Summary
Upon receiving a letter from his mother saying that his father's chronic kidney's disease had taken a turn for the worse, the narrator borrows money from Sensei for train fare and returns to home. Fortunately, by the time the narrator sees him, his father is very much recovered, and so the narrator spends his time easily at home before returning to Tokyo in January. There he thanks Sensei for the loan, and the older man tells him cryptically about the dangers of kidney disease, which Sensei's mother-in-law died from, and mentions the unnatural ways in which men die, namely suicide and murder.
The narrator spends then next few months in Tokyo until the latter part of April working feverishly on his thesis, and it is only after he completes it that he resumes his regular calls on Sensei. One day, he goes on a walk with Sensei that takes the two to the empty garden of a tree nursery, where Sensei tells the narrator that he should settle the matter of his inheritance now, because matters of money will make even relatives turn greedy and bad. Sensei explains that he himself suffered wrongs in his past from relatives and, despite his generally quiet and kind appearance, has a vindictive nature. The narrator finds it difficult to reconcile the image he had of a placid Sensei with the darkly misanthropic personality that emerges their conversations. When he presses Sensei to tell him about his past and not simply what he has learned from his past, Sensei agrees to do so, but only when the time is right.
After his graduation, the narrator has dinner together with Sensei and his wife before leaving Tokyo. As he is about to leave, Sensei asks his wife about which of them will die first and what the other would do, which distresses her. They ask the narrator for his opinion, but he does not know what to say either. Promising to return in September, the narrator leaves for home, still wondering over the problem that Sensei and his wife were discussing and realizing that his father will probably die soon.
Analysis
From listening to Sensei's conversations with his wife, we the readers and the narrator become aware of his strangely morbid streak: "My feeling is that if I must be ill, then I should like to be mortally ill" (45). Considering his peaceable and idle disposition, it seems that he only says such things facetiously, but the narrator notices and is frightened by a genuine darkness lurking beneath this calm surface. Sensei's wife, with her intuition, notices this too, though out of her love and traditional wife's modesty she cannot completely uncover his secret. And so it is up to the intensely curious and sometimes rudely forthright young narrator to bring Sensei's secrets and his past into the light.
From listening to Sensei's conversations with his wife, we the readers and the narrator become aware of his strangely morbid streak: "My feeling is that if I must be ill, then I should like to be mortally ill" (45). Considering his peaceable and idle disposition, it seems that he only says such things facetiously, but the narrator notices and is frightened by a genuine darkness lurking beneath this calm surface. Sensei's wife, with her intuition, notices this too, though out of her love and traditional wife's modesty she cannot completely uncover his secret. And so it is up to the intensely curious and sometimes rudely forthright young narrator to bring Sensei's secrets and his past into the light.
The metaphor is very noteworthy for the contrast of West against East. Indeed, in Sensei's testament, the conservative, duty-bound Confucianism of the older generation will be described as increasingly conflicting with the modern Western-influenced philosophies and even to some extent anachronistic. As students who come from country families but attend a university in Tokyo, both the narrator and Sensei find this cultural conflict at the center of their personal lives.
During their chat in the tree nursery after the student turns in his thesis, Sensei turns to the jubilant young man and tries to give him solemn words of worldly advice: "Under normal conditions, everybody is more or less good, or, at least, ordinary. But tempt them, and they may suddenly change. This is what is so frightening about me. One must always be on one's guard" (61). Though Sensei had talked about his misanthropy, or general distrust on mankind, earlier, this occasion was the first when he extended his own views as advice to the narrator. However much of a show of great intimacy or even fatherly care it was, Sensei's elaboration that it is money that tempts men seems too commonplace of an answer to the narrator, who thereafter becomes angry at Sensei and, just as Sensei had predicted, develops a vengeful desire to humiliate him. Fortunately, the ridiculous chance occurrence of Sensei's urinating off the side of the road makes this desire evaporate before the narrator has the chance to say anything irreparably hurtful, as Sensei did himself to K.
