by Nagai Kafu
The riffraff who hung around in the area during the day were joined later by laborers who were finished with their day’s work at various piers and construction sites and came out of nowhere to gather together on the sidewalks. The result was that the air, already abominable, now seemed to have the added smell of alcohol and sweat. Accompanied by the sound of heavy shoes and abusive shouting, rows of soiled torn shirts, torn trousers, and torn hats steadily moved like dark shadows toward the brightly lit alley of the Japanese quarter. And from that alley one heard a constant Babel of voices accompanied by the noise of band music sounding like the clanging of a circus, probably produced by gramophones in bars and shooting ranges. There was also the sound of samisen everywhere, echoing “chinten, chinten” as if in response to one another, followed by women singing and men clapping their hands. . . .
Just imagine. Against the surrounding American view, you have on one hand the noise of “the West” presented by the whistling of ships, the bells of trains, and band music played by gramophones, and on the other, long-trailing, howling, moaning, and sleepy country songs from the Kyûshû region, accompanied by the brief, intermittent sound of the strings. No music is sadder, giving rise to such a discordant, unpleasant, and complex, even if monotonous, sensation.
One evening—I think it was the night before I was to depart for the East Coast—I found myself unable to sleep, as the sound of the samisen was still ringing in my ears, so I joined the line of laborers and started walking toward the alley on the other side. Once inside the alley, I noticed huge crowds of Japanese everywhere, from the large archery grounds and billiard parlors to various restaurants and even the sidewalks. But they all seemed self-possessed, as if to say that this was their turf, so that even Western laborers were looked upon like foreigners. In the meantime, from the windows of wood-frame houses, women’s faces could be seen on and off, drawing the curtains aside and spying on what was going on outside. Some of them were calling out to others in shrill voices. All of them were women from the western part of Japan, with flat noses, narrow eyes, and flat faces. Their hair was swept back in a bun at the back with bangs at the front, and they wore what appeared like Western-style gowns. But for me, just a glance at them was enough to make me feel satisfied—or rather, queasy—anyway, I could not bear to get closer to them.
Still, I stayed at the street corner for a while and watched as laborers from East and West kept going in and coming out of dark entrance ways that were gaping like holes in between small shops selling tobacco, fruit, and other wares. Suddenly, I noticed a gentleman of fine appearance coming out, mingling with the laborers. He was wearing a heavy gold chain shining on his vest as well as a derby hat slightly hitched back; he looked drunk, with his face all flushed, and a small toothpick was sticking out of his mouth. Struck by the incongruity of the scene, I instinctively looked at his face.
He somehow looked familiar, so I gazed after him as he walked by, but then the gentleman stopped in front of a tobacco store a few feet away, revealing his profile by the store’s lights. . . . A profile is often a good indicator of one’s facial features. Thus it helped me suddenly remember what had happened about seven years earlier.
This sudden sensation must have moved me, for despite my customary timidity, I ran after him and called to him.
The gentleman was none other than the close friend of my late elder brother, who used to come to see him quite frequently.
3
His name was Yamaza. He had graduated from the same school as my brother, and they were working for the same company. As my brother was the eldest son and ten years older than I, the youngest, with two sisters in between, I naturally had no opportunity to speak with the man. But I used to hear a great deal about him from my parents and others.
It all goes back to the time when I was about to graduate from middle school. My brother had frequently caused our father trouble by leading a dissolute life and as a result, together with Yamaza, borrowing money at high interest. As if this were not enough, he, Yamaza, and a few of his sort swindled money out of people by using their company’s name. In no time their action was discovered and they were all arrested. However, my brother escaped punishment when my father sold the property he owned and indemnified the company. Yamaza too somehow managed to get acquitted, thanks to his uncle who was an army officer of some rank or other. Thus, only the remaining two, neither of whom had any such help, were to experience the most dismal of circumstances. But at that time I did not fully grasp the meaning of criminal acts, so all I felt was some vague fear.
After this incident, my brother idled away his time for about two years, becoming the focus of the whole family’s fear and aversion, as if he were an ill omen incarnate or a plague. But then he unexpectedly contracted consumption and died before the winter passed. Just as suddenly, my father and mother stopped badmouthing my brother, and on every occasion they would say that it was all because of that bad company, Yamaza, who used to frequent the house. . . . The maxim that goes “Who keeps company with the wolf will learn to howl” particularly became my parents’ favorite quotation. Not just my parents, but even my eldest sister (who was two years my brother’s junior and was already married to a graduate of law school) would say, whenever she visited our house and came across some pictures of my brother and Yamaza as she turned the pages of the family album, “My, doesn’t he look foppish! Just like an actor or a comic storyteller!” I still remember her gazing at the pictures intently and sometimes even hitting his face with the point of her ornamental hairpin.
One year came and went, and then another. And every year, whenever the cold month of February arrived, the month when my brother had died, Yamaza’s name would be mentioned anew by my parents, and the old maxim and numerous moral lessons would be repeated to me. But no one in my family knew where this dreadful Yamaza had gone, or what he was doing.
4
“So, you are the younger brother of Chiyomatsu . . . indeed, I’ve never forgotten. At that time you were just a mere kid, weren’t you? It must be already seven or eight years . . . perhaps even longer ago.”
Yamaza had just lit his cigar in front of the tobacco store, amid the laborers jamming the streets; he did look surprised and stared at me for a moment, but then changed his tone.
“Why did you come to the United States? To study? . . . But this is no place for young men like you.”
“I’ll be leaving for the East as soon as my friend gets here, perhaps as early as tomorrow,” I answered calmly. “And how about you? Are you engaged in some business?”
“I?” he broke off and studied my face for a while. “You’d be shocked if I told you. Ha! ha! ha! ha! One does change a great deal.”
“Maybe some immigration business?” I was led to ask, judging from his appearance, showing off a fine moustache and an ostentatious array of golden items like rings and chains; his somehow vulgar manner of speech; and the special conditions of this region.
At that, he burst out laughing and said, “You can indeed say it’s a kind of immigration business. Sure, it’s something the immigrants need. . . .” He fell silent for a while and puffed away at his cigar. “Why don’t I take you to a Japanese restaurant? Once you are in the East, all you get to eat at first will just be Western food.”
I didn’t decline his offer and was led to a Japanese restaurant in the same alley, which had a paper-covered lampstand saying SAKURAYA, if I remember correctly, sticking out of the second-floor window. The dark entranceway was similar to that of the brothels I had observed, and as we climbed upstairs, I noticed five or six painted doors on both sides of a narrow hallway where a lone naked gaslight was flickering. It was dim, but one could hear noises inside the closed doors created by the voices of many men and women and the sound of samisen, and the smell from the cooking of sukiyaki was lingering.
Yamaza looked around as if this were his own house and took me inside a room. As he pushed a bell button, a woman appeared, with a face thickly painted white, lookin
g like a maidservant at a post town in Japan and wearing a Western-style dress plus Japanese-style indoor sandals. Behaving as if they were on quite friendly terms, she said without ceremony, “Do you want something to eat?” and leaned wearily against the nearby wall.
“Doesn’t matter what. Just tell Oyuki and bring over something nice.”
The woman did not even respond but simply nodded and headed down the hallway, her sandals flapping.
Abruptly, from some room came the sound of merry sawagi samisen [boisterous samisen to enliven the party], along with the tapping of teacups to keep time. It somehow reminded me of the noises created by boatmen at a tea house on the wharf one evening some summers back in the Bôshû area [to the east of Tokyo]. All of a sudden, the feeling of loneliness from having come to a foreign land a long way from home welled up in my heart, making me a little sad. Then the door opened. Another woman entered, carrying pickled vegetables and sake bottles; but she didn’t treat Yamaza as a guest, either, and sat down close to him, saying, “What happened last night? Don’t you think it was too much? Don’t carry your jokes too far.”
Taken aback, I looked at her face. She was about twenty-seven or -eight, and judging from her way of speaking and her slender face, she was the type of woman one saw frequently among the maids at small restaurants or sukiyaki houses in the Asakusa area.
Even Yamaza looked a little embarrassed in my presence and, repeatedly puffing cigar smoke, he said, “What’s the matter with you, talking silly nonsense as soon as you arrive? Can’t you serve some sake to our guest right away?”
The woman poured me some and took the opportunity to turn to me and say, “I can’t help complaining once in a while, can I? He brings me all the way to America and then flirts around every night. . . . Please straighten him out a little.”
Finally, it came out, and I must say it was stranger than ever. Yamaza let the woman go, telling her to hurry the kitchen. As if determined that he should no longer hide his secrets, he said, even before I asked him anything, “You must be amazed, yes? Aren’t you flabbergasted?” He laughed and then told me what had happened to him.
Around the time that he learned about my brother’s death from the newspapers’ obituaries, he left his country, where he had been unable to make a living any longer, for San Francisco in search of some good fortune. After experiencing the kinds of hardships and disappointments of most immigrants to the United States, he came to the conclusion that the best way to make money in America was to live on women. So he went back to Japan and immediately returned to America with a maid from a sukiyaki house, namely Oyuki. Settling down in Seattle, he told me, he had been making a living as an intermediary in smuggling prostitutes and by gambling.
“Once you take one step in the wrong direction, it’s all over; you can’t reverse course midway. No matter how repentant you are, the world won’t forgive someone who has been tainted. The only choice for you is to push as far as you can in the direction of evil. Take your brother, Chiyomatsu. He wanted to turn back halfway in order to become respectable, but he worried so much about such things that he contracted tuberculosis and ended his life. It’s the same with everybody. Scholars who don’t know the world seem to think human beings will continue to fall if let alone, but don’t worry. They might fall halfway, becoming neither good nor bad, but to settle down in the bottomless pit beyond that point is hard work for anyone who has any measure of education. You have to completely subdue that creature called ‘conscience’ that sticks its head out from time to time. That’s far more difficult to do than to say. There is nothing unusual about a guy born to a family of beggars becoming a beggar. And it takes no effort for someone born into a good family to become an ordinary good citizen. The problem is what comes next, whether to take another step and become a great figure, or to retreat a step and move to the wrong side of society, neither of which is easy. The efforts and training involved in either course are the same, though they are as different as night and day. So the choice boils down to whether one wants to become a Napoleon or an Ishikawa Goemon [a notorious thief in the sixteenth century].”
He was discoursing in a grandly exalted tone of voice, drinking cupfuls of sake, as if he were back at a time, ten or twenty years earlier, when students used to aspire to serving the country, accomplishing great deeds, or achieving fame—unlike today when we are more accustomed to talking about life or mysteries. I decided it was best to listen to his words as an expression of some eccentric satire coming from the aching heart of a man with an injured past, and so I didn’t contradict or ask him questions but just pretended to be absorbed in his speech.
Outside, the sawagi samisen had not yet stopped, but another party’s samisen and the singing of “Shinonomebushi,” a song popular in Japan three or four years earlier, began to be heard.
The very next day, joined by my friend who had arrived from the south, I departed for the East Coast on a Great Northern train.
A little later, in a letter to my mother, I casually mentioned my encounter with Yamaza, to which she responded saying that everything, whether good or bad, was now but a dream; Mr. Yamaza had been a close friend of my elder brother’s, and so as a token of her good wishes, she had sent under separate cover a can of yakinori [toasted seaweed], which she wanted me to deliver to him when I had an opportunity.
The parental thoughtfulness, the motherly affections, of an elderly person who had no idea that New York and Seattle were separated by three thousand miles: thinking of her moved me to tears in spite of myself.
(June 1907)
Old Regrets
I was discussing opera with Dr. B—. We talked about the enchanting and passionate Italian school, the discreetly tasteful and beautiful character of the French school, and eventually about the sublime, imposing, and mysterious Wagnerian opera of Germany.
The great Das Rheingold and the trilogy that follows it, the sacred Parsifal, the sorrowful Tristan und Isolda [sic], the beautiful Lohengrin, the profound and melancholy Der Fliegende Holländer . . . among all these immortal works bequeathed to us by the great genius of Bayreuth, somehow the story of Tannhäuser was unforgettable to my amateur’s ears. . . .
“Dear sir, what are your views about that opera’s ideals?”
As I asked the question, Dr. B— heaved a deep sigh as if he had been stabbed in the heart and gazed at me silently for some moments. Then he said, looking down, “Unfortunately, I am not qualified to pass scholarly judgment on that opera, for whenever I recall the time I heard Tannhäuser, I am struck by an uncontrollable emotion. . . . Shall I tell you the story? It happened nearly twenty years ago. . . .”
As I drew up my chair, he began.
“It was already twenty years ago. My wife, Josephine, asked me, just as you did, the meaning of Tannhäuser. At that time, I was touring Europe with her on our honeymoon, and one evening, while we were staying in the capital of Austria, we went to its famous Imperial Opera House. (As he spoke, he pointed to a building in a photograph on the wall.) That evening’s opera was none other than Tannhäuser.
“I still vividly remember everything, from the appearance of the inside of the opera house, the faces of the singers who performed that evening, and the musicians to the faces of the numerous members of the chorus who appeared as retainers in the hunting scene or in the procession of lords and pilgrims.
“Soon after my wife, Josephine, and I took our designated seats in the hall filled with beautiful gowns and jewelry, the long-haired conductor appeared at the podium at the foot of the stage and marked out three beats with his baton; all at once the brilliant lights went out and the huge audience fell silent, enveloped in the darkness of the spacious theater. The orchestra starts with the sad and solemn tune of the pilgrims and moves on to the passionate music of Venusberg, then to ‘the hymn of Venus,’ concluding the long overture that may be said to summarize the whole meaning of this opera. . . . The curtain rises, and it is the scene of the goddess Venus’s mountain.
“As you
know, at the left-hand side of the stage, Tannhäuser, the Minnesinger, slumbers at the foot of Venus’s bed, still holding a harp. Numerous nymphs dance, and apparitions float in the air, suggesting Tannhäuser’s dreams, and finally the singer awakens; he says that, having been inebriated for many years by all imaginable pleasures through Venus’s love, he now misses the world and wants to return to it, bidding Venus farewell. The goddess tries to dissuade him, saying that if he goes back to the world he will surely recall the bygone dreams and regret the decision; he should forever play his harp of love and sing songs of joy with her. But Tannhäuser is unmoved, and as he sings a hymn to Saint Mary, he is awakened from his dreams of the bewitched world. Venus disappears into darkness, along with her mountain. Alone, Tannhäuser stands by a mountain path near his native place of Waltburg.
“On a rock by the mountain path, a lone young shepherd is playing on a pipe and singing with a clear, innocent voice. Soon, from beyond the mountain, sad voices of pilgrims on their way to Rome begin to be heard, and their procession moves down the path and away.
“Tannhäuser pays rapt attention to these songs, and suddenly he is filled with dread as he recalls the sinful pleasures in which he indulged; he is so shaken that he throws himself down, sobbing.