“We will always seek your judgment.” The Great Passage was the professor’s alter ego. Forcing the professor to maintain distance from the final editing process would be like forcibly separating him from a part of himself.
Majime and Araki decided to walk back to the station, and left the professor’s house before sundown. The professor and his wife came out to the front gate and waved them off. When they reached the corner and turned to look back, he was still standing there, his frail silhouette waving lightly good-bye.
The three éclairs sat untouched on the parlor table.
When the fifth proofs arrived, fear of not finishing in time drove Majime.
What if something happened to the professor before he could see The Great Passage completed? Don’t be morbid, don’t think negative thoughts, Majime reminded himself, but the outlook was hardly positive. Shortly after they had visited him, the professor had been hospitalized again. He was released at the end of the year and spent New Year’s at home with his wife, but no sooner were the decorations put away than he was back in the hospital. Araki visited him there frequently and received valuable advice on various problems that arose during the check of the fifth proof.
At this rate, they wouldn’t make the March deadline. This very real and pressing possibility also sent Majime into panic. At year’s end, students went home for the winter break, and there were not nearly as many as in the summertime. Finding enough people to carry on the work was difficult. To make up for time lost during the monthlong work camp, Majime, Araki, Kishibe, and Mrs. Sasaki had taken work home on New Year’s Eve and worked there the first three days of the New Year.
Now it was mid-January. The students were all back, and they were proceeding with the final check fully staffed. The dictionary had so many pages and the initial print run was so huge that printing would take time. As each page was approved, they had to send it off so the printing process could get underway. If the printing press didn’t start up by the end of January, there was no hope of finishing on time.
Night after night Majime got home around midnight, just as Kaguya was arriving home after closing the restaurant. She would make a midnight meal for the two of them. Normally Majime made supper and put Kaguya’s share in the refrigerator for her, covered in plastic wrap. After she ate she would wash the dishes and make the next day’s breakfast. This was the relay system they had worked out to knit their lives together, since they kept such different hours.
They rarely had dinner together at home, and so Majime was happy to share the time with her, but their conversation lagged. He was exhausted, for one thing, and for another the state of Professor Matsumoto’s health weighed on his mind. Concerned, Kaguya made dishes to give him energy: grilled eel on rice or cubed steak with plenty of garlic. He was sorry to put her to the extra trouble, knowing her work kept her busy, too. She sat across from him, silent and reliable, as he gratefully polished off every bit of the food.
Eating these rich foods in the middle of the night was giving him a bit of a paunch, he thought. If he kept this up, he shuddered to think what he would look like in a few years. Her loving midnight meals gave him renewed determination to finish The Great Passage with all possible speed.
While Majime was tied down at the office, Kaguya paid the professor occasional visits. From the time she had worked at Umenomi, he had always appreciated her cooking and sometimes used to visit her restaurant on his own, so it was only natural that she, too, should worry about him. She began making his favorite dishes and taking them with her. When Majime asked whether he ate them or how he seemed during her visits, however, she was vague. “He always sounds apologetic for making you shoulder the main burden,” she would say. “We can’t have that,” he would reply. “Be sure to tell him the dictionary’s coming along fine, so he can just relax and concentrate on getting well.” Countless variations on this dialogue took place.
Heavy gray clouds hung low in the sky, as if it were midwinter. The Great Passage crawled toward completion, and the professor’s health showed no sign of improving as January drew to an end.
As long as progress continues, eventually the end comes in sight. Xuanzang, the seventh-century Chinese monk and scholar, accomplished the amazing feat of journeying to India, bringing back sacred Buddhist texts, and translating them into Chinese. The priest Zenkai devoted the final thirty years of his life to chiseling through rock to create a cliff-side tunnel for worshipers. A dictionary is a repository of human wisdom not because it contains an accumulation of words but because it embodies true hope, wrought over time by indomitable spirits.
Finally the printing press began turning out pages of The Great Passage, with Majime standing by alongside Araki and Kishibe. Majime picked up a packet of freshly printed pages and held it reverently.
The pages were on giant uncut sheets of thin paper. They came in signatures of sixteen, with text printed on both sides, so thirty-two pages in all. The pages as seen on the sheets seemed to be out of order. But when the sheets were folded in half four times, the thirty-two pages lay sorted out in the proper size and order. Each such batch was called a “gathering.” Each group of thirty-two pages equaled one gathering. The Great Passage would have nearly three thousand pages, enough for over ninety gatherings bound together.
The large, still-uncut sheets of paper gave off a faint warmth. Majime knew this was because they had just come through the printer, yet he couldn’t help believing that the heat was the condensed passion of all those who had worked on this dictionary—Araki and Professor Matsumoto, Miss Kishibe and Mrs. Sasaki, the scholars and students, the staffs at the paper company and printing press, and himself.
Against the slightly golden tinge of the paper, the lettering stood out clearly with the darkness of a summer’s night. Realizing that the page he was looking at included the word akari—light—Majime had to blink back sudden tears. The word referred not only to sunlight and lamplight, but also to testimony or evidence. Here before him was clear evidence that the past fifteen years of struggles had not been in vain.
“It’s so beautiful.” Kishibe looked at the printed page as if it were a precious gem and wiped her eyes with a handkerchief.
Beside her, Miyamoto was nodding with emotion.
Araki reached out and touched a page in trembling awe. Having apparently reassured himself that this was no dream, he said, “Majime, we have to deliver this right away.”
“Yes,” Majime agreed. “Let’s take it to the professor.”