Three Japanese Short Stories

by Akutagawa

  Just about the time he graduated from university, Ōike died. This did not spell the end of the Ōike line, however, since Mr Ōike had a perfectly fine heir to carry on his name. But the payments to Sansaku came to a halt the moment he graduated, almost as if Ōike’s debt to Sansaku’s father had now been settled once and for all. As noted earlier, Sansaku is a Bachelor of Laws, but he knows almost nothing about the law. Not one of his relatives, who felt only antipathy towards him, offered to help him find employment. Nor did he, in his strange arrogance, bother to approach any of his senior law colleagues in search of an opening. None of them liked Sansaku, either.

  In this way did our poor Bachelor of Laws suddenly find himself pressed to make ends meet. While at university, most of his friends had been in the literature department rather than law, and it was through those friends that Sansaku was able to live from one poverty-stricken day to the next by doing the occasional cut-rate translation or writing fairy tales, though even so he has run up a sizable debt at his boarding house. In addition, once he graduated he found that he was expected to send fifteen yen every month to his elderly mother in the country.

  Over the past year or two, Sansaku has fallen into ever-deepening poverty. There has never been enough translation work, and he has run out of ideas for fairy tales. Still, visiting literary friends to beg for work has been just as hard for him as calling upon his senior colleagues in law. (In other words, though arrogant, he is also a man of great diffidence.) Before he knew it, then, his payments to his mother fell further and further behind. Once that happened, it ceased to bother him, and he gradually stopped sending anything at all. In the end, he could toss her urgent letters aside with hardly a twinge of conscience.

  Then, just a month ago, a letter arrived from the country. As we have seen, Sansaku might allow two or three days to go by before reading his mother’s letters, and some he never read at all; but this one, fortunately, he opened and read immediately – ‘fortunately’ because it brought him excellent news. Since he had so often been late sending money to her, his mother said, their relatives had begun to hear of her difficulties, and several of them who, like Ōike, had been aided by Sansaku’s late father and had since done especially well for themselves, had got together and collected ten thousand yen, enabling her to open a small but dependable shop.

  This news brought Sansaku such a tremendous sense of relief from the cares of day-to-day living that he felt quite drained.

  ‘What was that again?’ he muttered to himself, recalling the last part of his mother’s letter. ‘ “Our relatives say they pooled their resources and helped me open a shop because you have failed to support me the way you ought to, Sansaku, so under no circumstances should you even dream of pestering your mother” – “not that we are in a position to say such a thing,” said the hypocritical bastards! – “for a loan.” A loan? Who the hell’s asking for a loan? But wait a minute,’ he went on, trying to make sense of the situation. ‘If they gave it to her, it’s hers. And besides, it’s not as if I’m some prodigal son planning to “pester” his mother for money to support his dissolute lifestyle. This will be my chance to sit down and do some serious work. Which means … and so …

  ‘All right, then, let me just set all thought of money aside and take the time to apply myself to a grown-up novel.’ (Having written so many fairy tales over the years, this is how Sansaku refers to standard novels.)

  ‘Because I’ve had to send out fifteen yen or so every month until now, I’ve been compelled to keep taking stupid jobs I absolutely detested, but now that my mother’s livelihood is assured …’

  No sooner had his thoughts brought him this far than Sansaku felt that sudden, draining sense of relief, like a traveller who remains unconscious of his fatigue as long as he keeps hurrying down the road but who collapses in a heap from exhaustion the moment he realizes he has reached his destination (though in fact, as stated earlier, Sansaku had by no means been making regular monthly remittances to his mother). Once he felt it was no longer necessary for him to act, the will to act simply vanished. Although he did at least feel an occasional urge to write a grown-up novel – after all, it was an ambition he had often harboured to the point of ignoring everything else, including his studies for a time – it occurred to him that, even if he managed to finish one, far from earning him easy money like his fairy tales, just getting it accepted would require enormous effort on his part. And so he flung his pen away.

  Every single day since then he has spent either visiting with friends or sleeping. Sansaku’s style of sleeping deserves special mention. His small tatami-matted room has the standard tall, deep closet divided by a sturdy shelf into upper and lower compartments for storing his futon and covers behind a pair of sliding paper doors, but Sansaku long ago decided that it was too much trouble to open the closet door and pull the bedding out every day to spread it on the tatami. Instead he cleared out the upper compartment and now keeps his futon spread out permanently on the shelf. He sleeps in the closet with the doors open and never has to make his bed.

  ‘This is it! This is the answer!’ he cried in delight at his own discovery. ‘I may have been born in the sticks, but I’m different from the typical farmer or merchant’s son. I’m delicately built, so I can’t sleep just anywhere with a pile of magazines or a folded cushion for a pillow. This is it!’

  Lazy as he was, Sansaku still managed to wake up early every morning, wash his face and eat breakfast. After an hour or two, however, he would crawl back into his bed on the closet shelf. Usually he would be awakened by the maid when she brought his lunch on a tray, which she would set on the tatami. He would slip down from the shelf, sit cross-legged on the floor to finish his lunch and then immediately burrow his way back into the bedding on the closet shelf. Then, in the evening, he would be awakened yet again by the maid when she arrived with his dinner on the usual tray. While he slept, of course, Sansaku was unconscious, so it seemed as if his three meals – breakfast, lunch and dinner – were delivered to him in rapid succession the way a waiter in a Western restaurant brings one dish after another to the table. He spent most evenings strolling around the city or visiting friends to talk about nothing in particular. Bedtime was two o’clock in the morning for him most days. Still, it was Sansaku more than anyone who was amazed at how much he could sleep.

  ‘On the other hand, I never sleep without dreaming,’ he would often think to himself. ‘Which may mean that the amount of time I am actually asleep is short. If ordinary people dream a little while sleeping, in my case it’s more that I sleep a little while dreaming.’

  Now, the boarding house in which Otsukotsu Sansaku, LLB, lives is halfway up a hill, and it stands on a plot of land that is two feet lower than the street level, as a result of which, even though his room is on the second floor facing the street (that is, the hill), the faces of people passing by are at virtually the same height as his when he is sitting on his tatami floor. This means that when he leaves his window open and keeps the door of his closet slid back, he can lie amid the bedding on his closet shelf, watching the street and closely observing the passers-by – none of whom, of course, can imagine that there is a person in the closet watching them and who must consequently pass by unconcerned about what they assume to be an empty room.

  This way, from among the folds of his bedding, Sansaku can spend certain intervals – the five or ten minutes between the time his eyes have tired of reading magazines and the time he drifts into his morning or afternoon nap – watching the people climbing or descending the hill as if he were seeing them in a play. He has developed the ability to pick out local residents even if he has never spoken a word to them, saying to himself, ‘Aha! That’s so-and-so from such-and-such a house.’ Quite often, while lying in bed and watching the passers-by in this way, he will eventually slip into a dream while muttering something like ‘Oh, I’m glad to see him out walking all the time again: he must have got over his sickness’ or ‘My goodness, look at that girl! She’s reall
y decked out today!’

  In his student days, Sansaku had been terribly dissatisfied with the law as an academic discipline. Now he has the LLB attached to his name, but he still lives like a literature student, albeit one to whom current literature and literary people have come to seem just as dissatisfying and contemptible. Before, he (and perhaps only he) had believed that a literary man was someone who possessed keen powers of appreciation for all things in this world. Now, however, how did those literary people he had grown familiar with appear to him?

  ‘To take an example close at hand,’ thought Otsukotsu Sansaku, LLB, while observing the street from his closet bed as usual, ‘the face of that woman passing by: among the writers I know’ (and in fact, many of the literature-student friends he had while he was in law school were already well-known men of letters) ‘is there even one who would be capable of composing a decent critique of how beautiful – or not beautiful – her face is, or her figure, or the way she wears her kimono, or her whole outfit?’

  As a child, Sansaku tended to be smug and arrogant, always ready to show off his slightest ability. He was, in a word, vaguely contemptuous of just about everything and everyone. The tendency only increased with age to the point where now even he has come to find it somewhat abnormal. His sense of dissatisfaction has increased over the past two or three years such that all works of art – not only fiction but critical essays, dramatic texts, theatrical performances, paintings – are remarkable to him only for their innumerable shortcomings. He has come to feel that he is the only one who can perceive their flaws and virtues (if, indeed, they possess any virtues), that he alone truly understands them. He has gone so far as to think he should therefore provide models for other writers, write works that would serve to guide them to increasingly greater accomplishments; but in the end nothing has ever materialized.

  Say, he goes out to eat, or to a performance of gidayū or rakugo or kōdan or naniwabushi, or perhaps ongyoku or buyō, or down a notch to comic teodori or a shinpa tragedy: there is absolutely nothing about them that he does not know how to appreciate. He believes himself capable of discovering points of beauty in things that everyone else dismisses, and equally able to find bad points in things that everyone else admires, which makes him very pleased with himself.

  ‘Had I become a sumo wrestler, I’m sure I would have numbered among the champions.’ This was one of the more far-fetched thoughts that came to Sansaku one day as he was lying in his closet. ‘Take that Ōarashi Tatsugorō, for example. Everybody is calling him unbeatable, but I knew him in middle school. At first, he and I were in the same class, but he was what they called a “backward” student and failed his exams twice in two years, ending up two grades behind me. Now you look at the sumo coverage in the paper and they’re calling him an unusually smart wrestler. Well, I used to face him in judo all the time. I never had the physical strength, but my body was as unresisting as noodles, so the other guy could come at me with all his might, but I was like a willow in the wind – sure, it’s an old figure of speech, but that’s how I was – and nobody could ever knock me down. After a while, when the other guy started pressing, I’d see an opening and use his strength against him. I always won. Old Ōarashi was fairly strong back then (though nothing special), but he never once beat me. If I had been training all this time like Ōarashi, I’d be great by now, or at least a damn good – if unusual – wrestler.’

  The thought made Otsukotsu Sansaku feel he couldn’t lose against Ōarashi even now. As he lay there in his closet imagining himself going up against each of the current sumo wrestlers, a big grin crossed his face.

  ‘I wonder why I never put more of myself into studying the law,’ thought Sansaku one day. ‘I mean, think of that stiff-brained, tongue-tied, unimpressive-looking classmate of mine, Kakii: I see in today’s paper they’re calling him one of the up-and-coming hot young lawyers for some stupid case he’s managed to win. The public is so damn easy to fool.’ (Sansaku finds fault only with other people and forgets how hard the public is – and has been – for him to fool.) ‘With my intelligence and my eloquence …’ More than once, such thoughts inspired him to resolve to hit the law books and apply to be a judge or public prosecutor, but the inspiration never lasted more than an hour.

  Ultimately, Sansaku lacked the most important elements for making a go of it in this world: perseverance, courage and common sense. To him, everything was ‘stupid’, everything was ‘boring’, everything he saw and heard filled him with displeasure and sometimes even anger. He was especially repulsed by his landlady’s modern, swept-back hairstyle, to which she added an extra swirl by placing a black-lacquered wire frame against her scalp and covering it as best she could with her thinning hair, each strand stuck in place with pomade. She also appeared to spend her days in eager anticipation of being called ‘Madam’ not only by the maids but by her lodgers as well; she was trying to hide the fact that she was the mistress of an old country gentleman who visited her once or twice a week.

  Only Sansaku made a point of calling her ‘Mistress Proprietor’, to which she never once deigned to reply. In spite of her refusal to respond, he would always ask her, ‘How much fun are you getting out of life?’

  ‘How much fun are you getting out of life?’ was a pet phrase of Sansaku’s.

  ‘And you?’ he once asked a friend. ‘Are you enjoying life?’

  The friend’s only answer was a couple of non-committal grunts.

  Another friend answered the question with a straight-out ‘Not at all’, to which Sansaku responded with his second pet phrase, ‘Don’t you want to die?’

  ‘I’d like to be killed without knowing it,’ the friend answered.

  ‘Oh, oh, I can’t take it any longer. I think I’ll just find myself an aeroplane. I was one of the best gymnasts in middle school, so I’m sure I’d make a great pilot.’ Sansaku’s own special delusions of grandeur were taking flight. ‘Too bad I don’t have the one thing you really need for that … guts.’ And soon he was drifting into his usual dream world in his closet bed.

  Otsukotsu Sansaku had been an excellent long-jumper in middle school. He would take a twenty-foot run, plant his left foot on the line and sail into the air with his legs still rotating, as if swimming. As he neared the end of his jump, he would flip his body forwards, beginning a second arc and lengthening his distance, and then twist himself to make still another arc the moment before he touched down, forming three arcs in all. This way, he managed to jump much further than the other jumpers, who could only execute a single arc. Now, in his mind, he found himself using this technique to send his body aloft until he was sailing through the air without the aid of machinery. ‘This is so much fun! And so easy for me! Oh, look! I’m flying over pine trees and all those people down there! Strange how no one seems amazed by this. But they’ll realize it soon enough. I’ll show them! They’ll see how great my work is! Oh, I’m coming to the far bank of the river. But so what? River, ocean, they’re all the same to me. Just go, go, it doesn’t matter. See? It’s nothing, I’m across the river now!’ This was all in his dream, of course. He didn’t know when he awoke, but the one thing he knew for sure was that the dream didn’t end, as they so often did, in failure.

  Otsukotsu Sansaku was not the least bit surprised when he opened his eyes. He really had been an excellent long-jumper at school, and he could clearly remember being able to propel his body further in mid-jump.

  ‘Why haven’t I tried that all this time? Sprinting to the line is the same as a plane accelerating for a take-off, and planting the foot is probably the take-off itself. Sure, that’s it, I know I can do it! But …’ Of course he started having second thoughts in the midst of his enthusiasm. ‘But …’ he thought to himself again.

  He climbed out of his closet and gave it a try in his narrow six-mat room, but he could not even rise a foot above the tatami. In fact, he fell back so heavily and clumsily that he suspected he must have gained weight. ‘No, I can’t be this bad,’ he told himself,
his initial failure spurring him on to a more determined attempt. He stepped out into the corridor. Fortunately, there was no one present. It so happened that the house had undergone a major clean a month earlier, and a layer of oiled paper soaked with some kind of new chemical and varnish that had been put down to improve appearances and protect against bed bugs was still spread out over the floor. It was very slippery, and Sansaku enjoyed skating on it in his slippers whenever he was bored.

  Now, using the aeronautical skills suggested by his dream, Sansaku gave himself over to running down the corridor and leaping through the air, but he could not make a tenth of the distance he used to cover at school. When he tried to plant his foot for the take-off on his fourth run down the corridor, he slipped and fell, slamming his shin against the banister and landing on his bottom. He was sitting there on the floor, scowling with pain, when the landlady with her hard-pomaded backswept hairdo came climbing up the stairs.

  ‘My goodness!’ the woman cried with wide-open eyes. ‘Mr Otsukotsu!’

  ‘Madam!’ Sansaku responded with the title he preferred not to use for her. He chose it because he had recalled something that made it necessary to call her ‘Madam’, something that even made him forget about the pain in his shin.

  ‘Madam, I expect to receive a small payment tomorrow, so I will be able to …’

  After he said this, he sighed from the pain in his leg and from the imagined consequences of his lie. Feeling a need for further words to cover his embarrassment, he came out with his habitual: ‘Life is not much fun, is it, Madam?’

  ‘Not much,’ she replied resolutely. ‘For either of us.’ Without so much as a smile, she headed back down the stairs.