“What, this?” she said breezily. “This will clear up in no time.”
“Really?”
“It hasn’t affected the eyes themselves at all. I’m sure you’ll be able to travel in four or five days.”
My wife broke in to ask if there were any injections that could be given for this sort of thing.
“There are, yes, but . . .”
“Please, Doctor,” said my wife, bowing deeply.
Whether the injection worked or the infection had simply run its natural course I couldn’t say, but my daughter’s eyes opened on the afternoon of the second day after we visited the hospital.
“Thank goodness, thank goodness,” was all I could say, and I said it over and over. The first thing I did was take her to see what was left of the house.
“See? It burned all up.”
“Yeah,” she said, with a big smile on her face. “Burned all up.”
“Everything’s gone. Mr. Rabbit, our shoes, the Odagiri house, the Chino house, they all burned up.”
“Yeah, they all burned up,” she said, still smiling.
TRANSLATED BY RALPH McCARTHY
ONE HUNDRED VIEWS
OF MOUNT FUJI
The slopes of Hiroshige’s Mount Fuji converge at an angle of eighty-five degrees, and those in Bunchō’s paintings at about eighty-four, but if you study survey maps drawn by the army, you’ll find that the angle formed by the eastern and western slopes is one hundred twenty-four degrees, and that formed by the northern and southern slopes is one hundred seventeen. And it’s not only Hiroshige and Bunchō—most paintings of Fuji, in fact, depict the slopes meeting at an acute angle, the summit slender, lofty, delicate. Some of Hokusai’s renditions fairly resemble the Eiffel Tower, peaking at nearly thirty degrees. But the real Fuji is unmistakably obtuse, with long, leisurely slopes; by no means do one hundred twenty-four degrees east-west and one hundred seventeen north-south make for a very steep peak. If I were living in India, for example, and were suddenly snatched up and carried off by an eagle and dropped on the beach at Numazu in Japan, I doubt if I’d be very much impressed at the sight of this mountain. Japan’s “Fujiyama” is “wonderful” to Westerners simply because they’ve heard so much about it and yearned so long to see it; but how much appeal would Fuji hold for one who’s never been exposed to such popular propaganda, for one whose heart is simple and pure and free of preconceptions? It would, perhaps, strike that person as almost pathetic, as mountains go. It’s short. In relation to the width of its base, quite short. Any mountain with a base that size should be at least half again as tall.
The only time Fuji looked really tall to me was when I saw it from Jukkoku Pass. That was good. At first, because it was cloudy, I couldn’t see the top, but I judged from the angle of the lower slopes and picked out a spot amid the clouds where I thought the peak probably was, only to find, when the sky began to clear, that I was way off. The bluish summit loomed up twice as high as I’d expected. I was not so much surprised as strangely tickled, and I cackled with laughter. I had to hand it to Fuji that time. When you come face to face with absolute reliability, you tend, first of all, to burst into silly laughter. You just come all undone. It’s like—this is a funny way to put it, I know, but it’s like chuckling with relief after loosening your belt. Young men, if ever the one you love bursts out laughing the moment she sees you, you are to be congratulated. By no means must you reproach her. She has merely been overwhelmed by the absolute reliability she senses in you.