."
Keitaro offered no opinion as to whether it was better for Morimoto to give up his job or not. As he had no experience of resigning from a post or even of being forced to, he was indifferent to the other man's problem about keeping his job or leaving it. He was conscious only of becoming weary by talk that had taken a practical turn.
Morimoto seemed to have noticed that he was boring Keitaro; he suddenly changed the tone and subject of his talk to some cheerful, gossipy topics and after ten minutes or so rose to leave. "Thanks a lot. And Tagawa-san, whatever you have to do, you should do it while you're young." With these words, which might have been expected from the mouth of someone over fifty, he left Keitaro's room.
For a week or so Keitaro had no opportunity to have any long chats with Morimoto. But living in the same boardinghouse, they seldom missed seeing each other in the morning or evening. When they met at the wash-stand, Keitaro invariably noticed Morimoto's padded robe with its neckband of black cloth. And when Morimoto returned from work, Keitaro often noticed that he changed into a new suit with an open jacket and went out again carrying a queer-looking stick. In Keitaro's own departures and returns, he knew upon seeing this cane in the porcelain umbrella-stand on the dirt floor of the boardinghouse entrance that Morimoto was in the house. And then it happened that even though the cane was where it usually was, its owner had suddenly disappeared.
A few days passed without Keitaro's being aware of anything amiss with Morimoto, but when Keitaro had seen nothing of him for about five days, he began to wonder. From the maid who waited on him at breakfast, he learned that Morimoto had gone on a business trip. Since he was a government clerk, it was possible he had been sent somewhere on official duty. Yet to Keitaro, who had appraised the man as a functionary whose job was no more important than forwarding baggage, this information was somewhat unexpected. But when the maid further explained that Morimoto had said upon departing that he would be traveling for five or six days and that his return was to be on this day or the next, Keitaro was satisfied with her account. However, the days Morimoto was due back passed, and his figure in the padded dressing gown was not seen at the washstand. Only his queer cane remained in the umbrella holder.