This was not the first time Togoro had left suddenly.  It had happened first  shortly after his arrival at the doctor’s house.  The doctor had gone to look for him and found him at prayer in a nearby temple.  Togoro had been apologetic, but had not explained.  Yamada gathered that sometimes his life got too much for him and he found relief in religious meditation.  It had happened a few more times, and Togoro had always returned after these absences.  But this time, he had been gone longer than usual.  The doctor checked the local temples.  Finding no trace of him, he asked one of the priests.  The priest remembered the scarred man and thought that Togoro might have gone on a pilgrimage up to the mountains because he had asked about the holy places on Mount Hiei.

The doctor wondered sometimes when Togoro would come back, but he was too preoccupied with work and the New Year and his private thoughts to worry unduly.  When Otori grumbled about the extra work, he told the boys to help her or lent a hand himself.  Over the New Year, he spent more time with his sons.

Hachiro, who was enrolled in the temple school a few blocks away, had a holiday from his studies.  Doctor Yamada had bought him a place in the school with a generous donation to the temple fund, and the boy seemed to be applying himself well.  He still spent time away every day, but he was making an effort to behave well at home.  Yamada was pleased but uncomfortably aware of Hachiro seemed to be withdrawn and living in a world of his own.

Sadamu was a pure joy.  He had been teaching the boy himself.  Their studies were somewhat unorthodox in that much of them consisted of Yamada showing the child the wonders of the world around them.  But there were also writing lessons.  Sadamu was bright and eager for praise so he worked very hard to please his father.  Already there was a closeness between them that was lacking with Hachiro, a fact Yamada ascribed to Hachiro’s being older and out of the house most of the day.  He welcomed having Sadamu to himself, for in his more truthful moments he knew that he could not like Hachiro the way he should.  His dislike for the boy caused him guilt, and so he was more lenient and generous with Hachiro than with Sadamu.  Sadamu never complained, and Hachiro seemed to accept this special treatment as his due as the oldest son.

And so the days passed quietly, and the holidays with good cheer, and gradually they settled down again to their routines.

This peace was broken abruptly the day one of the doctor’s poor patients asked, “Say, Doctor, didn’t you have a servant who was burned all over and ugly as a demon?”

“Yes.  Togoro.”  The doctor paused in his work.  “He left before the New Year.  I’ve been wondering why he hasn’t come back yet.  Have you seen him?”

His patient was having an open sore on his knee treated.  He said, “Haven’t seen him myself, but I hear he got thrown in jail.”

Yamada straightened in surprise.  “In jail?  Are you sure?”  His conscience stirred.  He should have looked harder for Togoro.

“He got drunk and raped a girl.  She must’ve had a rare fright.  Her father caught them together.  Sorry, Doctor.  I figured you knew.”

Yamada gaped at the man.  “No.  Nobody told me.  Rape?  How long ago was that?  Where did it happen?”

The man scratched his chin.  “It was before the New Year.  And before the fire at the Sanjo Palace, I think.  Honest, Doctor, that’s all I know.”

The news was disturbing.  Apparently Togoro’s trouble had befallen him very shortly after he left.  But why had he not sent a message?  He must have known that the doctor would come.  It was a puzzle.

Yamada finished with the man’s leg and then went straight to his warden’s office to ask for information about the rape case.  But they knew nothing there, and that meant the incident happened elsewhere in the city.  He next went to the city jails.  In the Left City Jail, he finally got news.  It filled him with horror.

Togoro had indeed been charged, tried, convicted, and had died soon after.  He had died before the New Year.

As he stood in the prison office and heard the matter-of-fact announcement, the doctor grasped a column for support.  The guard said, “He was an ugly bastard.  We figured nobody wanted the body.”

I wanted him, Yamada thought.  Pity and guilt wracked him so sharply that tears rose to his eyes.  The guard stared at him.  “Surely not a relative of yours, sir?” he asked with a glance at the doctor’s good silk robe.

“My servant.  He was a good man.  I still can’t believe . . . tell me about the charge.”

“Rape.  I expect it nearly drove the girl mad -- seeing that on top of her.”

Yamada felt a surge of impotent anger and asked to see the documents in the case.

He was referred to the judge, who appeared to take his questions as an accusation of legal incompetence.  It was only with great difficulty that Yamada got the name of the young woman who had brought the charge.  Togoro had denied the crime but had been convicted on her word and that of her father who had come upon the two of them just as Togoro got off the daughter and ran away.  He had been all too easily identified and was caught within the hour.  Both the girl and her father testified at his trial.  Togoro had said nothing.

The doctor did not know what to believe.  The story seemed very strange and not like the Togoro he knew.  But what did he know of men’s urges?  No young woman would willingly give herself to a man so horribly disfigured.  And the young can be very cruel.  Perhaps this girl had mocked him and he had finally broken under his burden.

Only why, after he had been arrested and sent to be trial, had Togoro not given them Yamada’s name?  There could be only one explanation:  Togoro had been guilty and too ashamed to have Yamada know what he had done.

And so the doctor walked to one of the temples where Togoro had prayed, and there he bought incense and burned it before the golden Buddha statue.  He stayed for a long time, praying that Togoro’s suffering in this life had earned him a better one hereafter.

It was not until later that Yamada realized that Togoro had probably died from the brutal beatings because he would not confess.  It had happened in the last weeks of the year when he had been preoccupied with his own affairs. The thought of Togoro’s helplessness in his final desperate days shocked and grieved him immeasurably.  Such a fate seemed grossly at odds with what life had owed the poor and gentle man.  Yamada wept again – for Togoro, for himself, and for all the pain in this life.

*

Togoro had come to him when Yamada had just begun his practice of medicine.  After waiting in vain for paying customers, he had turned his hand to seeking out the non-paying kind, those who lived on handouts from the wealthy in the shadows of the large mansions and those who hung about in the dirty alleys of the business quarter, scrounging for food in garbage.  Among them, there was no scarcity of disease, and there he absorbed practical medical knowledge far more rapidly than ever at the university.

He had found Togoro lying among the garbage beside a poor eatery.  If it had been a better place, the constables would have been called to remove him, but in this case the owner of the eatery took matters into his own hands and laid into the sick man with a broom handle while a small crowd of ragged onlookers shouted encouragement.

Togoro had not made a sound.

When the doctor saw what was going on, he was disgusted.  “Stop it this instant,” he shouted at the man with the broom.  “I’m a doctor.”

The man glowered but obeyed, and the others made room for him.  The shivering creature on the ground looked barely human; it had human legs and human arms and wore the rags of a man.  The head was another matter.  It was a mass of suppurating flesh covered with flies.  The man’s features were so distorted by blackened skin, oozing wounds, and swelling that it was difficult to find a mouth and a nose.  The eyes were mere slits in livid flesh.  When the doctor overcame his revulsion and knelt to take a closer look at the injuries, he saw that the deformed man wept.  He wept silently.  Having made no effort to protect himself against the blows, he simply seemed to wait for the final, fatal one that would end his suffering.