Sanshiro

by Sōseki Natsume

  “I’m sorry.”

  “That’s all right.”

  She was still wiping her face. There was nothing more for him to say, and she fell silent as well, poking her head out of the window again. He could see in the feeble light of the oil lamps that the three or four other passengers all had sleepy faces. No one was talking. The only sound was the ongoing roar of the train. Sanshirō closed his eyes.

  “Do you think we’ll be getting to Nagoya soon?”

  It was the woman’s voice. He opened his eyes and was startled to find her leaning over him, her face close to his.

  “I wonder,” he answered, but he had no idea. This was his first trip to Tokyo.

  “Do you think we’ll be late?”

  “Probably.”

  “I get off at Nagoya. How about you?”

  “Yes, I do too.”

  This train only went as far as Nagoya. Their remarks could not have been more ordinary. The woman sat down diagonally opposite Sanshirō. For a while again the only sound was that of the train.

  At the next station, the woman spoke to him once more. She hated to bother him, she said, but would he please help her find an inn when they reached Nagoya? She felt uneasy about doing it alone. He thought her request reasonable enough, but he was not eager to comply. She was a stranger, after all, a woman. He hesitated as long as he could, but did not have the courage to refuse outright. He made a few vague noises. Soon the train reached Nagoya.

  *

  His large wicker trunk would be no problem: it had been checked all the way to Tokyo. He passed through the ticket gate carrying only a small canvas bag and his umbrella. He was wearing the summer cap of his college4 but had torn the school patch off to indicate that he had graduated. The color was still new in just that one spot, though it showed only in daylight. With the woman following close behind, he felt somewhat embarrassed about the cap, but she was with him now and there was nothing he could do. To her, of course, the cap would be just another battered old hat.

  Due at 9.30, the train had arrived forty minutes late. It was after ten o’clock, but the summer streets were noisy and crowded as though the night had just begun. Several inns stood across from the station, but Sanshirō thought they were a little rich for him—three-story buildings with electric lights.5 He walked past them without a glance. He had never been here before and had no idea where he was going. He simply headed for the darker streets, the woman following in silence. Two houses down a nearly deserted backstreet he saw the sign for an inn. It was dirty and faded, just the thing for him and this woman.

  “How about that place?” he asked, glancing back at her.

  “Fine,” she said.

  He strode in through the gate. They were greeted effusively at the door and shown to a room—White Plum No. 4. It all happened too quickly for him to protest that they were not together.

  They sat opposite each other, staring into space, while the maid went to prepare tea. She came in with a tray and announced that the bath was ready. Sanshirō no longer had the courage to tell her that the woman was not with him. Instead, he picked up a towel and, excusing himself, went to the bath. It was at the end of the corridor, next to the toilet. The room was poorly lit and dirty. Sanshirō undressed, then jumped into the tub and gave some thought to what was happening. He was splashing around in the hot water, thinking what a difficult situation he had gotten himself into, when there were footsteps in the corridor. Someone went into the toilet. A few minutes later the person came out. There was the sound of hands being washed. Then the bathroom door creaked open halfway.

  “Want me to scrub your back?” the woman asked from the doorway.

  “No, thank you,” Sanshirō answered loudly. But she did not go away. Instead, she came inside and began undoing her obi. She was obviously planning to bathe with him. It didn’t seem to embarrass her at all. Sanshirō leapt from the tub. He dried himself hastily and went back to the room. He was sitting on a floor cushion, not a little shaken, when the maid came in with the register.

  Sanshirō took it from her and wrote, “Name: Ogawa Sanshirō. Age: 23. Occupation: Student. Address: Masaki Village, Miyako County, Fukuoka Prefecture.”6 He filled in his portion honestly, but when it came to the woman’s he was lost. He should have waited for her to finish bathing, but now it was too late. The maid was waiting. There was nothing he could do. “Name: Ogawa Hana. Age: 23. Address: As above,” he wrote and gave back the register. Then he started fanning himself furiously.

  At last the woman came back to the room. “Sorry I chased you out,” she said.

  “Not at all,” Sanshirō replied. He took a notebook from his bag and started a diary entry. There was nothing for him to write about. He would have plenty to write about if only she weren’t there.

  “Excuse me, I’ll be right back,” the woman said and left the room. Now, writing was out of the question. Where could she have gone to?

  *

  The maid came in to put down the bedding. She brought only a single wide mattress. Sanshirō told her they must have two mattresses, but she would not listen. The room was too small, the mosquito net too narrow, she said. And it was too much bother, she might have added. Finally she said she would ask the clerk about it when he came back and then bring another mattress. She stubbornly insisted upon hanging the single mosquito net and stuffing the mattress inside it.

  Soon the woman came back. She apologized for taking so long. She started doing something in the shadows behind the mosquito net and eventually produced a clanking sound—probably from one of the children’s toys. Then she seemed to be rewrapping her bundle, after which she announced that she would be going to bed. Sanshirō barely answered her. He sat on the doorsill, fanning himself. It occurred to him that he might best spend the night doing just that. But the mosquitoes were buzzing all around him. It would be unbearable outside the net. He stood up and took a muslin undershirt and underpants from his bag, slipped them on, and tied a dark blue sash around his waist. Then, holding two towels in his hand, he entered the net. The woman was still fanning herself on the far corner of the mattress.

  “Sorry, but I’m very finicky. I don’t like sleeping on strange mattresses. I’m going to make a kind of flea guard, but don’t let it bother you.”

  He rolled his side of the sheet toward the side where the woman lay, making a long, white partition down the center of the bed. The woman turned the other way. Sanshirō spread the towels end to end along his side of the mattress, then fitted his body into this long, narrow space. That night, not a hand nor a foot ventured out beyond Sanshirō’s narrow bed of towels. He spoke not a word to the woman. And she, having turned to the wall, never moved.

  The long night ended. The woman washed her face and knelt at the low breakfast table, smiling. “Did you have any fleas last night?”

  “No, thank you for asking,” Sanshirō said gravely. He looked down and thrust his chopsticks into a small cup of sweet beans.

  They paid and left the inn. It was only when they reached the station that the woman told him where she was going. She would be taking the Kansai Line to Yokkaichi. Sanshirō’s train pulled in a moment later. The woman would have a brief wait for hers. She accompanied Sanshirō to the ticket gate. “I’m sorry to have put you to so much trouble,” she said, bowing politely. “Goodbye, and have a pleasant trip.”

  Bag and umbrella in one hand, Sanshirō took off his hat with the other and said only, “Goodbye.”

  The woman gave him a long, steady look, and when she spoke it was with the utmost calm. “You’re quite a coward, aren’t you?” A knowing smile crossed her face.

  Sanshirō felt as if he were being flung onto the platform. It was even worse after he boarded the train; his ears started to burn. He sat very still, making himself as small as possible. Finally, the conductor’s whistle reverberated from one end of the station to the other, and the train began to move. Sanshirō leaned cautiously toward the open window and looked out. The woman had long since disappear
ed. The large clock was all that caught his eye. He edged back into his seat. The car was crowded, but no one seemed to be paying any attention to him. Only the man seated diagonally opposite him glanced at Sanshirō as he sat down again.

  *

  Sanshirō felt vaguely embarrassed when the man looked at him. He thought he might distract himself with a book. But when he opened his bag, he found the two towels stuffed in at the top. He shoved them aside and pulled out the first thing his hand chanced upon in the bottom of the bag. It was a collection of Bacon’s essays, a book he found unintelligible. The volume’s flimsy paper binding was an insult to Bacon. Sanshirō had been unlucky enough to come up with the one book in the bag he had no intention of reading on the train. It was in there only because he had failed to pack it in the trunk and had tossed it into the bag with two or three others at the last minute. He opened Bacon’s essays at page twenty-three. He would not be able to read anything now, and he was certainly in no mood for Bacon, but he reverently opened the book at page twenty-three and let his eyes survey its entire surface. In the presence of page twenty-three, he might try to review the events of the night before.

  What was that woman, really? Were there other women like her in the world? Could a woman be like that, so calm and confident? Was she uneducated? Reckless? Or simply innocent? This he would never know because he had not tried to go as far as he could with her. He should have done it. He should have tried to go a little farther. But he was afraid. She called him a coward when they parted, and it shocked him, as though a twenty-three-year-old weakness had been revealed at a single blow. No one, not even his mother, could have struck home so unerringly.

  These thoughts only made him feel worse. He might as well have been given a thrashing by some stupid little nobody. He almost wanted to apologize to page twenty-three of Bacon. He should never have fallen apart like that. His education counted for nothing here. It was all a matter of character. He should have done better. But if women were always going to behave that way, then he, as an educated man, would have no other way to react—which meant that he would have to steer clear of them. It was a gutless way to live, and much too constraining, as though he had been born some kind of cripple. And yet…

  Sanshirō shook off these ruminations and turned to thoughts of a different world. He was going to Tokyo. He would enter the University. He would meet famous scholars, associate with students of taste and breeding, do research in the library, write books. Society would acclaim him, his mother would be overjoyed. Once he had cheered himself with such derelict dreams of the future, there was no need for Sanshirō to go on burying his face in page twenty-three. He straightened up. The man diagonally opposite was looking at him again. This time Sanshirō looked back.

  The man had a thick mustache on a long, thin face, and there was something about him reminiscent of a Shinto priest. The one exception was his nose, so very straight it looked Western. Sanshirō, who was looking with the eyes of a student, always took such men to be schoolteachers. The man wore a youthful summer kimono of a blue-and-white splashed pattern, a more sedate white under-kimono, and navy blue split-toed socks. This outfit led Sanshirō to conclude that he was a middle-school teacher—and thus of no interest to anyone with the great future he himself had in store. He must be forty, after all—beyond any future development.

  *

  The man smoked one cigarette after another. The way he sat with his arms folded, blowing long streams of smoke from his nostrils, he seemed completely at ease. But then he was constantly leaving his seat to go to the toilet or something. He would often stretch when he stood up, looking thoroughly bored, and yet he showed no interest in the newspaper that the passenger next to him had set aside. His curiosity aroused, Sanshirō closed Bacon’s essays. He considered taking out another book, perhaps a novel, and reading that in earnest, but finding it would have been too much bother. He would have preferred to read the newspaper, but its owner was sound asleep. He reached across and, with his hand on the paper, made a point of asking the man with the mustache, “Is anyone reading this?”

  “No, no one,” he said, looking sure of himself. “Go ahead.”

  This left Sanshirō, with the paper in his hand, feeling ill at ease. The newspaper contained little worth reading. He skimmed through it in a minute or two and returned it, properly folded, to the seat opposite. As he did so, he nodded to the man with the mustache. The man returned his nod and asked, “Are you a college student?”

  Sanshirō was pleased that the man had noticed the dark spot on his cap. “Yes,” he answered.

  “From Tokyo?”

  “No, Kumamoto.7 But—” he began to explain, then stopped. There was no need to say that he was now a University student, he decided.

  The man answered simply, “Oh, I see,” and continued puffing on his cigarette. He was not going to ask Sanshirō why a Kumamoto student would be going to Tokyo at this time of year. Perhaps he had no interest in Kumamoto students. Just then the man across from Sanshirō said, “Ah, of course.” That he was still sleeping, there could be no doubt. He was not just sitting there talking to himself. The man with the mustache looked at Sanshirō and grinned.

  Sanshirō took the opportunity to ask, “And where are you going?”

  “Tokyo,” was all the man said, stretching out the syllables. Somehow, he no longer seemed like a middle-school teacher. Still, if he was traveling third class he was obviously no one special. Sanshirō let the conversation lapse. Every now and then the man, arms folded, would tap out a rhythm on the floor with the front lift of his wooden clog. He seemed very bored, but his was a boredom that betrayed no desire to engage in conversation.

  When the train reached Toyohashi the sleeping man bolted up and left the car, rubbing his eyes. Amazing how he could wake himself at the right time like that, thought Sanshirō. Concerned lest the man, still dazed with sleep, had alighted at the wrong station, Sanshirō watched him from the train window. But no, he passed through the ticket gate without incident and went off like anyone in full possession of his faculties. Reassured, Sanshirō changed to the seat opposite. Now he was sitting next to the man with the mustache. The man moved across to Sanshirō’s former seat. He poked his head out the window and bought some peaches.

  When he was seated next to Sanshirō again, he placed the fruit between them and said, “Please help yourself.”

  Sanshirō thanked him and ate a peach. The man seemed to enjoy them very much. He ate several with great abandon and urged Sanshirō to eat more. Sanshirō ate another one. The eating continued, and soon the two of them were talking like old friends.

  *

  The man remarked that he could well understand why the Taoists had chosen the peach as the fruit of immortality. Mountain ascetics were supposed to live forever on some ethereal essence, and peaches probably came closer to that than anything else. They had a mystifying sort of taste. The pit was interesting too, with its crude shape and all those holes. Sanshirō had never heard this particular view before. Here was a man who said some pretty inane things, he decided. The man spoke of the poet Shiki’s8 great liking for fruit. His appetite for it was enormous. On one occasion he ate sixteen large persimmons, but they had no effect on him. He himself could never match Shiki, the man concluded.

  Sanshirō listened, smiling, but the only subject that interested him was Shiki. He was hoping to move the conversation a little more in that direction, when the man said, “You know, our hands reach out by themselves for the things we like. There’s no way to stop them. A pig doesn’t have hands, so his snout reaches out instead. I’ve heard that if you tie a pig down and put food in front of him, the tip of his snout will grow until it reaches the food. Desire is a frightening thing.” He was grinning, but Sanshirō could not tell from the way he spoke whether he was serious or joking. “It’s lucky for us we’re not pigs,” he went on. “Think what would happen if our noses kept stretching toward all the things we wanted. By now they’d be so long we couldn’t board a train.�
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  Sanshirō laughed out loud. The man, however, remained strangely quiet.

  “Life is a dangerous business, you know. There was a man called Leonardo da Vinci who injected arsenic into the trunk of a peach tree. He was testing to see if the poison would circulate to the fruit, but somebody ate one and died. You’d better watch out—life can be dangerous.” As he spoke, he wrapped the chewed-over peach pits and skins in the newspaper and tossed them out the window.

  This time Sanshirō did not feel like laughing either. Somewhat intimidated by the mention of Leonardo da Vinci, he had suddenly thought of the woman. He felt oddly uncomfortable and wanted to withdraw from the conversation, but the man was oblivious to his silence. “Where are you going in Tokyo?” he asked.

  “I’ve never been there before, I really don’t know my way around. I thought I might stay at the Fukuoka students’ dormitory for the time being.”

  “Then you’re through with Kumamoto?”

  “Yes, I’ve just graduated.”

  “Well, well,” the man said, offering neither congratulations nor compliments. “I suppose you’ll be entering the University now,” he added, as though it were the most commonplace thing one could do.

  This left Sanshirō a little dissatisfied. His “Yes” was barely enough to maintain the civilities.

  “Which Faculty?” the man asked.

  “I was in the First Division—Law and Letters.”

  “I mean in the University. Will you be in Law?”

  “No, Letters.”

  “Well, well,” he said again.

  Each time he heard this “Well, well,” Sanshirō found his curiosity aroused. Either the man was in so exalted a position that he could walk all over people, or else the University meant nothing to him. Unable to decide which was true, Sanshirō did not know how to behave with the man.