Three Japanese Short Stories

by Akutagawa

  Ah, this blue sky, this sunlight: mementos of a forgotten summer. How could one imagine it to be October, to be autumn? The barest hint of a breeze turns the pages of the poetry book on my knees until I have a clear view of the final stanza of Baudelaire’s sad ‘Song of Autumn’:

  Ah! laissez-moi, mon front posé sur vos genoux,

  Goûter, en regrettant l’été blanc et torride,

  De l’arrière saison le rayon jaune et doux!

  ‘Ah! let me, with my head bowed on your knees, / Taste the sweet, yellow rays of the end of autumn, / While I mourn for the white, torrid summer!’

  No matter what I see, even the most beautiful flower, I wonder if it is blooming only to make us think of the sadness to come when it has withered and died. The delightful intoxication of love, I can only believe, exists to give us a taste of the sadness to come after parting. And surely the autumn sunlight shines this beautifully in order to tell us, ‘Know ye that the sadness of winter will be here tomorrow.’ Now and then I become strangely agitated and, wishing to see the fading sunlight for even a few seconds longer, I leave to walk not just in the garden but through the gate and into the streets beyond. Ah, what scenes the autumn sun – the autumn sun of my birthplace – has shown me!

  As I said at the beginning of this letter, my home is located behind the Ichigaya prison. When I began my travels nearly six years ago, this was a tranquil patch of countryside. ‘You know,’ I would tell the city girls, ‘it’s that place where the azaleas bloom.’ Only then would it dawn on them which area I was talking about. Now, however, it is just another new district slapped together on the edge of Tokyo. All that is unchanged are the long prison embankment that looms over the narrow street and the life of the poor who toil here beneath it.

  The first thing you see across from our front gate is the long, weather-beaten wooden fence enclosing the jailers’ compound and then the horrible embankment itself, casting a shadow over the narrow street and topped by a spiky hedge, beneath which not even a weasel could burrow. The flanks of the embankment are covered by a prickly growth of frightful devil’s thistle, one touch of which would cause your hand to swell in pain. On stormy September days, I would expect the wind to blow over the dilapidated fence around the jailers’ compound, and, sure enough, the next morning, when the street was littered with tree branches, I would see pairs of prisoners chained together at the waist in orange jackets with numbers on their collars and wearing bamboo coolie hats, pulling up and repairing the fence under the supervision of uniformed, sword-bearing guards. Sometimes, too, at the height of summer, a gang of prisoners would mow the weeds on the embankment. Passers-by would stop and stare at them in silence, eyes filled with simultaneous loathing and curiosity.

  The embankment runs in a long, straight line from both left and right until it curves sharply inwards at the centre, where it ends in a large black gate between two thick columns. The gate’s heavy-looking doors are always tightly shut. No voices can be heard from the other side of the gate, and there is nothing to be seen from the outside except a narrow chimney poking up above a low tiled roof, and four or five skinny cedars. The trees stand some distance away from one another, which to my eyes suggests that even these unfeeling plants are being kept apart in the prison yard to prevent them from whispering together, plotting evil schemes under cover of darkness.

  Where the raised embankment suddenly gives out some distance from the gate, the narrow street becomes a downward-winding slope, on one side of which, during my absence, some rich gentleman seems to have built a new residence upon high stone walls, while on the other side the road is lined with the same kind of rental tenement houses that have been there for ever, like a row of boxes, one atop another, going down the hill. The prison embankment stands behind them like a blank wall, thanks to which no ray of sunlight has ever reached the tenements. Their wooden foundations are rotting and overgrown with moss, and insects have eaten holes through the bottom edges of the storm shutters standing outside each unit’s front lattice door during the day. Two or three of the units invariably have barely legible ‘For Rent’ signs hanging from them. And always there are signs soliciting piecework. Often when passing these tenements on a cold winter evening, I have seen on a small window’s torn, soot-smeared shoji the pale shadow cast by an oil lamp of a woman with tousled locks retying her obi. And on sultry summer evenings, peering through sparse reed blinds, I have had a clear view of the secrets of these people’s households. How well I recall passing by here on afternoons when the prisoners’ used bath water would gush down the drainage ditches below the tenements’ windows, raising clouds of foul-smelling steam. It must be the same even now. Most shocking of all were the local housewives with scabrous babies on their backs, seizing the opportunity to make use of the hot water on cold, clear days, to wash things in the ditches as they chattered away with mouthfuls of crooked teeth, or in summertime scattering the stinking water on the road.

  Shabby shops line both sides of the road at the bottom of the hill – a sweet shop, a hardware store, a tobacconist, a greengrocer, a firewood seller – among which a rice merchant and soy sauce dealer are the only good old-fashioned establishments with thick pillars that might arouse vague feelings of rebellion. Which is not to suggest a modern socialist reaction on my part, but merely a fantasy inspired by the traditional look of the houses and starring such popular stage heroes as Jiraiya or Nezumi Kozō. Oddly, there are two old stonemasons down here, and especially noticeable of late has been the increase in the number of home-delivery tempura shops and fishmongers, proof of the day-by-day increase in the number of tenements in the area. Upon a wooden counter disturbingly overgrown with green moss sits a shallow, round wooden sushi rice mixing bowl half filled with greasy water containing fish parts, shaved fish meat and rows of skewered shellfish that have been dried in the sun, almost all bearing price tags of ten sen or less. As far as I can see, the eyes of the dead fish are all stagnant and cloudy, the scales on their bellies have faded to a pale bluish white, and the chilled bloody edges of their sliced meat have lost so much of their freshness that the colours in each shop front are not only unpleasant but downright depressing. The sight of dripping blood used to terrify me whenever I passed a butcher’s shop in the West, but here, to the contrary, the thought that this faded, cold fish meat is the only source of nourishment for the blood of most of my countrymen fills me with an inexpressible sorrow. All the more so when I turn the corner at the bottom of the hill near sundown and hear the hoarse voice of the old man at a stand there displaying nothing but fish bones and guts with a scarf tied over the top of his head and yelling, ‘Get your tai guts cheap! Get your tai guts cheap!’ He’s surrounded by housewives with babies on their backs, the women all screaming at him to bring his prices even lower.

  Above the sand-whitened tiled roofs, the evening sky’s great expanse glows less red than a murky burnt sienna because autumn is nearing its end, casting shadows more intensely black than the dark of night. The narrow road is suddenly crowded with men most likely coming home from work – rather well-dressed gentlemen, military men on horseback, passengers in rickshaws. All move as black shadows, without a single light to be seen in the houses on either side of the road. Running with dizzying speed among them are children at play, waving sticks and other playthings. I have seen men in Western suits stop at the fish guts stand by the roadside on their way home from the office before climbing the hill towards the back of the prison, carrying their purchases wrapped in bamboo sheathing. The sight brings to mind scenes of dinner in poor Japanese households.

  The lattice door of a tenement unit clatters but shows no sign of opening, nor does the patched grey shoji behind it catch any lamplight from within. The threshold remains in darkness. One Western-suited gentleman steps out of his never-polished rubber-soled shoes, opens the shoji and steps inside to find his disabled old mother coughing beneath the window of the tiny three-mat room. The baby is squealing. Shocked to realize that night has fallen, the wif
e squats down like a frog on the kitchen floor, nervously trying to fill the lamp with oil. Alerted to her husband’s homecoming by the sound of the opening door, she turns her colourless face towards him in the skylight’s afterglow, loose hairs from her dry-looking bun floating off in all directions. Though not cold, she sniffles as she offers him a blank ‘Welcome home’.

  Instead of answering, the husband asks, ‘You’re only getting to the lamp now?’ and he scolds her for her poor housekeeping. His old mother crawls out of her bedding on the floor and tries to intervene. Whichever side she takes, the results are the same and the argument blossoms. Just then the eight-year-old comes in wailing about the fight that sent him flying into the drainage ditch, and he has the mud-smeared kimono to prove it. Now the argument centres on him until the evening dishes line up beneath the dusky lamp – boiled beans, pickled vegetables, a stew of fish bones and scallions, and a rice tub smeared with dirty fingerprints. Gathered around their flimsy table, the family talk about uncle so-and-so, who showed up this afternoon wanting to know the cost of Mother’s medicine in the spring. They talk about how the wife’s father lost his job. They talk about their everyday expenses. The family’s mouths were formed for only two purposes: to eat food and to complain endlessly about the hardships of life. Whether they are impoverished or not, it amounts to the same thing. The pure art of conversation for its own sake is lost on people like this. They have no need of language for anything other than seeking advice, complaining, harping on the same old stories and quarrelling.

  Such are the scenes that have greeted me when I have strolled out of our front gate and up the road behind the prison in the hope of enjoying the autumn light. What grips my heart still more painfully are the tragic acts of animal cruelty I see on the road. Two or three freight wagons in a row drawn by emaciated horses over long distances, some loaded with bales of rice, others with lumber or bricks or other heavy payloads, will be led through the rear gate of the prison at the top of the slope. Unfortunately for the animals, the open area in front of the gate rises at the same angle as the road itself, which causes the wheels of the turning wagons to dig into the soft, damp soil, and this makes it impossible for the exhausted horses to drag the wagons up and through the gate in a single effort. When this happens, the rough teamsters scream at the horses and beat them mercilessly with fallen branches. The men yank violently on the reins, and the horses clamp their white teeth on the bits in what seems like unbearable pain. Their manes bristle, their bloodshot eyes bulge and finally their forelegs collapse, bringing them down on the gravel surface. Everything on the narrow slope comes to a halt whenever this occurs, but far from being shocked, most passers-by stare open-mouthed in amusement. Here, then, is proof that cruelty to animals is an issue only to a few Christians, not a pressing problem for the whole of Japanese society. Is this a matter for grief or celebration? Witnessing these scenes only deepens my sense that the Japanese are a warlike people who are sure to defeat the Russians once again in the future. Oh, patriots, set your minds at ease. As long as you can make a yellow man like me believe in the white man’s Yellow Peril, you should feel free to go on cursing your wives, oppressing your children and giving three cheers for the empire with glasses held high. And so we declare: the age is still too young for us to worry that melancholy poets will begin giving voice to their ideals.

  Slowly, gradually, I have come to avoid and even fear the prospect of venturing beyond the front gate. Yes, let me gaze in quiet solitude at the shifting autumn sunlight through the glass doors of my veranda.

  Sadly, autumn is already beginning to fade. The intense sunlight that made the afternoons seem like summer has weakened now, and the sky is always thickly overcast. It looks like the frosted glass skylight of a large atelier, across which cloud curtains move, sending down pale refracted rays as soft as twilight. Shadows and colours seen in this light seem to have a transparent clarity that cannot be sensed in the blinding glare of the sun. The trees have lost their leaves, their crowns bare and bright, their slender black branches tracing innumerable upward-thrusting lines against the sky. Behind them, the gazebo’s thatched roof and the field’s withered grasses glow yellow through the black evergreens in the distance. Half hidden by the ornamental stones beyond the veranda, tiny golden chrysanthemums bloom like stars. From there to the far end of the garden spreads an unbroken velvet carpet of moss even more lustrous than in summer. Two or three wagtails, pecking at the tiny moss flowers, move across the carpet, flicking their long, pointed tails up and down. How sharply their grey feathers and the crimson leaves of the dwarf sumac bonsai upon a boulder contrast with the broad green lustre of the moss!

  No wind blows. The shifting, cloudy autumn afternoon maintains its thick silence, giving the illusion that the outlines of objects have been obliterated, leaving only their colours. On occasion, a few remaining leaves will suddenly flutter down from a tree. This unexpected stirring of the air is like the deep sigh of some mysterious creature. When that happens, every single leaf in the garden – from the evergreens’ lush needles to the clumps of chrysanthemums among the stones – resounds with an inexpressible sorrow and then, a moment later, reverts to silence. Atop the smooth moss: the wagtails again, the chrysanthemum blossoms, the bonsai’s crimson foliage. Ah, the light of a dream, the thin overcast of departing autumn.

  Excellency! Since yesterday I have been reading Verlaine’s book of prison verse Sagesse:

  O my God, you have wounded me with love.

  The wound remains open, unhealed.

  O my God, you have wounded me with love …

  Excellency! Please come visit me once before the onset of winter. I am lonely.

  Closet LLB

  by Uno Kōji

  Five years have gone by since Otsukotsu Sansaku received his Bachelor of Laws degree from the university and became known as Otsukotsu Sansaku, LLB, but he still has no fixed occupation. Almost nine years have gone by since he first arrived in Tokyo from the provinces, but he still spreads his bedding in the same room of the same boarding house he chose at the beginning (while ownership of the boarding house itself has changed hands thirteen times).

  As an undergraduate, Sansaku was, in fact, present on at least two-thirds of the days his college was open for classes – perhaps because the rules prohibited anything less – and his grades were on the high side. At university, however, he averaged ten days a year, passing through the campus gate no more than forty times in four years, as a result of which he graduated second from the bottom in his class.

  Back in the third or fourth year of primary school, Sansaku became obsessed with boys’ magazines and fairy tales, and he aspired, if somewhat vaguely, to become a children’s author like Iwaya Sazanami.

  His father died when Sansaku was three, leaving Sansaku and his mother enough money to live on for the rest of their lives. His mother took the extra precaution of entrusting the property to an influential relative, but this had the reverse effect of plunging them into misfortune when, unexpectedly, the relative went bankrupt, losing not only his own property but theirs as well. This happened the year Sansaku entered middle school.

  At that point another relative, a man named Ōike, stepped forward to pay his school fees. Ōike was a cousin of Sansaku’s father whom the father had aided monetarily and in other ways and who, unexpectedly, had succeeded in business and become a millionaire. When the fourteen-year-old Sansaku finished his first year of middle school, Ōike brought him to live in the Ōike household and insisted that he take an examination to transfer into a prestigious business school. Try as he might, Sansaku could not make himself study for the exam, and two days before the appointed date he ran away from the Ōikes’ to his own house (or, rather, to the house of his mother’s parents, who had taken them in after the bankruptcy).

  Ōike then gave up on his plans for Sansaku and resigned himself to paying the boy’s tuition and letting him continue through the full five years of middle school. Sansaku had had excellent grades all the
way through primary and middle school, which is not to say that he was working especially hard in middle school. Far from it. Indeed, he was already completely immersed in magazines and fiction. But the ambition Iwaya Sazanami had sparked in his earliest years had been evolving bit by bit: first, Sansaku found himself wanting to be a staff writer at a magazine, and then, from the third year of middle school, he embraced the unshakeable goal of becoming a novelist. To this very day, that has not changed. Which only goes to prove that we are dealing here with someone who was once a childhood prodigy.

  Yet another problem arose when Sansaku graduated from middle school at the age of eighteen. Ōike, convinced that this was the time for him to take action, again pressed Sansaku to study business, but Sansaku insisted that his future lay in literature. The two clashed repeatedly until it was decided (through the offices of a third party) that Sansaku should take the middle path and study law at college. Not even the gifted Otsukotsu Sansaku was able to grasp exactly how law was the ‘middle path’ between business and literature, but he did see that any further resistance to the wishes of the relative who was paying for his education would be both futile and against his better interests, and in the end he resigned himself to entering the college’s pre-law programme. Thus it came about that, through the three years of college and four more at university, Sansaku steeped himself exclusively in literature while supposedly settled in law. He managed to squeeze through his university law exams at least, and five years ago became, if in name only, a Bachelor of Laws: Otsukotsu Sansaku, LLB.