by Osamu Dazai
The vacation that winter was my last as a high-school student. As the day drew near for going home, my younger brother and I felt a certain awkwardness toward one another.
Arriving at home, we went over to the kitchen hearth and sat down. We were on the floor, directly across from one another, with our legs crossed. As we glanced around anxiously, our eyes met two or three times. Miyo was nowhere about.
After dinner, my second oldest brother invited us to his room. We sat around the charcoal brazier to play cards, but every card in the deck seemed blank to me. While conversing with my older brother, I seized an opportunity to ask, Isn’t one of the maids missing? I tried to sound casual, keeping my face hidden behind the five or six cards in my hand as though truly absorbed in the game. It was fortunate that my younger brother was present. If pressed by my older brother, I’d make a clean breast of everything.
My older brother cocked his head this way and that. While deciding which card to play next, he mumbled, You mean Miyo? She had a quarrel with Granny and went home. An obstinate bitch, if ever there was one.
He threw down a card. I played one of mine, and my younger brother, without a word, played his.
Four or five days later I went out to the caretaker’s shed by the chicken coop. The young caretaker, who liked to read novels, filled me in on what had really occurred. Miyo had been defiled by a manservant. It had happened only once; but when the other maids found out, she could not bear to stay on. The manservant had done other mischief too and had already been sent away. But the caretaker had to spill the entire story, including the manservant’s boast of how Miyo had murmured, but only after the deed, Stop! Stop it now!
With New Year’s Day past and the winter vacation nearly gone, my younger brother and I went into the family library to look at various book collections and scroll paintings. As the snow fluttered down on the skylight, I gazed around eagerly. Since Father’s death, my oldest brother had been making changes as the new head of the family. I could see something different each time I visited—from the selection of books and paintings to the newly decorated rooms. I unrolled a painting that my oldest brother must have sought out quite recently—a depiction of yellow roses scattering on water.
My younger brother brought over a large box of photographs and started going through the collection quickly, warming his fingertips now and then with his white breath. After a time he showed me a newly mounted print. Miyo must have gone to my aunt’s house with Mother, for the print showed all three women. Mother sat by herself on a low couch while Miyo and my aunt, who were the same height, stood behind. The garden was in the background, with roses blooming in abundance.
My brother and I sat next to one another and gazed momentarily upon this print. In my own heart I had long ago made peace with my brother. I had hesitated to tell him of this other business concerning Miyo, and so he still didn’t know about it. I could now look at the photo with a show of equanimity. Miyo must have moved slightly, blurring the outline of her head and shoulders. My aunt, her hands folded upon her sash, was squinting. They even look like one another, I thought.
Undine
Gyofukuki
The literal title of this tale, “An Account of Taking on the Guise of a Fish,” has been altered to “Undine” in the interests of euphony. Undine figures in Western mythology as a female water spirit who can become human by marrying a man and bearing a child. This title has been chosen for want of a better one, and in the hope that it will prove memorable with readers.
According to some critics Dazai’s story calls to mind a famous Japanese tale by the eighteenth-century exponent of the ghostly and macabre, Ueda Akinari. Akinari’s tale, “The Carp That Came into My Dream,” features a Buddhist priest named Kōgi, possibly an actual person from early in the Heian period (794-1185). In the tale, Kōgi practices compassion by purchasing the entire catch of certain fishermen, then releasing the fish and painting them as they swim away.
With a setting of almost idyllic beauty, “Undine” might impress one initially for its simplicity and charm. Both of the main characters—a charcoal-maker and his daughter, Suwa—are simple people who seem quite at home in their surroundings. They need not speak to each other often. The rural argot they do employ in their occasional exchanges (an argot that I have not attempted to convey in the translation) only underlines how rooted they are in their own environment.
As the tale unfolds, Suwa comes to regard her idyllic existence as merely a pointless routine. This change in her outlook eventually leads to the final climactic scene, which takes place after the girl hurries to the waterfall on sheer instinct. Her end might well be understood with reference to several earlier scenes that, though seemingly fortuitous at the time, take on meaning as the function of water as a unifying symbol becomes apparent. In one of these scenes a student perishes at the waterfall, while in another the brothers Saburō and Hachirō are separated at a stream. The story concludes with Suwa attempting to escape her father and to join up with a friend, impulses that have come to her by way of the tale of the serpent and the death by drowning of the young student.
The peaceful tenor of life early in “Undine” is disturbed by specific actions as well as by Suwa’s state of mind. The greatest disruption—and the one most cryptically described—occurs when her father returns to the hut late at night. What he attempts in this brief scene confirms that he is drunk and also deeply frustrated over his daughter’s alienation from him. However, a second symbolic network in the tale, even more obscure than the one related to Suwa’s fate, gives a different complexion to this drunken attempt at violence. Suwa, it will be noted, arranges her hair before awaiting her father’s return. Here, she seems to be her usual innocent self, and perhaps she is. However, a curious gesture of hers from earlier in the story—the placing of her father’s finger into her mouth after she hears his tale of Saburō and Hachirō—becomes quite ominous in retrospect and makes one wonder, for a moment at least, whether Dazai doesn’t see her as a temptress, though perhaps an unwitting one.
“Undine” portrays a girl who eventually undergoes the stresses of puberty while living alone with her stolid father. Having rejected him, she instinctively heads toward the waterfall and the pool, the milieu that has come to represent for her the possibility of companionship and consolation. Like the student, she ends up being pulled into the depths—whether to be destroyed or fulfilled the author does not say.
I
In the far north of Honshu there’s a row of low hills known as the Bonju Range. Only three or four hundred meters high at best, these hills don’t appear on an ordinary map.
Long ago the entire area was apparently under the sea, and people in the region still say that the hero Yoshitsune once came here by boat. It happened after he had gone into hiding and was fleeing northward toward the shores of faraway Ezo. His boat ran aground—there’s a square patch of red soil some ten meters across on a low tree-covered hill midway along the range that shows where he landed.
They call this particular place Bald Horse Hill. That’s because, from the village below, the patch of red soil is supposed to resemble a galloping horse. In fact it’s more like an old man’s profile.
Bald Horse Hill is also famous hereabouts for its scenery. A stream emerges from behind the hill and flows past the village and its twenty or thirty homes. Several miles up this stream a waterfall descends from a cliff. The waterfall is one hundred feet high and looks very white.
The trees covering this hill begin to change color at the end of summer. The leaves are beautiful in the autumn, and people come from the provincial towns to view them, enlivening even this remote place for a time. At the foot of the falls there is a small tea stand to serve them.
Just as the season was getting underway this year, a death occurred at the falls—an accidental death, though, and not a suicide. The victim was a student from the city with a pale complexion. He had come, as others occasionally do, to collect some of the rare ferns that grow here.
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The pool below the falls is surrounded almost entirely by high cliffs. A narrow gap opens to the west, and here the water rushes against the rocks and pours out into the stream. The ferns grow in patches down the cliffs, moistened by the constant spray and quivering in the roar of the waters.
The student had been scaling one of the cliffs. It was afternoon, and the early autumn sun still shone overhead. When he was halfway up, a rock the size of a man’s head suddenly gave way beneath his foot, and he fell as though he had been torn away from the cliff. On the way down he got snared by the branch of an aging tree. But the branch snapped, and he was sent plummeting into the pool below with a horrible splash.
Several people nearby witnessed the fall. The girl who looked after the tea stand—she was going on fourteen—saw it best.
She watched him sink far into the pool and then float up until his body rose halfway above the surface. At that moment his eyes were shut, his mouth was slightly open. His blue shirt was torn in places while the collector’s box still hung from his shoulder.
The next moment he was again sucked down—all the way to the bottom.
II
On clear days from late spring until well into fall, columns of white smoke can be seen even from faraway rising over Bald Horse Hill. The sap runs abundantly then, and the trees are just right for producing charcoal. So the charcoal-makers work hard at their kilns during this period.
There are ten or so huts on Bald Horse Hill, each with a kiln. One of the kilns is located near the waterfall, off by itself. The other charcoal-makers are from this area, while the man working this kiln comes from a distant part of the country. The girl who runs the tea stand is the man’s daughter. Named Suwa, she lives alone with her father throughout the year.
Two years ago, when Suwa was twelve, her father set up the little stand with logs and a reed screen. He also arranged a number of things on the shelves for her to sell—lemonade and crackers, rice jelly, and all sorts of sweet candies.
With summer approaching once again and people beginning to come around, Suwa’s father would assemble the stand. He would then carry the provisions there every morning in a basket, his daughter skipping along behind him in her bare feet. Upon reaching the site, he would soon go back to the hut and his own kiln, leaving Suwa there all alone.
If she caught even a glimpse of any sightseers, Suwa would call out the greeting her father had taught her—“Hello! Please stop in for a while.” But the roaring falls drowned out her sweet voice, and she could seldom catch anyone’s attention. In a whole day she could not even take in fifty sen.
Her father would return at dusk, his entire body black as charcoal.
“How much did you get?” he’d ask.
“Nothing.”
“Too bad,” he would mutter, as if it didn’t much matter. After looking up at the falls, he would place the sweets back in the basket. And then they would go back to the hut.
It went on like this day after day until the frost came.
Suwa’s father could leave her alone at the tea stand without having to worry. Since she had grown up among these hills, she wasn’t going to lose her footing on a rock and plunge into the waterfall pool. In fact, when the weather was good, she would take off her clothes, dive into the pool, and swim up close to the falls. If she noticed someone while she was swimming, she would toss her short brown hair from her forehead with one hand and then cry out, “Hello! Please stop in for a while.”
When it rained, Suwa would crawl under a straw mat in the corner and take a nap. A large oak grew out over the tea stand, its abundant leaves providing shelter from the rain.
Suwa would gaze up at the thundering falls and imagine that the water would eventually run out. She also wondered why the waterfall always took the same shape.
Lately her thoughts had deepened.
She could now tell that the waterfall didn’t always keep the same shape. In fact the varying width and the changing pattern of the spray made one dizzy. Finally the billowing at the crest made her realize that the falls was more clouds of mist than streams of water. Besides, she knew that water itself could never be so white.
One day Suwa lingered dreamily beside the falls. As the sky became overcast and the early autumn wind reddened her cheeks and made them smart, she remembered the tale her father had told her some time ago. He had held her in his lap then, while keeping an eye on the kiln.
The story concerned two brothers, Saburō and Hachirō, both of whom worked as woodcutters. Hachirō, the younger brother, had caught some trout in a mountain stream and had brought them back home. Before Saburō returned from the mountains, Hachirō grilled one of the trout and ate it. The fish tasted good, so he ate two or three more of them. After that, he couldn’t stop until he had eaten the entire catch. He was thirsty now—so thirsty that he drank all the water in the well. Then he ran to the river at the edge of the village and kept on drinking. Scales suddenly spread out over his body. By the time his brother came running back, Hachirō had become a great serpent and was swimming in the river.
“Hachirō! What is it?” Saburō called out.
Shedding tears, the serpent called back from out in the river. “Ah, Saburō!”
Weeping and wailing, the two brothers called back and forth, one from the bank and the other from the river—“Ah, Hachirō!” “Ah, Saburō!” Unfortunately there was nothing that could be done.
This tale had so moved Suwa that she had put her father’s charcoal-blackened finger into her small mouth and wept.
Coming out of her reverie, she gazed at the falls in wonder. The water seemed to murmur—“Ah, Hachirō! Ah, Saburō! Ah, Hachirō!”
Her father, pushing the leaves aside, emerged from the red ivy that hung along the cliff.
“How much did you sell, Suwa?”
Her nose glistened with spray from the falls. She rubbed it without making any reply. Silently her father gathered up the things.
They headed home, pushing through the bamboo grass that overgrew the mountain road. Before they had covered the quarter mile back, Suwa’s father said, “Maybe you should quit now.” He shifted the basket from his right hand to his left, the lemonade bottles clinking against one another. “It’s getting cold,” he went on, “and no one’s coming any more.”
As the sunlight faded, the only sound was that of the wind. Once in a while the leaves falling from the oak or fir trees would strike against the father and daughter like sharp hailstones.
“Papa,” Suwa called out from behind, “what are you living for?”
The huge shoulders merely shrugged. Then Suwa’s father looked closely into his daughter’s determined face and muttered, “Nothing, I guess.”
Suwa bit off part of the long grass leaf she was holding.
“You’re better off dead, then.”
His hand flew up—he would teach her some respect! Then, hesitantly, he lowered it. His daughter had been on edge for some time now. He realized that she was getting to be a woman and he must leave her be.
“All right,” he conceded, “all right.”
Stupid! That’s what this listless reply was—stupid! Suwa spat out bits of the leaf. “Fool!” she screamed. “You’re a fool!”
III
The Festival of the Dead1 was over, and the tea stand had been taken down for the winter. For Suwa this was the worst time of the year.
Every fourth day or so her father would hoist a bag of charcoal onto his shoulders and set off for the market. There were men for hire who did this sort of work, but he could not afford the fifteen or twenty sen they would charge. Leaving Suwa all alone, he would carry the load himself to the village below the hill.
When the weather was good, Suwa would hunt mushrooms while her father was gone. After all, the charcoal would not bring in enough for them to live on even when it sold for five or six sen a bag. So Suwa had to pick mushrooms for her father to sell as well.
The moist, pea-shaped nameko would fetch a good price. They grew in
clusters on decaying logs among clumps of fern. Each time Suwa saw moss on the logs, she thought of the only friend she had ever had. She liked to sprinkle the moss on top of her mushroom-filled basket and head for home.
Whenever her father sold the charcoal or mushrooms for a good price, he would return with saké on his breath. Once in a while he would bring back a paper purse or some other gift for Suwa.
One day a raging wind blew about the hill from early morning, causing the straw mats that served as curtains to swing back and forth within the hut. Suwa’s father had gone down to the village at dawn.
She decided to stay inside today and arrange her hair, an unusual thing for her to do. When she had finished tying up her curls in a paper ribbon patterned with waves, a present that her father had given her, Suwa stoked the fire and sat down to await his return. Now and then the call of a wild animal could be heard, along with the rustling of leaves.
After the sun went down, Suwa prepared her supper. It was fried bean paste over brown rice, and she ate it all alone.
As the night deepened, the wind died down and the weather turned cold. An unearthly quiet settled upon the hill, the kind of quiet in which wondrous events are bound to happen. Suwa heard all sorts of things— tengu demons2 toppling the forest trees, someone right outside the hut swishing adzuki beans3 in fresh water. She even caught the clear echo of a hermit’s laughter in the distance.
Tired of waiting for her father, Suwa wrapped herself in a straw quilt and lay down by the hearth. As she dozed, a creature occasionally lifted the straw mat hanging in the doorway and peeked in. Thinking that this was a hermit from the mountains, Suwa pretended to be fast asleep.
In the glow of the dying fire, something else could just be made out fluttering through the entrance onto the dirt floor. Snow-the first of the season! Suwa was elated, even as she appeared to dream.