Free To the Spring Equinox and Beyond by Natsume Sōseki Page B

gentleman would be arriving in a rickshaw with the name of his inn marked on the lantern, that she should show him into a clean room the moment he arrived, that she should treat him very attentively and inform him before he said a word that his companion had long been waiting for him, and, these words uttered, withdraw at once and return to Taguchi to report the man's arrival.
    Then Taguchi smoked on alone with arms folded as he waited. Finally, with everything proceeding as planned, he knew it was time to make his own appearance. He went to the room adjoining his friend's, opened the sliding door between the rooms, and greeted him: "Well, thanks for coming so soon." A, his face paling, was astounded. Taguchi sat before him and confessed to all the details of his practical joke. Laughing, he said, "Let me treat you tonight—because of my tomfoolery."
    Sunaga's mother laughed too as if amused by the story she had told. "That's the kind of wag he is, you see."
    Keitaro returned to his boardinghouse thinking, "Surely that automobile wasn't one of his practical jokes."

    Since the automobile incident Keitaro had given up the idea of counting on Taguchi for help. At the same time he felt his attempt to know the real identity of the woman he had seen from behind and whom he had assumed to be Sunaga's cousin had come to a thudding halt only a few steps after it had started. And in the depths of that thought was something unpleasant, something seemingly tantalizing and inconclusive.
    To this very day Keitaro had never been conscious of pursuing a thing fully under his own power. No matter what he had earnestly set out to do, be it study, sport, or anything else, he had not once followed anything through to its completion. The only thing in his life he had ever finished was his graduation from university. And even there he tended to be lazy, to lie coiled like a snake until the university of its own accord dragged him out of its campus cage. Therefore, while he had had no tedious stoppages on his path through the university, he had never felt the exhilaration one would feel, for example, in having dug through to a well after painstaking effort.
    He passed several days in a kind of daze. Suddenly he recalled a discourse he had heard in his school days, one delivered by a teacher of religion invited to the school. The man's circumstances had been such that he had no grievance against either his family or society, but of his own free will he had become a Buddhist monk. In the course of explaining his situation, he said he had chosen the religious life because he had been confronted by an inexplicable problem.
    No matter how bright and clear the skies above him, he said he felt as if he were undergoing the torment of an imprisonment coming from every direction. Trees, houses, people walking along the street, all these were clearly visible to him, yet he constantly felt as if he alone had been put into a glass cage, separated from direct contact with the outside world until his pain became so excruciating that he felt he was suffocating.
    After hearing the talk, Keitaro had suspected that the man had been victimized by a kind of neurosis, and with this reflection Keitaro gave no further concern to such a state of mind. But when he thought it over during these several days of worrisome idleness, he found some resemblances between himself—who had never once experienced the delight of completing anything—and the feelings of this religious man before he became a monk. Of course, since his own suffering was incomparably trivial and of an entirely different nature, he did not have to make the kind of great decision that the religious teacher had to make. If only he had learned how to brace himself a little more, how to exert himself just a bit, he might have been able to be more satisfied with himself, whether his aims were attained or not. Up to the present moment he had not given sufficient attention to this deficiency in