A Promise Fulfilled

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This is something that happened four years ago. I was spending the summer at Mishima in lzu, staying in a roorri. on the second floor of an acquaintance's house, writing a story called "Romanesque." One night, in the course of riding a bicycle through the streets of the town, drunk, I suffered an injury. The skin above my right ankle was split open. The wound wasn't deep, but because I'd been drinking, the bleeding was frightful, and I made a frantic dash to the doctor's. The town doctor was a corpulent man of thirty-two who resembled Saigo Takamori. He was very drunk. When he wobbled into the consultation room in a condition that clearly rivaled mine, it struck me as hilarious, and as he treated my wound I began to giggle. The doctor soon joined in, and before long we were both laughing uncontrollably.
We were good friends from that night on. The
doctor preferred philosophy to literature, and since I, too, felt more at ease with that subject, our discussions were always lively. The doctor's view of the world was one that might best be described as a primitive sort of dualism. He saw in all worldly matters manifestations of the struggle between Good and Evil, and this allowed him to explain everything in admirably clear and concise terms.
Even as I inwardly strove to maintain my
monotheistic belief in the deity we call Love, the
doctor's expositions of his theory were like breaths of cool, fresh air, briefly dispelling the gloom in my heart. One of his illustrations, for example-that he himself, who called to his wife to bring beer directly I visited them at night, was Good, whereas his wife, who would smilingly suggest that tonight, instead of drinking beer, we play bridge, was a true representative of Evil-struck me as flawless, and I had to concur. The doctor's wife, though small and plain, was fair of skin and had an air of elegant refinement. They had no children, but the wife's younger brother-a quiet, serious youth who attended a commercial school in Numazu-lived upstairs.
Five different newspapers were delivered to the
doctor's house, and in order to read these I would drop by for thirty minutes or an hour almost every day during my morning walk. I would come in through the back gate and circle around to the veranda outside the drawing room, where I'd sip the cold barley tea the wife brought me and read, holding the newspaper down firmly with my free hand as it flapped noisily in the breeze. Not more than ten or twelve feet from the veranda, an ample little stream flowed lazily through the edge of a green meadow, and along the narrow lane that bordered the stream, a boy who delivered milk would pass on his bicycle and invariably call out "Good morning!" to me, the stranger from out of town.