of fact, we are a bit short of money."
"I thought so," said Eiko with a smile.
Tatsuya remembered Eiko saying as they were leaving the night club that she wanted to see him box one day.
"By the way, you remember the handkerchief you gave me with the money in? Well, anyhow, Matsuno was sick in it on the way home that night and we had to throw it away," Tatsuya said.
"How unromantic!" said Sachiko.
Eiko dropped Tatsuya at the entrance to the hospital and they said good-bye. She turned, gave a toot of the horn, and drove off; Tatsuya found himself staring vacantly at the disappearing car.
"Don't be a fool! Did you expect her to come into surgery and bandage you up?" he told himself.
As he slowly made his way up the stairs to surgery he met a friend of his, a soccer player, coming down with his arm in a sling.
"Well?" he looked inquiringly at his injury.
"I won on a TKO," replied Tatsuya.
"Congratulations," said his friend and shook his free hand warmly.
Tatsuya's cut was not serious but they made him lie down for an hour while they treated him. A nurse came in and said there was a call for him. The doctor told her to take a message and leave it at the reception desk.
When they had finished, he asked about the call and was told that someone had rung up to find out if he was still in the hospital. Tatsuya figured it was Eda. He was surprised and a little annoyed to hear a big car honking just behind him as he walked out of the gate. He jumped aside and looked round. The car was moving along slowly and Eiko was waving at him from inside.
"Well! What's going on here?" he asked puzzled.
"I've got rid of the others."
"How did you know I was still in the hospital?"
"I phoned just now."
"So it was you!"
Tatsuya got in beside her. She was now wearing Western clothes. He was delighted at her quick and efficient ways, and it made up for whatever annoyance he had felt in the afternoon.
He drank a lot that night and his cut began to hurt, but with Eiko there it did not seem to matter.
After that he went out with her a lot. Each time he was amazed at the number of people she knew. Wherever they went, at least one or two people would nod to her. At first she introduced him to her friends, but he always looked awkward and hardly spoke to them, so she soon stopped.
Tatsuya once wondered but could not decide whether her friends were mainly men or women. Anyhow, the men were not his business; their relationship wasn't close enough for him to complain if she had been in love with them.
Up till then Tatsuya had only been interested in sensual pleasure. The women he knew best were those of the red light districts. In the confusion of modern life, love was out of the question for Tatsuya. No matter what kind of girls he might have been in love with, they always shattered any romantic illusions quickly enough, and he had no way of telling whether Eiko might not do the same.
Among his friends, emotions, and love in particular, came to be looked at from a materialistic point of view; the word "love" was only used with contempt. To them it was a word used to tease or ridicule someone ignorant of women. A popular remark was: "He's in love, so we know he hasn't had a woman yet."
To them the relationship between father and son was that of mutual friendship. But with their mothers—even with the mothers of their close friends—they behaved like spoiled children. When they got disillusioned by women who at first had attracted them, they came running home to their mothers. They only thought of their women as "things" as time went on, and this nursed the overly-indulgent nature of their mothers' love. There was a case of a young mother who, out of spite for her husband's having taken a mistress, took on a lover herself. Her son found out and kicked her in the face. His friends heard of this and treated him with the greatest respect. He was looked up to as a matured man.
All the group were very good friends, but theirs were not the generous friendships each had had in his high school days. There was no element of self-sacrifice in their relationships, but instead a carefully balanced system of debit and credit. If the debit column grew too long, the friendship would break up. Everything they did and said was calculated; they never risked a wild venture that might drastically upset their accounts. In a sense, there were certain standards which had to be adhered to and which served as a basis for their special morality. Their conception of friendship was that of being accomplices in crime. There was a common bond formed by their savage or immoral acts—acts which were not wholly attributable to their youth—and this welded the bonds of their friendships.
This group of young men was mixed up in all sorts of sleezy doings—with women, questionable businesses, fights, and even blackmail. These involvements occurred frequently and were always considered the result of youthful mistakes. Their elders would either ignore their faults or else excuse them because they were "young."
If the adult world feared them as a dangerous force, second only to communism, this fear was groundless. A new generation brought forth new sentiments and a new code of morals, and these youths were growing up in such surroundings. They stood erect, like cactus, without looking down to see that they were blooming in barren soil.
The young unconsciously tried to destroy the morals of their elders—morals which always judged against the new generation. In the young people's eyes, the reward of virtue was dullness and vanity. While the older generation thought it was growing ever more broad-minded, but actually grew narrower in outlook, the young looked for something broad and fresh to build on. And besides, who started measuring naked human feelings in terms of material things?
Tatsuya was no exception. He behaved like a spoiled child with his mother, but with his father it was quite different. One day, soon after he had joined the boxing club, he happened to see his father in a first-class railway car between Tokyo and Yokosuka. Tatsuya was on his way home from a training session. He got on and came home in the same car as his father. Sitting still on a roomy seat beside his father, he was the picture of the dutiful teenager next door who went to school every morning on the same train as his father.
That evening after supper he felt thoroughly worn out. He stretched himself out and muttered: "I can't stand it. I think I'll get a first-class train pass during training. It's so much more comfortable."
His father heard him and lowered his paper noisily.
"What's that? Where do you get such silly ideas? You're still in college, you know. If your training tires you so much, you'd better give it up. In any case, I haven't got money to waste on a pass for you."
"Money to waste?"
For a moment Tatsuya felt nothing but hatred for his father.
Sunday about a month later he was watching his father training for the annual alumni boat race.
"Your old man's still pretty fit. Just look at these muscles," his father called out. "Training was training in my day. Go ahead, punch me, boxer!"
He felt his father's muscles. His stomach was still lean and solid. His father tensed, and Tatsuya punched him as hard as he could in the stomach, sending the older man reeling backward.
"Hey,
