The Gate

by Sōseki Natsume

  Thus this couple who were averse to all change found themselves back in calm waters. One Sunday afternoon, in order to wash away a four-day accumulation of grime, Sōsuke paid a rare visit to the bathhouse in the nearby business district. Inside, a fiftyish man with the shaved head of a priest and a man in his thirties with the look of a merchant were chatting, each commenting to the other that it finally felt like spring. The younger man announced that he’d heard his first bush warbler just that morning. The priest replied that he’d heard one two or three days earlier.

  “It was the bird’s first try, and it really made a mess of things.”

  “Yes, I know what you mean. They haven’t got the hang of it yet.”

  Back home, Sōsuke repeated this exchange about the bush warbler.

  Gazing through the glass shoji at the sparkling sunlight, Oyone’s face brightened. “What a sight for sore eyes. Spring at last!”

  Sōsuke had stepped out on the veranda and was trimming his fingernails, which had grown quite long.

  “True, but then it will be winter again before you know it,” he said, head lowered, as he snipped away with the scissors.

  NOTES

  1 Kin is a common way to read the Chinese character that Sōsuke has forgotten, while the “O” of “Omi” (a place-name), which Oyone offers as a mnemonic, is a rare reading that not a few native speakers of Japanese might forget.

  2 Another common reading for a very common character.

  3 This is the largest species of bamboo to grow in Japan—sometimes to a height of more than sixty feet. Its name (Chinese: Meng Zong) derives from that of a character in popularized Confucian tales extolling filial piety, who is described as walking barefoot through the late-winter snow in order to detect the early bamboo shoots craved by his aged parents.

  4 Sometimes translated as “high school” or “higher school,” it was in fact far more exclusive, there being just one in Tokyo, and functioned as a kind of preparatory school for young men bound for university—in this case, Tokyo Imperial University, the nation’s most prestigious.

  5 A long, pleated trouser-like skirt, usually divided at the inner seam and worn over a kimono from waist to feet; part of a man’s traditional formal wear, although also worn by women on some occasions.

  6 Polite for “older sister,” also used for “sister-in-law”; often spoken as a term of address.

  7 In this period, the site of modern office buildings devoted to governmental agencies and large businesses such as banks.

  8 In February 1910 a film entitled The Snows of Siberia, purportedly based on Tolstoy’s Resurrection (produced by Pathé), showed at the Fujikan Theater in Asakusa.

  9 Short for Bodaidaruma (Sanskrit: Bodhidharma), this refers to the traditional representation of the semilegendary founder of the Ch’an or Zen sect as a cartoonish, roly-poly figure, often made into a papier- mâché doll that when knocked down will always right itself.

  10 In this period, in a middle-class household, even when there was a maid to do the serving, the sharing in a meal by the mistress of the house when her husband had been joined by adult males, even relatives, would still be unusual enough to attract notice.

  11 Itō Hirobumi (1841–1909), a four-time prime minister and one of the main architects of the Meiji state as well as the resident-general of Korea prior to its outright annexation in 1910, was assassinated on October 26, 1909, in Harbin, Manchuria. His assassin was a member of the Korean independence movement.

  12 Horatio Herbert Kitchener (1850–1916), a British commander in the South African War, visited Japan in 1909.

  13 At this time there were still only two national (Imperial) universities in Japan: the one in Tokyo, established in 1886; and the one in Kyoto (1897). The campus in Sendai (Tōhoku University) was established in 1907, shortly before the narrative present. In prewar Japan, compulsory education consisted of six years of elementary schooling. A few male students (female students had a separate track) went on to middle school, which lasted five years. Fewer still advanced to secondary (higher) school, of which there were originally only five campuses in the entire country. Nearly all secondary-school graduates entered one of the Imperial universities or a private college.

  14 Normally a younger sibling in a situation of this kind would address an older brother with this polite form of address, which corresponds to “Nee-san” when addressing one’s older sister; its absence would be noticeable.

  15 A small, shrub-size version of a banana tree widely grown in Japan for ornamental purposes.

  16 Usually Tsukishima; a string of islands made from landfill in the late 1800s and early 1900s at the mouth of the Sumida River in Tokyo, used primarily for industry.

  17 “Yellow Patrinia” (Patrinia scabiosifolia), a wild, umbelliferous perennial: one of the “seven autumn grasses” that are prized in painting and poetry as well as in horticulture.

  18 Usually Ki’itsu; a pseudonym of Suzuki Motonaga (1796–1858), a student of the celebrated Hōitsu.

  19 Sakai Hōitsu (1761–1858), one of the most influential painters of the late Edo period, who took as his point of departure the style of Ogata Kōrin.

  20 Ganku (1749–1838), the founder of a branch of the Maruyama-Shijō school characterized by what were then considered idiosyncratic still lifes, which bore traces of recent Chinese influence; Gantai (1782–1865) was his son.

  21 The First Higher School (Dai-ichi Kōtōgakkō), the secondary school that Koroku attended, was located in Hongō Ward (now part of Bunkyō Ward), adjacent to the Tokyo University campus.

  22 The impression of a custom-made seal is, to this day, the legal equivalent of a signature in Japan and other East Asian countries.

  23 Japanese is normally written with a combination of Chinese characters (kanji) and a phonetic syllabic script (kana). In Sōseki’s time a higher ratio of kanji was used in most styles of writing, but lines of solid Chinese characters without any kana would have stood out as much as, say, a passage of italicized Latin inserted into an English text.

  24 The Analects of Confucius, traditionally said to date from around 500 BCE. The most widely diffused text dates from the early Han dynasty (202 BCE–8 CE).

  25 Hiyodori: sometimes loosely rendered as “Persian nightingale.”

  26 A round, hollow, wooden percussion instrument decorated with a fish pattern, struck during the chanting of Buddhist sutras to mark the rhythm.

  27 A wooden frame placed around a container for hot coals (replaced in more recent times by an electric element) and covered with a quilt to provide an area for warming hands and feet. There are both portable and stationary types of kotatsu (here the narrator refers to the former).

  28 Hossu: an implement composed of a short staff and the bundled hair of an animal (typically from the tail), carried by officiants at various Buddhist ceremonies.

  29 A sturdy flat-woven silk, often made of thread remnants, used for making everyday kimonos and bedding.

  30 Nattō: fermented soybeans; along with tofu and a few other staples of the traditional diet, it was widely sold in the neighborhoods of populous towns and cities by itinerant peddlers down to recent decades.

  31 Historically the official translation of the Japanese term tōkanfu, the English rendering masks the near total degree of control over Korean domestic as well as foreign affairs that this institution exercised between 1905 and 1910, when Korea’s nominal status as a protectorate ended with Japan’s formal annexation of Korea, after which direct rule was administered by a governor-generalship.

  32 Squares of cloth, normally silk or cotton, of varying sizes, used to wrap up items. Ordinarily, two opposite corners go around the item while the other two corners are tied into a single knot at the top for carrying.

  33 So-called because it is thought to have originated in the province of Mino (present-day Gifu Prefecture), this especially strong type of traditionally made paper was long preferred for such purposes as official copies of documents, envelopes, and insertion into shoj
i panels.

  34 There were ten rin in a sen and one hundred sen in a yen. The prices quoted correspond to the late 1880s, or about twenty years before the novelistic present.

  35 Watanabe Kazan (1793–1841): a pioneering painter with a Westernized style, he was particularly adept at portraiture. As a member of the shogun’s advisory board for naval matters, he and several colleagues were punished for expressing unwelcome opinions, and in the end Watanabe committed suicide in jail.

  36 Under the Tokugawa some daimyo and so-called bannermen (hatamoto: direct vassals of the shogun) were given purely nominal titles, derived from the ancient ritsu-ryō hierarchy imported from China, of kami or “governor” of this or that province.

  37 The present-day city of Shizuoka, it was the administrative seat of Suruga, the Tokugawa family’s home province and the place to which family members and their supporters returned after the shogunate’s collapse in 1867, prior to the Meiji Restoration in 1868.

  38 All of these items are associated with the Girls’ Festival (sometimes called the Festival of Dolls), celebrated annually on March 3; the musician dolls represent a selection of the vocal and instrumental accompanists for the Noh drama.

  39 The Japanese word for stepmother is mama-haha (mama is a prefix of ancient origin denoting indirectness, and not cognate with any Indo-European words), hence the girl’s confusion.

  40 “Granny,” though not the more common word, which would be o-baasan; also sometimes “nanny,” depending on the age of the nurse maid.

  41 The editors of Sōseki’s complete works are silent on any basis for the printing process described here that might have existed in reality at the time. Though certain general features mentioned may seem to anticipate electrophotographic (soon renamed xerographic) techniques of reproducing print, the essential theory for this technology does not appear to have been proposed until the 1930s. Yasunosuke’s new speculative venture appears then to have been a product of the author’s imagination.

  42 Tōkyō Jogakkan: a private secondary school for young women from well-to-do families, some with aristocratic lineages, that is no longer in existence.

  43 Kankōba: originating in 1877 as more permanent successors to the industry and trade exhibitions through which modern manufacturing techniques and their products had been introduced in the early Meiji period, by the turn of the century these covered rows of tightly packed stalls, found throughout Tokyo and other major cities, had become for the most part purveyors of cheap goods and refreshments, attracting as many casual strollers as interested shoppers.

  44 Hayauchikata: an archaic word for what would appear to be an acute referred pain from angina pectoris.

  45 Present-day Yamanashi Prefecture. Although the feudal domains (han) were replaced by prefectures (ken) under control of the central government in 1871, the old names of provinces (kuni), such as Kai, most of which were not coterminus with the han and dated back to a much earlier period, continued to be used in this period as historical-geographical referents, as to a lesser extent they do to this day.

  46 Chaya: Sakai seems to invoke here a mildly ribald double entendre with a variety of teahouse for which the full word is hikitejaya: traditionally, outposts of brothels in the licensed quarters where assignations were arranged.

  47 Observance of the lunar New Year was common even after the adoption of the Western solar calendar at the beginning of the Meiji period. It fell, with considerable variance, around the middle of February. According to well-established tradition in China, it also marked the beginning of spring, and as such was celebrated in ceremonial dress, poetic references, and the like, while of course for the Japanese, as for the northern Chinese, Koreans, etc., meteorologically, this springtime remained a fiction.

  48 In transliterated Japanese, this word was already common in the early twentieth century; still in use, it is almost exclusively applied to women.

  49 Bodaiji: the particular Buddhist temple with which a family maintained some historical connection and where cremated remains of deceased members would sometimes be interred.

  50 Koromogae: according to the reduced schedule for these semi-ritual seasonal changes of clothing that evolved in the Edo period out of more elaborate older practices, the day for changing into lighter garments suitable for late spring and summer was the first day of the fourth month in the lunar calendar, i.e., roughly middle to late May in the solar calendar. With encouragement from the newly emergent department stores, the observance of this custom, adjusted for the date change, continued into the modern era.

  51 Fortune-telling based on the Chinese Book of Changes (I Ching) has been a common practice in Japan since early on in the centuries-long process of Japanese importation and adaptation of Chinese philosophy, literature, and religion.

  52 Roughly corresponding to the present-day Fukui Prefecture, north of Kyoto on the coast of the Sea of Japan, it was also not far from the city of Kanazawa, which boasted one of the country’s few secondary schools.

  53 Located on the flank of Arashiyama at the western edge of Kyoto, the Kannon hall of this temple is called the Daihikaku, rendered literally here as “the Pavilion of Compassion.”

  54 Sokuhi Nyoitsu (1616–1671) was a celebrated calligrapher and a monk of the Ōbaku branch of Zen (Chan) Buddhism; he founded a temple in the Ogura district of Kyoto and later became the abbot of a temple in Nagasaki.

  55 A traditional accommodation dating from the sixteenth century, it is located in the Kawabata quarter of Sakyō-ku (northeast Kyoto), in a scenic area.

  56 Of a type known as mago-uta (packhorsemen’s songs), this ballad, popular in the Edo period (thanks in part to an excerpt included in a puppet play by Chikamatsu), tells of the ill-starred romance between Seki-no-Koman, a prostitute attached to one of the way-station inns, and a packhorseman named Tamba Yosaku. Tsuchiyama, located in present-day Mie Prefecture, was one of two way stations that flanked the Suzuka pass (the other was called Ōsaka).

  57 The traditional mode of execution called haritsuke, though normally translated as “crucifixion,” antedates by centuries any contact with the West. In the earlier recorded incidents (from the eleventh and twelfth centuries) the condemned was either tied to a wooden plank or stretched out on the ground then pierced with nails; in the Edo period, execution took the form of driving lances into the body of the condemned after it was bound to a wooden, cruciform frame.

  58 All celebrated places in the vicinity of Shimizu in Shizuoka Prefecture. The last is the home of the original mausoleum for Ieyasu, the first Tokugawa shogun, before the one at Nikko was built.

  59 Edo sunago: a celebrated, multivolume gazetteer compiled by Kikuoka Tenryō; containing maps and illustrations of locales throughout Edo accompanied by descriptive prose entries, citations of poems, etc., it was first published in 1732, followed by a revised, enlarged edition in 1772.

  60 Extracted from the Cinnamomum camphora tree (kusunoki) native to Japan, in various forms this substance has been used in incense, medicine, and, in this case, as an insect repellent particularly effective against moths.

  61 In the original, risshū: sometimes misleadingly rendered as “the beginning of autumn,” the term refers to a traditional scheme of dividing the year (as defined by a lunar calendar) into twenty-four segments according to calculations of the sun’s position in relation to the earth’s orbit (originally, of course, thought to be the earth’s position in relation to the “sun’s orbit”). Transposed to the solar calendar, this date would fall sometime during the first half of August.

  62 A day traditionally associated with rainy, windy weather—and the start of the typhoon season; in the solar calendar it falls sometime between the end of August and the second week of September.

  63 Dai-dai: a type of orange bush imported from the Asian continent grown chiefly for the ornamental value of its leaves and bitter fruit, which ripens late in the year and remains on the branch into the New Year, hence this Japanese reading assigned to the Chinese character for this p
lant—literally, “from age to age.”

  64 Wakazari: a traditional New Year’s decoration consisting of a small wreath made of straw to which is attached a kind of streamer woven from straw and various leaves and fronds, such as those mentioned next in the text.

  65 Yuzuriha (Daphniphyllum macropodum): chosen in part for its shiny oval leaves, possibly also for the literal meaning of its name: “leaves that give way i.e., to new ones,” apt for the New Year. Urajiro: an evergreen fern with leaves whose undersides are a pale grayish-white.

  66 Yarihago: a game in which a shuttlecock is batted back and forth using small paddles (generally rendered as “battledore”), traditionally played by young girls at New Year’s.

  67 Located in the Ningyō-chō district of Nihombashi, at the traditional heart of Edo/Tokyo, the shrine is dedicated to various gods and historical figures associated with water (e.g., the boy emperor Antoku and his nurse Nii-no-ama, who drowned while fleeing the conquering Genji forces) and popularly thought to offer protection from such calamities as shipwrecks and death in childbirth.

  68 A game played mainly around New Year’s that involves the matching of cards bearing the first and second halves (consisting, respectively, of seventeen and fourteen syllables) of a hundred famous classical poems in the thirty-one-syllable waka form.

  69 Sodehagi is the wife of the eleventh-century rebel Abe Sadatō, as portrayed in the eighteenth-century puppet play (jōruri) by Chikamatsu Hanji. A line from this character’s star turn in the third act of this play, in which she laments her estrangement from her birth family, is parodied in the puns mentioned in the text.

  70 A semilegendary beauty at the court of the Chinese state of Yue (fifth century BCE) who is said to have been sent to debauch the Prince of Wu in order to bring about his downfall. The anecdote about her envious cohorts’ unsuccessful emulation of her brow, furrowed from an indisposition but in a manner that only enhanced her beauty, is related in The Chuang-tzu.