【2010/2/10上梓】五合庵烏有 著

RIPENESS OF A PERSIMMON

　"Autumn will soon be over," murmured Midori in bed, looking through the window of a sickroom. At a distance, red fallen leaves were whirling up and down in the wind, blowing rather strong in the gathering dusk. A few white clouds like pieces of cotton wool torn off were sailing across the dark sky. There was a horned moon hunging cold and unsteady.


　It was towards the end of April when the cherry blossoms had all but gone and the season of fresh green was just around the corner, that Midori was taken to hospital. A traffic accident had happened to her, with her left leg miserably fractured. Soon afterwards, she contracted appendicitis, and, what was worse, the part operated on began to suppurate, costing her such long confinement in bed in this room.

　She was in the third year of a junior high school.


　"Even if I can leave here in two or three weeks......," said she to herself, with a sigh.

　Now her lost time weighed heavily on her, and it cudgelled her brains how to catch up with the rest of her class, and she could not help growing irritable whenever it haunted her.

　Midori was gay by nature, and there was nobody who knew her but liked her as a girl a little wilful, a little mischievous and a little meddlesome, but very lovely. However, very few of her classmates so far visited her since the second term had begun, nor did so much as her close friend Akiko at all for these thirty days. It made her feel lonelier. Did they keep her at a distance?--then, for what reason? she wondered, or were they considerate enough to pay as few visits as they could for her rest and quick recovery?


　In this thought and that, she went round and round about almost endlessly until at last she came to one conclusion that, since there was no one or nothing for her to be wilful or meddlesome about, she could enjoy solitude, far from company of any sort, and do nothing but think, read and study for herself.


　It made her less and less uneasy and regained her presence of mind. Lying thus in bed, she often thought of those days of long sunshine, especially in May, when she used to wander about as her fancy dictated, with her beloved dog; sometimes listening to a brook babbling on the pebbles, or skylarks soaring and singing in the blue sky, sometimes feasting her eyes with fresh verdure in light and shade, slowly undulating like the wavelets of spring sea, as far as the eye could reach........


　May was more to her liking than any other of the year; convincingly, a month as gay and bright on its front as she, but, seen in the depth, as it were, of something like sadness after the fulness of joy which she might feel when now left alone in bed. In May, young fresh green, so sober and heart-soothing that it would tune her mind to calm thoughtfulness; with her, solitude to adapt her to it, as long as her confinement in bed would last. Whether or not she felt something therein in common with as inclination or another phase as yet hidden of her personality, there was, perhaps, no denying that the accident was the origin to which her mind's development coming to this could be traced.


　As days went on, the fewer visited her, the more conscious she became of her true self to think deep and study hard. There was a process seen there of a young persimmon growing gradually into ripeness.


　The sickroom might be scarcely so large as to let her walk at will, but was large enough for her fancy to, with Nature's favors to be arranged month by month outside the window.

　Soon autumn would be over as she murmured, and the dark, dreary days of winter take its place, but, never trespassed on by anyone or anything, she would in imagination wander about all the oftener, beneath an azure sky of May, over green field, pasture and hill.


　Half a year or so after she had been taken to hospital, it was not unreasonable that she should have come to feel rather grateful for her accident at heart.

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