Natsume Sōseki — Chapter 3: An erased marginal note in a late-century ledger — Novella Movement 2

The little device my nephew fixed above the lintel — a smart home surveillance sensor, he called it, pronouncing the English with the smug carefulness of a man reciting a foreign scripture he does not himself believe — blinks at intervals of no discernible logic, a small green eye that neither sleeps nor apologizes, and I confess that in the three weeks since its installation I have come to resent it with an intimacy I generally reserve for relatives. It watches the vestibule the way, I imagine, the old household gods once watched the hearth, except that the gods at least had the courtesy to remain invisible, whereas this thing insists on announcing its vigilance with a small mechanical throat-clearing every time the wind so much as tests the door.

I have tried to think of it kindly, as one tries to think kindly of rain that ruins a print one meant to hang out to dry — that is, aesthetically, at a remove, as though the irritation belonged to someone else's nerves. Considered thus, the sensor's cold pupil recalls nothing so much as the paper lanterns the night-watchmen once carried through the back streets of my childhood ward, swinging their small pools of light over gutters and shut gates, announcing to sleeping households that someone, somewhere, retained an interest in their continued existence. The lantern, at least, went out. This will not.

"You object to being observed," said my nephew, when I mentioned the matter, "and yet you spend half your mornings observing the street from that very window, cataloguing the fishmonger's laziness and the widow's callers. Is that not surveillance also?"

"The difference," I told him, "is that I forget what I see by evening, whereas your device apparently remembers everything until the end of the world, or until the subscription lapses, whichever arrives first."

He had no answer to that, which is the nearest thing to victory old age affords.

It was in this frame of mind — irritable, ironic, and thoroughly unfit for scholarship — that I wandered, the following afternoon, into the secondhand shop behind the temple, where a dealer of uncertain provenance, a man named Kubota whom I had met perhaps four times and trusted on none of those occasions, had lately acquired a stack of merchant ledgers from some collapsed household in the north. He is the sort of rogue who prospers precisely because he understands that scholars like myself cannot resist an unanswered question, and he had left one ledger conspicuously open on the counter, its spine cracked at a page bearing, in the margin, the unmistakable smear of a note that had been rubbed out — not torn, not blotted by accident, but deliberately erased, the brush-strokes ghosting faintly beneath a later, blander entry recording nothing more than the price of dried bonito.

"Someone did not wish that read," Kubota said, watching me the way the sensor watches the vestibule.

"Or someone wished it read only by the right person," I said, "which amounts to the same vanity dressed in different clothes."

"For the right price," he said, "I could tell you what the ink shop's own records suggest was written there."

I did not buy his information, then, on principle, the principle being chiefly that I distrust any knowledge sold by the ounce. But I bought the ledger.

What is lost with such an erasure, I find myself turning over even now: the clerk's private grievance against his master, most probably; or a debt called in and shamefully unrepaid; or a lover's name jotted in a moment's carelessness and later regretted — one cannot know, and the not-knowing has its own melancholy furniture, no less real for being imagined. I think of other things similarly rubbed out: the old woman two doors down who kept accounts of every neighbor's kindness and slight in a book no one now living has read; the well that used to mark the ward's boundary and is filled in; the itinerant scribe who would write, for a coin, whatever a customer dared not write himself, and who vanished, I am told, the year the postal service made his trade obsolete.

The sensor blinks. It will forget nothing, and for that reason will preserve nothing worth troubling over — no grievance, no debt, no lover's name, only the dull continuous fact of the door opening and closing, world without erasure, amen. Whether this is progress or merely a new species of forgetting disguised as memory, I confess I have not settled, and I rather suspect the ledger, could it speak, would decline to settle it either. It was into this unsettled state of mind that Kubota inserted himself.

Some days later he appeared at my gate uninvited, which I have since learned is his preferred mode of arrival, since an invited guest may be refused admittance whereas an uninvited one has already, by the plain fact of his shoes in the vestibule, achieved half his purpose.

"I have thought further on the ledger," he said, settling himself with the unhurried presumption of a man who intends to stay until tea is offered. "The ink-shop's daybook survives, as it happens, in the temple archive — I did not mention this before, out of tact."

"Out of commercial instinct," I said, "which you dignify with the word tact the way my nephew dignifies his English with scripture."

He smiled, unoffended, which is itself a kind of professional accomplishment. "The daybook records an order, that same season, for a rare pigment — a blue, ground from something imported, costly enough that only three households in the ward could have afforded it. One of those households burned in the fire of the following winter. One removed to Osaka. One," he paused with the satisfaction of a man laying down a winning tile, "is the house this ledger came from."

"So the note was written in a blue too expensive for its own good," I said, "and someone judged the sentiment inside it more expensive still, and rubbed it out to save what the pigment could not."

"Perhaps," Kubota said. "Or perhaps the pigment simply faded first, being cheap after all, and what you take for deliberate erasure is only three generations of damp."

I confess this second explanation lodged in me more uncomfortably than the first, for it proposed that the mystery I had been nursing like a private garden was, in the end, no mystery at all — merely rot, doing what rot does, indifferent to grievance, debt, or love equally. I have known scholars, myself among them on bad afternoons, who mistake the accidents of decay for the intentions of the dead, the way a man startled in the dark mistakes a coat on a hook for an intruder. It is a comfortable error. It flatters the coat.

"You have brought me two theories," I said, "and sold me neither. What do you want for the truth, assuming you possess it?"

"I possess no truth," he said, with what I choose to believe was honesty, though with Kubota one accepts such things the way one accepts weather — gratefully, and without expecting it to last. "I possess only the daybook entry and the ledger, and the distance between them, which you may fill as you please. That is, after all, the trade I am in."

He left without tea, having apparently decided my company insufficiently profitable, or perhaps sensing, with the rogue's infallible nose for a closing door, that I had nothing further to give him.

That evening the sensor blinked its small green punctuation over the doorway as my nephew's dinner guests came and went, and I found myself watching it watch them, cataloguing in my mind the four sorts of forgetting I had accumulated in a single week: the clerk's grievance rubbed to a ghost beneath dried-bonito prices; the ink-shop's daybook, which remembers a pigment but not a sentence; the old woman two doors down, whose book of neighborly slights went into the fire with her, unread even by the fire; and this small device, which will remember the dinner guests' comings with perfect indifference to whether any of them return.

"You are still cross with it," my nephew said, following my gaze.

"I am past crossness," I said. "I have arrived at something more like professional sympathy. It is, after all, a colleague — a fellow clerk of the passing moment, no wiser than I, only better funded."

"That is either very generous or very cruel," he said.

"With me," I told him, "you may generally assume both, in roughly equal parts, and save yourself the trouble of choosing."

He laughed, not entirely certain at what, and went in to his guests, and I remained a while at the window in the manner the sensor itself might be said to remain, recording without conclusion the fishmonger closing his shutters, a dog investigating a length of rope, the widow's caller leaving somewhat later than decorum prefers. None of it will matter by the season's turn. The ledger's erased line, whatever it once held — grievance, debt, a name too dear to survive its own ink — has at least the distinction of having mattered enough, once, to someone, to be rubbed away rather than left standing. I cannot say the same will be true of tonight's small green record, which forgets nothing because it was never asked to remember anything in particular, and which will therefore, when its subscription lapses or its wire finally corrodes, leave no smear behind for some future idler to mistake, gratefully, for meaning.