His heart is very rich, explains Ribu-san in the Mahorowa: a rich heart, and a profoundly deep secret, that is the sensei. . but it is difficult, she says, and she doesn’t worry that the sensei himself hears this; it is very difficult to speak about him because he doesn’t resemble me or us in any way at all, since he is entirely different in everything; I, she points at herself, I have been his wife for more than three decades, but often I don’t know what anything means to him, he continually astounds me, because I am blind, whereas he sees, I am blind to what is coming but he already sees what things will be like, I have said many times it’s impossible, or a miracle, and I’ve marveled at him because of that, but then I accepted that the sensei knows already in advance what is going to happen later, and also that this comes not from himself but from the world, from the true structure of the world, which he and only he sees and knows, but I could also express it like this: the sensei just feels things, and he is deaf, deaf, to those things that we are not deaf to, he is deaf to mundane explanations because he only feels, only grasps what his soul tells him, we are deaf to our souls, to him our mediocre imaginings and connections mean nothing at all, he sees them, he sees us, he knows what we believe, what we are thinking, and what we do, he knows the laws that are important to us, the laws that determine and circumscribe all of us here, yet these laws, in regard to the sensei, somehow. . just don’t affect him at all, however absurd this may sound, still it is so: he also eats, showers, gets dressed, and goes and sits down and stands up and drives the car and checks his bank receipts and the money sent here from the Umewaka school, but with him nothing occurs as it does with us, in that moment, when he is eating, showering, getting dressed and so on, somehow at once. . everything is different, how can she even explain it; Ribu-san closes her eyes tight, and it could be a kind of illness with her because this happens every minute, she closes her eyes tightly shut and at such times her face contracts sharply, to make it clearly understood that well, it’s difficult, she tilts her head to one side, because if she says that the sensei finishes everything, that he never leaves anything undone, that he is unpredictable, and that she never knows what he will do or say in the very next moment, then she hasn’t said anything at all, and it is really as if that were so, that she has said nothing at all, because at this point the sensei interrupts her, until now he has been listening to Ribu-san in silence, with mute agreement and patience, with a kind of motionless gaiety in his eyes, but now in the Mahorowa he puts in a word and notes in his own particular way of speaking — that is to say that as he pronounces every single word, indeed, truly, every single word, he pulls his mouth back widely, like someone who smiles with each single word, so that after the word or the sentence has been uttered, the face at once settles back into those serious features that hold this face in that motionless perpetual serenity — every single day, he suddenly speaks, every day
I am prepared for death, and then there is silence in the Mahorowa; the first time he met with death — he continues in tones even softer than usual — was when, in his childhood, a tall thin person came into the street where he lived, he came up to where he was playing, and greeted him and the other children; ohayou, he said, and he went on, on along the street, up to the end of the street, then he went out onto the Horikawa, and this happened every single day, the tall thin man, whether in the morning, the afternoon, at dawn, or at dusk, appeared again and again, and greeted him as he played in the middle of the street, and for him, the sensei says, this greeting became important, and he loved this person, and after a while he waited expectantly for him to appear already, and he was happy if he saw him at the end of the street; this person came, greeted him, and went on, and then one day he did not come anymore, and from that point on he never appeared again, and they quickly learned from the neighbors that he had been struck by a car out on the Horikawa, he had been taken to the hospital, where he continually asked for water, but the doctors did not give him water, but he just asked more and more for water, just water and water, he became dreadfully thirsty, but he did not get water from the doctors, they didn’t give him any, and he died, well that is when, says sensei Inoue, I met with death for the first time, yet to understand what it meant, he still had to wait awhile, but then the time came, and he understood everything, and since then he has known that there is no tomorrow; I never think about that — he lowers his voice even more, and with every word that he utters he smiles, as is his custom, then his face closes up again — never, he says, because I only think about today, for me there is no tomorrow, for me there is no future, because every day is the last day, and every day is full and complete, and I could die on any given day, I am ready for it, and then the whole thing will come to an end, and by this he means that — he looks up at a guest sitting across from him on the other side of the room — that one whole will come to an end, and in the distance another shall begin, I am waiting for death, he says with an unvarying smile, I am waiting, he says, and death is always close to me, and I shall lose nothing if I die, because for me only the present means everything, this day, this hour, this moment — this moment in which I am dying.