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sickness is not sickness alone.
    The short sixteen days after that were the happiest in Etsuko’s life. How alike they were—her honeymoon and her husband’s death—those two short periods of joy! Now she traveled with him to death’s resort. There was in this trip, as in the wedding journey, the same abuse of body and soul, the same untiring, insatiable desire and pain.
    Her husband lay with his chest bare, haunted by feverish nightmares, manipulated by the dexterous puppetry of death, groaning like a bride. In the last days, as his brain was being attacked, he would suddenly sit up as if doing calis-thenics, stick out his parched tongue, bare his front teeth dyed terracotta by the blood that oozed from his gums, and laugh out loud.
    In their room on the second floor of the Atami Hotel, the morning after the first night, he had laughed like that. He had opened the window and looked down at the gently undulating lawn. There was a family of Germans, guests of the hotel, with a big greyhound dog. The five- or six-year-old son was about to take the dog for a walk. Suddenly the dog saw a cat slinking under the shrubs and took off after her. The boy forgot to let go of the chain and was dragged on his backside across the lawn. Watching this, Ryosuke broke out in a laugh of pure, uninhibited joy. He bared his teeth and roared. Etsuko had never seen him laugh like that.
    Etsuko put on her slippers and ran to the window. That morning blaze on the lawn! That bright sea at the edge of the garden so deftly sloped that it seemed to join imperceptibly with the beach. They went down to the lobby. In the letter rack on a pillar were colorful travel booklets under a sign saying: “Help yourself.” Ryosuke took one, and while they were waiting for breakfast, he cleverly folded it into a paper airplane. Their table was by a window that looked out on the garden. “Look,” he said, and sailed the travel booklet airplane out toward the ocean. How silly!
    It was nothing but one of Ryosuke’s many tricks to ingratiate and delight the woman he was interested in. At that time, let it be said, he was really interested in pleasing Etsuko. He really wanted to impress this new wife. What sincerity!
    She still had some money. Until recently there had been just Etsuko and her father—all that were left of a wealthy old family tracing its lineage back to a famous general of the civil war period. Their fortune lay gathered in a stubbornly defended heap. Then the end of the war, the property tax, her father’s death, and Etsuko’s inheritance—a shockingly small bundle of securities. At any rate, that morning at the Atami Hotel, the two were a couple in every sense of the word. Ryosuke’s fever later made the two one once more. In this cruel joy that unexpectedly came to her again, Etsuko seemed to find the fullest, the most detailed, the greediest, the most wretched of pleasures. Her nursing of her husband was almost enough to make an onlooker avert his eyes.
    It took time to diagnose the illness as typhoid. For a long time they thought it was a peculiar, pernicious cold accompanied by catarrh. There was the relentless headache, the sleeplessness, the complete lack of appetite; yet there were no indications of the two characteristic symptoms of early typhoid—the mounting fever and the irregularity of body temperature and pulse. In the first two days, there was the headache and general body lassitude, but not the fever. The day after he came home, he did not go to the office.
    All that day, oddly, he passed docilely putting things in order, like a child playing in someone else’s house. An amorphous, incomprehensible anxiety arose out of his numbing lethargy. As Etsuko entered his six-mat study bearing him coffee, she found her husband spread-eagled on the tatami in his blue and white lounging robe. He was biting his lip as if testing it. The lip wasn’t swollen, but it felt as if it was going to be.
    When he saw Etsuko, he said: “I