Sanshiro

by Sōseki Natsume

  *

  When he had finished eating, the maid withdrew to the kitchen. Alone finally, Sanshirō could relax—and begin worrying about Nonomiya’s sister. She was on her deathbed… Nonomiya had been too late… She was undoubtedly the young woman he had seen by the pond. He recalled her as she looked that day: her face, her eyes, her clothing. He placed her in a hospital bed, stood Nonomiya by her side, and had them say a word or two to each other. But the scene needed more than a brother. Before he knew it, Sanshirō had taken the brother’s place and was caring for her tenderly. Just then a train thundered past below the bamboo grove. Owing to the condition of the floor joists, possibly, or the nature of the soil, the room seemed to shake a little.

  Sanshirō turned from his lovely patient and looked around the room. This was a nice old house, the pillars glossy with age. The doors did not slide smoothly, however, and the ceiling was black with soot. Only the oil lamp shone with the glow of modernity. It was of the same order of things as Nonomiya himself. A modern scholar, he nevertheless chose to rent an old house like this and live within view of a feudal-age bamboo grove. Of course, he was free to live in any kind of place he liked. But what a pity if economic necessity had forced him into exile in the suburbs! Despite his scholarly renown, the University paid him only fifty-five yen a month,22 which was probably why he taught at a private college. He could hardly afford to keep his sister in the hospital. Maybe that was why he had moved to Ōkubo.

  The night had just begun, but a stillness had descended on the suburbs. Insects murmured in the garden. Alone, Sanshirō felt the melancholy of early autumn.

  A voice cried in the distance, “Oh, oh, it won’t be long now.” It seemed to come from the rear of the house, but he could not be certain. It was too far away and had ended too quickly. But this single cry had sounded to Sanshirō like a true soliloquy, the solitary utterance of one who has been abandoned by all, who seeks an answer from no one. An eerie feeling came over him. Another train echoed in the distance. He heard it drawing nearer, and when it passed below the bamboo grove, its roar was fully twice the volume of the earlier train’s. Sanshirō went on sitting there vacantly as long as the room continued to tremble, but in a flash he brought together the cry he had heard and the roar of the train. A shock ran through him when he saw what a frightening connection he had made.

  He found it impossible to sit still. A tingle of horror was running down his spine to the soles of his feet. He stood and went to the toilet, where he looked from the window at the clear, star-filled night. The roadbed beneath the embankment was still as death, but he went on staring into the darkness, nose thrust between the bamboo lattices.

  Some men came down the tracks from the station holding paper lanterns. Judging from the voices, there were three or four of them. Past the crossing, the glow of the lanterns disappeared behind the embankment, and only voices were left when they passed below the bamboo grove. Sanshirō could hear them distinctly.

  “A little farther down.”

  The footsteps drew away into the distance. Sanshirō went back through the study to the garden and stepped into his wooden clogs. He scrambled down the six-foot embankment and started after the lanterns.

  *

  He had gone only a few yards when someone else jumped down from the embankment. The man spoke to him.

  “Someone was hit by a train, don’t you think?”

  Sanshirō tried to say something, but his voice would not come. The man’s black shadow went on ahead. This must be Nonomiya’s neighbor from the house at the other end of the bamboo grove, Sanshirō decided, following after him. Another fifty yards down the track, he came to where the lanterns and the men had stopped. The men stood mute, holding the lanterns high. Sanshirō looked down without a word. In the circle of light lay part of a corpse. The train had made a clean tear from the right shoulder, beneath the breast, to the left hip, and it had gone on, leaving this diagonal torso in its path. The face was untouched. It was a young woman.

  Sanshirō would always remember the way he felt at that moment. He started to turn on his heels but could hardly move his legs. When he crawled up the embankment and entered the room, his heart started pounding. He called the maid to ask for water. She seemed to know nothing, fortunately. A short time afterward there was some sort of commotion in the neighbor’s house. He was back, thought Sanshirō. Presently a din arose below the embankment, and when that ended, everything was silent again, almost unbearably so.

  Sanshirō could still see the face of the young woman and hear her impotent cry. When he thought of the cruel fate that must lurk within them both, he sensed that the roots of life, which appear to us so sturdy, work loose before we know it and float off into the darkness. Sanshirō was terrified. It had happened in that moment when the train roared past. Until then she had been alive.

  Sanshirō recalled how the man eating the peaches on the train had said to him, “You’d better watch out—life can be dangerous.” For all his talk of danger, the man was annoyingly self-possessed. Perhaps one could be like that if he stood in a position so free of danger that he could afford to warn others against it. This might be a source of amusement for those men who, while part of the world, watched it from a place apart. Yes, for certain, the man was one of them. It was obvious from the way he ate those peaches, the way he sipped his tea and puffed on his cigarette, looking always straight ahead. The man was a critic. Sanshirō tried out the word “critic” with this unusual meaning, and he was pleased with himself. Indeed, he went so far as to wonder if he, too, should live as a critic some day. The ghastly face of the dead woman could inspire such thoughts.

  Sanshirō looked at the desk in the corner of the room, at the chair in front of the desk, at the bookcase beside the chair, at the foreign books neatly lined up in the bookcase, and he reflected that the owner of this quiet study was as safe and happy as that critic. There was no question of crushing a woman under a train to study the pressure of light. Nonomiya’s sister was ill, but he had not caused her illness, she had contracted it on her own. His mind flew thus from one thing to the next, and soon eleven o’clock had come. There would be no more trains from the city. Sanshirō started worrying again: perhaps Nonomiya was not coming back because his sister was truly ill. At that point a telegram arrived. “Sister well. See you in a.m.”

  Sanshirō went to bed relieved, but his dreams were full of danger. The woman who had killed herself was involved with Nonomiya, and he had not come home because he knew what she was up to. The telegram had simply been a way to put Sanshirō’s mind at ease. The part about the sister was a lie; she had died at the very moment the woman threw herself under the train. And the sister was none other than the young woman he had seen near the pond.

  He awoke unusually early the next morning.

  *

  He smoked a cigarette, staring at the rumpled bedding where he had slept in strange surroundings. Last night was like a dream. He went to the veranda and looked up at the sky beyond the low-hanging eaves. It was a fine day, the world a clear, fresh color. He finished breakfast, drank his tea, and was reading a newspaper in a chair on the veranda when Nonomiya came back as promised.

  “I heard there was a suicide on the tracks last night,” he said. They must have told him at the station. Sanshirō related his experience in detail. “How interesting!” Nonomiya responded. “You don’t get a chance like that very often. Too bad I wasn’t here. They’ve gotten rid of the body, I suppose. I probably couldn’t see anything if I went for a look now.”

  “Probably not,” Sanshirō answered simply, but Nonomiya’s coolness shocked him. He ascribed this insensitivity to the difference between night and day, youthfully unaware that a man who experiments on the pressure of light reveals that characteristic attitude in all situations, even one like this.

  Sanshirō changed the subject to Nonomiya’s sister. It was just as he had suspected, Nonomiya said, there was nothing wrong with her. Disappointed that he had not visited her for several
days, she had tricked him into coming just to dispel her boredom. She was angry that he had been “so cruel” as to stay at home on a Sunday. “She’s such a little idiot.” He seemed to mean exactly what he said: how stupid she was to waste the time of a man as busy as himself! Sanshirō, however, could not see it that way. If the man’s sister wanted him to come so badly that she would send a telegram, he should not mind using up a Sunday evening or two for her. Time spent with people was real time, while the many days Nonomiya spent experimenting in the cellar should be considered leisure time distant from human life. If he were Nonomiya, it would make him happy to have his studies interrupted by his younger sister. By now Sanshirō had forgotten about the suicide.

  He had slept poorly last night, Nonomiya said, and his head was unclear. Fortunately, this was the day he did not go to the University, but went instead to teach at a private school in Waseda in the afternoon. He would sleep until then.

  “Were you up late?” Sanshirō asked.

  Nonomiya said that his old College professor, a man named Hirota, had chosen that day to visit his sister at the hospital, and they were all up talking until after the last train had gone. He would have spent the night at Hirota’s but his sister had peevishly insisted that he stay at the hospital. The place was so cramped and uncomfortable he couldn’t sleep. What a silly little fool she was. Nonomiya started in on his sister again. Sanshirō found this comical. He thought of saying a word or two in her defense, but he felt uneasy in the role and decided against it.

  Instead he asked about Hirota. By now Sanshirō had heard the name three or four times and in his mind had given it not only to the peach professor and the professor at the Aokidō, but also to the one with the mean-tempered horse. Nonomiya said that the man on horseback had indeed been Hirota. Then Hirota must have been the man on the train, Sanshirō concluded—though it did seem a little far-fetched.

  When it was time for Sanshirō to leave, Nonomiya asked if he would deliver a kimono to the University Hospital before noon. This made Sanshirō very happy.

  *

  He was wearing his new four-cornered University cap and liked the idea of being seen with it in the Hospital. He left Nonomiya’s, beaming.

  Leaving the train at Ochanomizu Station, he hired a rickshaw—something the usual Sanshirō would never do. The Law and Letters bell began to ring just as his rickshaw man was charging in through the Red Gate. He would ordinarily be walking into Classroom 8 now with his notebook and bottle of ink, but it wouldn’t hurt to miss a lecture or two. He had the man deliver him straight to the front door of the Hospital’s Aoyama Wing.

  Through the door, down the hall, right at the second intersection, left at the end of the hall, and there it was, the second room on the right. NONOMIYA YOSHIKO, said the black-lacquered nameplate. Having read it, he went on standing in front of the door. Fresh from the country, where all you had to do was walk in, Sanshirō was not sophisticated enough to knock on the door.

  “In this room is Nonomiya’s sister. Her name is Yoshiko,” he thought. He wanted very much to see the face on the other side of the door, but he hated the thought of being disappointed. It bothered him that the face in his mind bore no resemblance whatever to Nonomiya Sōhachi.

  A nurse was coming toward him, the sound of her straw sandals closing in from the rear. Sanshirō went ahead and pushed the door open halfway, coming face to face with the young woman inside, his hand still gripping the doorknob.

  She had large eyes, a narrow nose, and thin lips. Her broad forehead and sharp chin gave the impression of a large, wide-mouthed bowl. This was all he took in of her features, but the expression that flickered across them for that instant was something he had never seen before. He noticed the rich, black hair combed back from the pale forehead and falling naturally past the shoulders. The morning sunlight streamed in from the eastern window behind her, and where the hair and sunlight touched she wore a violet-flaming, living halo. The face and forehead were in deep shadow, pale in darkness. The eyes had a far-off look. A high cloud never moves in the depths of the sky, and yet it must. But the movement is like a slow crumbling. She looked at Sanshirō with eyes like this.

  He found in her a union of languid melancholy and unconcealed vivacity. This sense of union was for him a most precious fragment of human life and a great discovery. Still gripping the doorknob, his face protruding into the room from the shadows behind the door, Sanshirō gave himself up to the moment.

  “Please come in.”

  She sounded as though she had been expecting him. There was a calm in her voice unusual in a woman meeting a man for the first time. She could hardly engage him this way unless she was a pure child or a woman who had known men to the full. But she was not being unduly familiar; they were old friends from the start. She smiled at him, moving the spare flesh of her cheeks, and her pallor took on a reassuring warmth. Sanshirō’s feet brought him into the room, and through this young man’s mind flitted the shadow of his mother at home far away.

  *

  When the door closed behind him and he stood facing forward at last, Sanshirō was greeted by a woman in her fifties. She had apparently left her seat and stood waiting for him to come around from the other side of the door. “Mr. Ogawa?”

  Good, he did not have to speak first. The woman looked like Nonomiya and also like her daughter. That was all he noticed about her. He handed her the bundle with which he had been entrusted. She took it and thanked him. Offering him her own chair, she went around to the far side of the bed.

  The mattress, he saw, was covered in pure white. The quilt, too, was pure white and folded halfway down at an angle. Yoshiko sat on the edge of the bed so as to avoid the thickness of the fold. The window was at her back. Her feet did not touch the floor. She held a pair of knitting needles. A ball of yarn rolled under the bed, and a long, red line ran to it from her hands. Sanshirō considered retrieving the ball of yarn for her, but she seemed unconcerned with it. He restrained himself.

  From her side of the bed, the mother thanked him profusely for last night. She knew how busy he must be. Not at all, Sanshirō replied, he had been doing nothing in any case. Yoshiko remained silent during the exchange, but as soon as it ended she asked, “Did you see the suicide?”

  There was a newspaper in the corner of the room. “Yes,” he said.

  “Was it very frightening?” she asked, looking at Sanshirō with her head cocked to one side. Her neck was long, like her brother’s. He stared at the bend of the neck without answering, partly because the question had been too simple and partly because he forgot to answer it. She seemed to notice what he was doing and quickly straightened her neck. Her pale cheeks reddened slightly. Sanshirō decided it was time to go.

  He said goodbye and left the room. Turning the last corner, he saw the bright square of the entrance at the end of the long corridor and, standing just inside, where reflections of green spilled in upon the floor, the young woman from the pond. Startled, he broke the swift rhythm of his gait. The dark shadow of the woman, painted on a transparent canvas of air, moved forward then by a step. Sanshirō, too, moved forward, as though drawn in her direction. The two moved closer, destined to pass somewhere along the narrow corridor. Suddenly she looked back. In the bright space out front there was only the floating green of early autumn. Nothing entered the square in response to her backward glance, nor did anything there anticipate it. Sanshirō used the moment to register her stance and clothing in his mind.

  He had no idea what the color of her kimono should be called. It was like the shadowy reflection of evergreens in the University pond. Vivid stripes ran the length of it from top to bottom. In their course they moved in waves, drawing together, moving apart, overlapping in broad bands, separating into twin lines. A wide obi cut across the irregular but unchaotic pattern a third of the way from the top. The obi had a warmth to it, perhaps because it contained yellow.

  Her right shoulder moved back when she turned, while her left hand, resting on her hip,
moved forward. In the hand was a handkerchief. The cloth below the fingers splayed out softly: it must be silk. Everything below the hips remained facing forward.

  *

  She soon turned toward him again. Eyes downcast, she moved two steps in Sanshirō’s direction, then suddenly raised her head and looked directly at him. Her eyes were well shaped, the outer corners chiseled deep and long into the face, the flesh of the lids softly creased. The eyes were alive, beneath brows of remarkable blackness. He could see her beautiful teeth now as well. The contrast between her teeth and the color of her skin was, for Sanshirō, something unforgettable.

  Today she wore a trace of white powder. It was not in such poor taste, however, as to hide the skin beneath. With its glow of color, the smooth flesh looked as though it would be unaffected by strong sunlight, and she had given it but the slightest touch of powder. The face did not shine. The flesh—the cheek, the jaw—was firm, with no more than necessary on the bone. And yet the face overall was soft. The very bone, it seemed, and not the flesh, was soft. It was a face that gave a sense of great depth.

  She bowed to him. Sanshirō was less startled by this courtesy from a stranger than by the grace with which it was performed. She dropped forward from the waist, as softly as a piece of paper floating on the wind, and very quickly. Then, arriving at a certain angle, she stopped, easily, precisely. This was not something she had been taught.

  “Pardon me…”

  The voice emerged from between the white rows of teeth. It was crisp but had a near-aristocratic ease. This was hardly a voice for asking whether acorns had formed on an oak tree in midsummer, but Sanshirō lacked the composure to notice such a thing.

  “Yes?” He stopped short.

  “Do you know where room fifteen would be?”

  Sanshirō had just left room fifteen. “Miss Nonomiya’s room?”

  “Yes…”

  “You turn at that corner, go to the end of the hall, then left, and it’s the second room on the right.”