2010-11-29
Long ago, there was a man with whom I was very close… He was also the son of a wealthy family… I knew his wife as well… He was very gentle and kindhearted, the sort of person liked by every other man.
As I have written before… To put it in extreme terms, there is no man who has never been unfaithful (none at all, if we consider the realm of the heart)—such are the men of this world… He was a pleasant man, and wealthy besides… I imagine he must have attracted quite a woman… One day, his wife placed documents from a private detective agency before him.
What I want to tell you is what happened afterward… At his wife’s family home… Her father slapped his daughter across the face as she berated and reproached him, I was told.
Naturally, he too froze… Because I knew him to be an exceedingly goodhearted man… I listened, convinced that, from that day onward, he would never again have an affair like this.
Turning to the present, how do things stand these days… What the idiotic television of more than twenty years, to which I have repeatedly referred… Particularly the state of talk shows and the news… Has produced, I believe, is a proliferation of parents who loudly insist that their own sons, their own daughters, are right—the exact opposite of the way that father behaved… What I believe to be the original Japanese disposition.
Needless to say, a husband and wife are, so to speak, comrades-in-arms who have lived together for many years… In this vast world, except for fur seals, monkeys, and the like… Especially among the birds to which I have always been so deeply drawn, there is only one companion with whom one shares one’s life.
♪It takes two to break the bond♪ (Shigeru Izumiya)… Through a minor quarrel, or excessive words born of familiarity, the two damage their relationship… Is it not the task of those around them to cool their heated hearts and heads… And, in consideration of all those years, to think of a solution that does full justice to both reason and feeling?
Incidentally, what this father said to his daughter was, I was told, “There is even a saying that an affair is a man’s badge of honor… What are you doing, talking of leaving the man you chose just because he has had an affair or two… You chose him as your husband… To stay with him to the end, whatever happens—is that not your duty as a wife…”
It goes without saying that he was the one whom these words touched most deeply.