Conclusion
Conclusion
Keitaro's adventures began with a story and ended with one. The world he had wanted to know was at first lying far off. Of late it lies just before his eyes. But in the long run he looked like an outsider who could neither enter that world nor play any part in it. His role was merely that of a kind of reporter who constantly puts a telephone receiver to his ear to listen to "the world."
Through Morimoto's lips he heard fragments of the vagabond life. But these fragments were quite superficial, composed only of outline and surface. And so they served only to inflate Keitaro's mind with innocent diversions, a mind already filled with wild curiosity. Yet through a gap in that mind inflated with fuzzy tales of adventure, Keitaro was able to catch sight of the image of Morimoto as a human being hovering between dream and reality. In addition to this knowledge of a form of human life, Keitaro had acquired both a sympathy and antipathy to Morimoto as a human being.
From Taguchi, that practical man of affairs, Keitaro learned something of the way a man views society. And at the same time he heard from Matsumoto, who had called himself a high-class idler, a portion of his view of life. Engraved on Keitaro's mind was the contrast between these two persons who, though connected by close social ties, were utterly opposite types. Knowing them made him feel that his own worldly experience had widened somewhat. But that experience extended only in breadth, hardly in depth.
Through the lips of a woman called Chiyoko, Keitaro heard about the death of a child. The death described by her was different from death as he imagined the world takes it to be. It drew out his finer feelings as though he were observing a beautiful picture. But mingled in that fine feeling were tears — tears not so much forced to try to escape pain, but shed in the sense of desiring to embrace a sorrow as long as possible. As an unmarried young man, Keitaro had little sympathy for young children. Still, the death of a beautiful child buried in a beautiful way aroused in him feelings of pity. It was the sad tale of an infant girl born on the eve of the Doll's Festival as though her fate had been that of a doll.
From Sunaga, Keitaro was surprised to hear of the slight dissonance between a mother and son. Keitaro had his own mother in his own hometown. But their relationship, while far from being as intimate as Sunaga and his mother's, did not have as entangled a fate as that of his friend. Keitaro had absolutely no doubts about how to understand the relationship with his own mother, since he was her child; at the same time he had been resigned to its prosaic quality. A more complicated relationship between parent and child, even though he could imagine it, could not really be felt by him in its reality. He thought his view of such connections had been much more deeply delved into, though, through learning about Sunaga's situation.
He heard too from Sunaga about his relationship with Chiyoko. And he wondered if eventually the two were made for one another as husband and wife, or whether they were to continue as intimate friends, or else remain at odds as enemies. These doubts had made Keitaro, driven half by curiosity, half by goodwill, run to Matsumoto. He unexpectedly discovered that Matsumoto was not merely a bystander observing the world with an imported pipe in his mouth. Keitaro heard a detailed report from him on what he had thought of Sunaga and how he had dealt with him. And Keitaro had also been fully informed as to why Matsumoto had felt compelled to treat Sunaga as he had.
In retrospect, Keitaro's career since his departure from school, at which time he had aspired to come into contact with the real world, was nothing more than his proceeding here and there among various people and listening to their tales. The one instance in which knowledge or feeling had not been imparted to him through the ear was limited almost entirely to the time he had stood at the Ogawamachi streetcar stop with the precious cane in his hand and had followed the man in the salt-and-pepper cloak after he had left the streetcar and gone into a Western-style restaurant with a young woman. Even that moment, when viewed at present on the board of memory, was mere child's play, hardly to be designated as adventure or exploration. True, it was through this experience that Keitaro had found a job. But as a man's experience the action proved serious only to himself; to the eyes of others it was ridiculous in its significance.