Kusamakura

by Sōseki Natsume

  “You have to be nonemotional to move like that, you know.”

  She gives a laugh. “You’re certainly fond of this ‘nonemotional, ’ aren’t you!”

  “I wouldn’t say you were exactly averse to it either. That performance with the wedding kimono yesterday, for instance.”

  But here she suddenly breaks in coquettishly. “Give me a little reward!”

  “What for?”

  “You said you wanted to see me in my wedding kimono, didn’t you? So I went out of my way to show you.”

  “I did?”

  “I gather that the artist who came over the mountains put in a special request to the old lady up at the teahouse.”

  I can produce no appropriate response, and she goes on unhesitatingly, “What’s the point of throwing my all into trying to please someone so hopelessly forgetful?” She speaks in a mocking, bitter tone. This is the second barb that has struck home, hitting me fair in the face, and the tide of battle is turning increasingly against me. She’s somehow managed to rally, and now that she holds the upper hand, her armor seems to have become impregnable.

  “So that scene in the bathhouse last night was purely kindness too, was it?” I try, scrambling to save myself from the perilous situation. She is silent.

  “I do apologize,” I go on, seizing the moment to advance when I can. “What should I give you as reward, then?” However, my sally has no effect. She is gazing with an innocent air at the piece of calligraphy by Daitetsu that hangs over the door.

  After a pause she murmurs softly, “‘Bamboo shadow sweeps the stair, but no dust moves.’” Then she turns back to me and, as if suddenly recollecting, studiedly raises her voice. “What was that you said?” I’m not going to be trapped again, however.

  I try taking my cue from the tranquil motion of the water after the earthquake. “I met that abbot just a while ago, you know.”

  “The abbot from Kankaiji? He’s fat, isn’t he?”

  “He asked me to do him a Western painting for his sliding door. These Zen priests say the most peculiar things, don’t they?”

  “That’s how come he can get so fat.”

  “I also met someone else there, a young man.”

  “That would be Kyūichi.”

  “That’s right, yes,” I say.

  “How much you know!”

  “Hardly. I only know Kyuichi. I’m quite ignorant otherwise. He doesn’t like talking, does he?”

  “He’s just being polite. He’s still a child.”

  “A child? He’s about the same age as you, surely.”

  She laughs. “You think so? He’s my cousin, and he’s off to the war, so he’s come to take his leave of the family.”

  “He’s staying here, is he?”

  “No, he’s in my older brother’s house.”

  “So he came here specially to take tea, then.”

  “He likes plain hot water better than tea, actually. I do wish Father wouldn’t invite people to tea like that, but he will do it. I bet his legs went numb from all that formal sitting. If I’d been there, I would have sent him home early.”

  “Where were you, in fact? The abbot was asking about it, guessing you must have gone off for a walk again.”

  “Yes, I walked down to Mirror Pool and back.”

  “I’d like to go there sometime. . . .”

  “Please do.”

  “Is it a good place to paint?”

  “It’s a good place to drown yourself.”

  “I don’t have any intention of doing that just yet.”

  “I may do it quite soon.”

  This joke is uncomfortably close to the bone for mere feminine banter, and I glance quickly at her face. She looks disconcertingly determined.

  “Please paint a beautiful picture of me floating there—not lying there suffering, but drifting peacefully off to the other world.”

  “Eh?”

  “Aha, that surprised you, didn’t it! I’ve surprised you, I’ve surprised you!”

  She rises smoothly to her feet. Three paces take her across to the door, where she turns and beams at me. I just sit there, lost in astonishment.

  CHAPTER 10

  I have come to take a look at Mirror Pool.

  The path behind Kankaiji temple drops down out of the cedar forest into a valley, forking before it begins to climb the mountain beyond, and there, enclosed by the two ways, lies Mirror Pool. Dwarf bamboo crowds its edges. In some places the leaves press in so densely on either side that you can barely avoid setting up a rustling as you pass. The water is visible from among the trees, but unless you actually go around it, you have no way of guessing where the pool begins and ends. A walk around its perimeter reveals that it’s surprisingly small, probably no more than three hundred fifty yards. However, the shape is highly irregular; large rocks jut out here and there into the water. What’s more, the exact point of the shoreline is as difficult to judge as the pool’s shape, for the lapping waves create a constant, irregular undulation along its edge.

  The area around the pool is largely broadleaf woods, containing countless hundreds of trees, some not yet flush with spring leaf bud. Where the branches are relatively sparse there is even a carpet of young grass, sprouting in the warmth of the bright spring sunlight that filters through, and the tender forms of little wild violets peep out here and there.

  Japanese violets seem asleep. No one would be tempted to describe them, as one Western poet has done, in the grandiose terms of “a divine conception” . . . but just as this thought crosses my mind, my feet come to a sudden halt. Now once your feet have stopped moving, you can find yourself standing in one place for an inordinate length of time—and lucky is the man who can do so. If your feet suddenly halt on a Tokyo street, you will very soon be killed by a passing tram, or moved on by a policeman. Peaceful folk are treated like beggars in the city, while fine wages are paid to detectives, who are no better than petty criminals.

  I lower my peaceful rump onto the cushion of grass. No one will raise an objection even if I should choose simply to stay sitting here for the next five or six days. That is the wonderful thing about the natural world; while on the one hand it has neither pity nor remorse, on the other, it is neither fickle nor arbitrary in its dealings with people—it treats all indifferently alike. Many are prepared to turn their noses up at the rich and powerful, the Iwasakis and Mitsuis of this world.1 But who besides Nature can coolly turn his back on the ancient authority of emperors? The virtues of Nature far and away transcend our pitiful human world; there absolute equality holds eternal sway. Rather than associate with the vulgar and thus induce in yourself the kind of misanthropic fury felt by Timon of Athens,2 far better to follow the way of the sages of old, to cultivate flowers and herbs in your little plot and spend your days in peaceful coexistence with Nature. People like to speak loftily of “fairness” and “disinterest.” Well, if this means so much to them, surely we would do best to kill a thousand petty criminals a day and use their corpses to fertilize a world of gardens. . . .

  But my thoughts have degenerated into mere tiresome quibbles. I haven’t come to Mirror Pool to engage in these schoolboy ramblings! I take a cigarette from the packet of Shikishima tucked in my sleeve and strike a match. Though my hand registers the rasp, no flame is visible. I apply it to the tip of the cigarette and draw, and only now, as smoke issues from my nose, can I be certain I am smoking a lit cigarette. In the short grass the discarded match sends up a little dragon curl of smoke, then expires. I now shift my seat slowly down to the shore. My grassy cushion slopes smoothly right on into the pool; I pause just at the edge, where any farther advance must bring the tepid water over my feet, and peer in.

  The pool seems quite shallow for as far out as my gaze can reach. Long, delicate stems of waterweed lie sunk there, in a deathly trance—I can think of no other way to put it. The grasses on the hill will bend with the breeze; stems of seaweed await the wave’s tender, enticing touch. This sunken waterweed, immobile for a cent
ury and more, holds itself in constant readiness for motion; through the endless recurrence of days and nights, it waits, the tips of those long stems fraught with whole lifetimes of yearning, for that moment when it will find itself tousled at last into action. Yet in all this time it has never moved. Thus it lives on, unable still to die.

  I stand and pick up from the grass two handy stones. I’ve decided to perform an act of charity for this waterweed. I toss one stone into the pool directly in front of me and watch as two large bubbles come gurgling up, to vanish in an instant. Vanish in an instant, vanish in an instant, my mind repeats. Gazing into the water, I can see three long stems of waterweed like strands of hair begin to sway languidly about, but in the next instant a swirl of muddy water wells up from the bottom to hide them from sight. I murmur a quick prayer.

  The next stone I hurl with all my strength, right into the middle of the pool. There is a faint plop, but the tranquil pool refuses to be disturbed. At this, I lose the urge to throw any more stones; instead, I set off walking to the right, leaving my painting box and hat lying where they are.

  The first few yards are an uphill climb. Large trees branch thickly overhead, and a sudden chill strikes me. A wild camellia bush is blooming in deep shade on the far bank. The green of camellia leaves seems to me altogether too dark, and there’s no cheerfulness in them even when bathed in the midday sunshine or lit by a patch of sunlight. And this particular camellia is growing quite deep within a crevice in the rocks, huddled there in quiet seclusion, so that if it weren’t for the flowers, one would never notice it. Those flowers! They are so many that a day’s counting could not number them—though now that I’ve noticed those brilliant blooms, I feel almost tempted to try. Bright though they are, they have nothing sunny in them. They seize your attention like little sudden flares, but as you continue to gaze, you feel for some reason an uncanny shudder. No flower is more deceptive. Every time I see a wild camellia in flower, I think of witchery—a bewitching woman who draws people in with her black eyes, then quickly slips a smiling poison into their unsuspecting veins. By the time they realize the trap, it is too late.

  When my eye falls on the camellia blooms on the far shore, I think to myself, Yes, better if you had not seen. The color of that flower is no mere red. In the far recesses of its dazzling gaudiness lies some inexpressible sunken darkness. The sight of a pear blossom sodden and despondent in the rain will provoke a simple pity; a coolly enchanting aronia blossom in moonlight calls forth only delighted affection. But the sunken darkness of the camellia is of a different order. It has a terrifying taste of blackness, of venom. And yet, with such darkness down there at its core, it decks out its surface in most flamboyant bright display. What’s more, it does not set out to entice or even to attract the human eye. Flowers open and drop, drop and open, over the passage of how many hundred springs, while the camellia dwells on in tranquillity deep in the mountain shadow, unseen by mortal eyes. A single glance, and all is over! He who once lays eyes upon her will in no way escape this lady’s bewitchment. No, the color of that flower is no mere red. It is like the red of a slaughtered criminal’s blood, drawing the unwilling eye and filling the heart with unease.

  As I watch, one of these red creatures plops onto the water. In all the quietness of that spring moment, only this flower has motion. A little while later another drops. These flowers never scatter their petals when they fall. They part from the branch whole and unbroken. The parting is so clean that they may strike us as admirably resolute and unclinging, yet there’s something malignant in the sight of them lying whole where they have fallen. Another drops. If this continues, I think, the pool’s water will grow red with them; indeed, the area surrounding these quietly floating flowers seems already tinged with crimson. There goes another. It floats there so still that one can scarcely guess whether it has landed on solid earth or on water. Another falls. Do they ever sink? I wonder. Perhaps the million camellia blooms that fall through the years lie steeped in water till the color leaches from them, till they rot, and finally disintegrate to mud on the bottom. Perhaps thousands of years hence and unbeknownst to men, all the fallen camellias will eventually fill this ancient pool till it reverts to the flat plain it once was. And now yet another tumbles to bloody the water, like a human soul in death. And another. A little shower of them plops to the water. Endlessly, they fall.

  I wander back and have another cigarette, thinking idly as I puff that this might be a scene for my painting of the beautiful floating woman. Nami’s joking words at the inn yesterday come snaking insidiously back into my memory. My heart rocks like a plank on a high sea. I will use that face, float it on the water beneath that camellia bush, and have the red flowers fall on it. I want to give a sense of the flowers falling eternally over the eternally floating woman—but can I achieve this in a picture? In Lessing’s Laocoön—but no, who cares what Lessing said? It doesn’t matter whether I choose to follow principles, what I’m after is the feeling. Still, remaining within the human realm, while seeking to express a sense of eternity that transcends the human, is no easy matter.

  The face is the first problem. Even if I borrow her face, that expression of hers won’t do. Suffering would dominate, and that would ruin everything. On the other hand, too great a sense of ease would also destroy the effect. Perhaps I should choose a different face altogether. I count off various possibilities, but none are suitable. Yes, Nami’s face does seem to be the right one. Yet something about it isn’t quite satisfactory. This much I know, but just where the problem lies is unclear to me, and consequently I can’t simply change that face on some fanciful whim.

  What would happen if I added a touch of jealousy to it? I wonder. No, jealousy has too much anxiety in it. What about hatred, then? No, too fierce. Rage? But that would wreck the harmony completely. Bitterness? No, too vulgar, unless it had a poetic air of romance to it. After pondering this and that possibility, I finally light on the answer: the one emotion that I’ve forgotten to include in my list is pity. Pity is an emotion unknown to the gods, yet of all the human emotions it is closest to them. In Nami’s expression there is not one jot of pity. This is its great lack. When on an instant’s impulse that emotion registers on her face, that will be the moment when my picture is complete. But when might I ever see this happen? The usual expression to be seen on that face is a hovering smile of derision and the intently furrowed brow of someone with a frantic desire to win. This is quite useless for my purpose.

  A rustling crunch of approaching footsteps shatters my ideas for the painting well before they have arrived at a final form. Looking up, I see a man in tight-sleeved workman’s clothing tramping along through the dwarf bamboo with a load of firewood on his back, making toward Kankaiji temple. He must have come down from the nearby mountain.

  “Lovely weather,” he says, taking off the little towel wrapped around his head and greeting me. As he bows, light flashes along the blade of the hatchet thrust into his belt. He’s a strapping fellow, whom I guess to be in his forties. I feel I’ve seen him before somewhere, and he too behaves with the familiarity of an old acquaintance.

  “You paint pictures too, do you, sir?” he asks. My painting box is open beside me.

  “Yes, I came along hoping to paint the pool. It’s a lonely sort of place, isn’t it? No one passes this way.”

  “That’s true. It’s certainly deep in the hills here. But tell me, sir—you’d have had a good soaking coming over the pass after we met the other day, I should think.”

  “Eh? Ah yes, you’re the packhorse driver I met, aren’t you?”

  “Yes. This is what I do, cut firewood like this and take it down to the town,” says Genbei. He proceeds to lower his bundle to the ground and sit on it. A tobacco pouch comes out—an old one, whether paper or leather I can’t tell. I offer him a match.

  “So you cross that pass every day, eh? That’s hard work.”

  “No, I’m quite used to it, really. And anyway, I don’t go over every day. It’s
once every three days, sometimes even four.”

  “I wouldn’t want to do it even once every four days, I must say.”

  He laughs. “Well, I’m sorry for the horse, so I try to keep it down to about every four days.”

  “That’s good of you. So the horse is more important than you are, eh?” I remark with a laugh.

  “Well, I wouldn’t go that far. . . .”

  “By the way, this pool strikes me as very old. How long can it have been here?”

  “It’s been here a long while.”

  “A long while? How long?”

  “A very long while, believe me.”

  “A very long while? I see.”

  “I’ll tell you this, it’s been here since the Shioda girl threw herself in a long while ago.”

  “You mean the Shiodas who run the hot spring inn?”

  “That’s right, yes.”

  “You say the girl threw herself in? But she’s alive and well, is she not?”

  “No, not that girl. This one lived a long while ago.”

  “A long while ago? When would that have been?”

  “Oh, a very long while ago, believe me.”

  “And why did that girl from a long while ago throw herself in here?”

  “Well, she was a beauty, you know, like the present girl is, sir. . . .”

  “Ah?”

  “And one day, one of them bonzes came along . . .”

  “You mean a begging monk?”

  “Yes, one of them bonzes that plays the bamboo flute and goes about begging. Well, when he was staying over at Shioda’s place—he was the village headman at the time—that beautiful young girl fell head over heels for him. Call it karma if you will, but at all events she wept and declared she simply had to marry him.”

  “Wept, did she? Hmm.”

  “But headman Shioda wouldn’t hear of it. He said no bonze would be marrying his daughter. And in the end he cried, ‘Be off with you!’”

  “To the monk?”

  “That’s right. So then the young girl, she takes off after him and comes as far as the pool here—and throws herself in, right over there, where you can see that pine tree. And it all caused quite a stir, I can tell you. They say she was carrying a mirror on her, and that’s how this pool got its name.”