A Spring Like Any Other by Takashi Tsujii

Author:Takashi Tsujii [Tsujii, Takashi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kodansha International
Published: 1992-04-26T17:00:00+00:00

Shortly after Kumiko returned to Paris with the disappointing results of her attempt to finance the casino, the operations manager in America notified me that there was a danger Jūrō might be forcibly deported. He hadn’t enrolled in enough courses to complete the school year, and his grades had been poor in the courses he had taken. But worse than that, he’d also been making collect late-night telephone calls to all sorts of places. The college had determined that “he lacks the ability to form normal human relationships on campus and requires treatment.” On top of that, he had neglected to renew his student visa because of the turmoil surrounding his expulsion from school and was being treated as an illegal alien as a result. It seemed he had also borrowed a considerable sum of money from his friends. With Jūrō you couldn’t rule out the possibility that he might run away if the police appeared to enforce his deportation. Should he succeed in doing this, there was a risk that he wouldn’t be found. If he joined up with a group of hippies, it would be nearly impossible to locate him. It was the U.S. operations manager’s opinion that at this stage it was safest to convince Jūrō of the gravity of the situation and persuade him to return to Japan temporarily.

I instructed him to take any emergency measures necessary to send Jūrō home. No one either in Japan or in America—with the exception of Mother and me—was sincerely concerned about Jūrō’s future.

The day after Jūrō returned to Japan, I met with him at the hotel where he was staying. He was in his early twenties, and already taller than I was. His hair was unkempt and dyed flame red.

“It was a mistake. An administrative mistake. It was the wrong school from the start. A terrible college. It didn’t suit me.

He spoke in halting Japanese and faced me, but his eyes seemed to look beyond me, focusing on a point in the distance.

“I don’t like this hotel. They don’t have any hash. That’s what I eat every morning. ——— was wrong to threaten me,” he said, criticizing the U.S. operations manager.

“But you were about to be deported,” I rebuked him.

Jūrō glowered at me, but his eyes were fixed, out of focus, on a point above my head.

“I wonder about that.” Suddenly, his voice changed and lowered.

For an instant, Jūrō’s expression returned to normal and his face looked like a younger version of his father’s. I wondered if the impression of dissociation he gave might be an act. His jaw jutted out farther than Hayashida’s, suggesting that something of Father’s facial structure had been transmitted to him through Kumiko. As I watched, his face clouded over again.

I asked a friend of mine who was on the staff of a university hospital for an introduction to a psychiatrist there. When I told the doctor he recommended about Jūrō’s symptoms, and asked for a diagnosis, he cocked his head to one side and said, “It sounds like a difficult case.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.