Sanshiro

by Sōseki Natsume

  “How tall you are,” Mineko said from behind.

  “A bean pole,” Yoshiko replied simply. When they came side by side at the front gate, she explained, “That’s why I wear sandals whenever I can.”

  Sanshirō was starting out of the garden after them when a shoji on the second story clattered open and Yojirō emerged at the handrail.

  “You going?” he asked.

  “Yes. Are you?”

  “No, what’s the point? A lot of stupid, fixed-up flowers.”

  “Oh, come on. What’s the point of staying at home?”

  “I’m writing an essay, a major essay. I don’t have time for stuff like that.”

  With a startled laugh, Sanshirō hurried after the others. They were two-thirds of the way down the lane toward the street. When he caught sight of them in silhouette beneath the sky’s expanse, Sanshirō felt that his present life was becoming a thing of far deeper significance than his life in Kumamoto had been. Worlds number two and three were both represented in this group image. One half was dark and gloomy, the other as bright as a field of flowers. The two were in perfect harmony in Sanshirō’s mind. And Sanshirō himself was being woven into the fabric almost before he knew it. But there was something unsettled about the design that made him feel anxious. As he walked along, it occurred to him that the immediate cause of this anxiety was the topic of Nonomiya’s conversation with Mineko in the garden. He wanted to ferret it out as a way of dispelling his anxiety.

  The four of them had reached the corner. They stopped and looked back toward him. Mineko held her hand to her brow.

  *

  Sanshirō caught up with them in less than a minute, but no one said a thing. They merely started walking again. After a while, Mineko spoke to Nonomiya. “You would say something like that. You’re a scientist.” It seemed to be a continuation of their talk in the garden.

  “That has nothing to do with it. If you want to fly, you have to think up a device that is capable of flying. It’s as simple as that. You have to use your mind first, don’t you see?”

  “Maybe that would be enough for someone who didn’t want to fly very high.”

  “It would have to be enough for him. Otherwise, he’d just get killed.”

  “So the best thing is to play it safe and stay on the ground. What a bore.”

  Instead of answering, Nonomiya turned to Hirota. “Lots of women are poets,” he said, smiling.

  “And the trouble with men,” Hirota said, “is that they can never quite become pure poets.”

  Nonomiya said nothing in response to this odd remark. Mineko and Yoshiko started their own conversation. Sanshirō could finally ask his question. “What were you two just talking about?”

  “Oh, nothing,” Nonomiya said. “Flying machines.”

  Sanshirō felt as if he were hearing the punch line of a comic story.

  No one said much after that. Lengthy conversations were impossible now in any case amid the weekend crowds. A beggar was kneeling on the ground outside the Ōgannon Temple. Forehead pressed to the earth, he poured forth a stream of loud entreaties. He would raise his face at intervals to reveal a white smudge of sand on his forehead. No one looked at him. Sanshirō and his four companions also passed him by, unconcerned. When they had left him several yards behind, Professor Hirota suddenly turned and spoke to Sanshirō. “Did you give that beggar anything?”

  “No,” Sanshirō answered, looking back. The beggar, hands pressed together beneath his white forehead, was persisting with his loud cries.

  “He doesn’t really inspire you to give him anything, does he?” Yoshiko put in.

  “What do you mean?” Her brother looked at her, but his tone of voice was not reproachful. His expression was, if anything, cool and detached.

  Mineko offered her critique. “The way he keeps on ranting, it doesn’t have any effect.”

  “That’s not it,” said Hirota. “He’s in the wrong place. There are too many people going by. If they came across him on a deserted mountain top, everyone would feel like giving him something.”

  “Yes, but he could wait all day without a soul coming by,” Nonomiya said with a chuckle.

  Listening to the others’ critiques of the beggar, Sanshirō felt that some damage was being done to the moral precepts he had cultivated thus far. Not only had it never crossed his mind to toss the beggar money, however: he had actually found it unpleasant to walk past the man. He had to admit that the others were being truer to themselves than he was. They were people of the city who lived beneath heavens that were broad enough to enable them to be true to themselves.

  *

  The farther they walked, the more people they encountered. Soon they came across a lost child, a little girl of perhaps seven. She swept aimlessly back and forth beneath the sleeves of the throng. “Grandma, Grandma,” she called out in tears. Everyone who saw her seemed touched. A few stopped to look. “The poor little thing,” someone said. But no one took her in hand. The little girl attracted the attention and sympathy of everyone around her, but still she had to keep crying loudly in search of her grandmother. It was a strange phenomenon.

  “She’s in the wrong place, too, I suppose,” Nonomiya said, keeping his eye on the shifting shadow of the little girl.

  “Everyone figures a policeman is bound to take care of her sooner or later, so they avoid the responsibility,” Professor Hirota explained.

  “If she comes near me, I’ll take her to the police box,” Yoshiko said.

  “So why don’t you just go get her and take her over?” her brother suggested.

  “I don’t want to go chasing after her.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know—there are so many people here. I don’t have to be the one.”

  “That’s it,” Hirota said, “avoiding the responsibility.”

  “She’s in the wrong place after all,” Nonomiya said. The two men laughed.

  At the top of Dangozaka, they found a swarm of people by the police box. The lost child was finally in the hands of the police.

  “You can relax now,” Mineko turned and said to Yoshiko.

  “Oh, I’m so glad.”

  Viewed from the top, the slope of Dangozaka curved to the right. The narrow street looked like the pointed end of a sword. The two-story buildings on the right obscured the lower half of the high exhibition sheds on the left. Higher up beyond the sheds flew a number of tall banners. People seemed to be plunging down into the valley below. Those who were plunging down and those who were crawling up came together in a chaotic jumble that clogged the street and gave what must have been the lowest part of the valley a grotesque sort of movement, a fitful squirming that quickly tired the eye.

  Standing atop the slope, Professor Hirota exclaimed, “This is horrible!” He was obviously ready to go home. All but pushing him from behind, they walked down the hill. Toward the bottom, where the slope began to curve and level out, there were large, reed-thatched exhibition sheds lining either side and towering over the narrow street. They were enough to make the sky itself look cramped. Everything was so tightly packed together the street was darkened. Amidst all this the ticket takers at the shed doors were shouting at the top of their lungs. So utterly remote from normal voices were their cries, they prompted a critique from Professor Hirota: “Those are no human sounds. They’re the voices of the chrysanthemum dolls.”

  They entered a shed on the left. The first tableau was a scene from a Kabuki play showing the attack of the Soga Brothers.32 All of the dolls, from the lowly Gorō and Jūrō to the great Yoritomo himself, wore equally gorgeous costumes fashioned from chrysanthemums. The faces, hands, and feet, however, were carved of wood. The next was a snow scene with a young woman in agony. She, too, was a wooden doll covered with clothing made entirely of chrysanthemums.

  Yoshiko gave her full attention to the dolls. Hirota and Nonomiya became involved in another discussion. They were saying that these chrysanthemums were cultivated differently, or some
such thing, when a few other spectators came between them and Sanshirō, and he moved several feet ahead. Mineko had already gone ahead of Sanshirō. Most of the crowd was composed of local shopkeepers and their families. There seemed to be few educated people here. Standing in this crowd, Mineko turned around and craned in Nonomiya’s direction. Nonomiya was pointing across the bamboo railing toward the roots of a chrysanthemum, heatedly explaining something. Mineko turned away and, pushed along by the other spectators, headed for the far exit. Sanshirō forced his way through the crowd in pursuit of her, leaving the others behind.

  *

  “Mineko!” he called when he had at last caught up with her. She reached for the green bamboo railing and turned her head the slightest bit to look at him. She said nothing. Beyond the railing was a scene depicting the Yōrō waterfall.33 A round-faced young man with an axe in his belt was crouching at the basin of the waterfall, holding a gourd scoop. Sanshirō was nearly oblivious to what lay beyond the railing when he looked at Mineko.

  “Is something wrong?” The words slipped out. Still she said nothing. She let her black eyes settle languorously on Sanshirō’s forehead. He found in the soft crease of her eyelids some unfathomable meaning, and in that meaning a fatigue of the spirit, a slackness of the flesh, an appeal close to suffering. Sanshirō forgot that he was waiting for an answer from her and relinquished everything to her eyelids and eyes.

  “I want to leave this place,” Mineko said.

  The eyes and eyelids seemed to be drawing closer together. The nearer they came to each other, the more strongly the feeling took root in his heart that he must leave this place for her sake. Almost at the moment this feeling reached its height, she turned away with a swing of the head. Withdrawing her hand from the railing, she stepped toward the exit, Sanshirō following close behind.

  When he caught up with her outside, Mineko hung her head and placed her right hand against her forehead. The crowd swirled around them. Sanshirō leaned close to her. “Is something wrong?” he whispered.

  She began to walk through the crowd in the direction of Yanaka. Sanshirō, of course, went with her. They had gone half a block when she came to a halt in the middle of the crowd. “Where are we now?”

  “On the way to Tennōji in Yanaka. Exactly the opposite direction from home.”

  “Oh? I don’t feel well…”

  Standing in the street, Sanshirō felt painfully helpless. He tried to think of something.

  “Isn’t there some quiet place we could go?” Mineko asked.

  In the lowest part of the valley, where Yanaka and Sendagi met, there was a little stream, the Ogawa. If they followed it through the neighborhood to the left, they would soon come out to an open field. The stream flowed straight north. Sanshirō thought about the many walks he had taken, often on the far side, just as often on the near. Mineko was standing now beside a stone bridge that crossed the Ogawa. This was where it flowed out to Nezu after cutting across Yanaka.

  “Can you walk another block or so?”

  “Yes, I can.”

  They crossed the bridge and turned left, walking several yards to the end of a kind of alleyway that led to someone’s house. Just before they reached the gate, a wooden bridge took them back across the stream. They continued upstream along the bank to a broad field where there were no more passers-by.

  Out in the tranquil autumn, Sanshirō became suddenly talkative. “How do you feel? What is it, a headache? It must have been the crowd. There were some pretty low-class men in the doll shed—did one of them do something?”

  Mineko did not speak. After some moments, she raised her eyes from the moving water and looked at Sanshirō. The flesh of her eyelids was taut again. This reassured him somewhat.

  “Thank you, I feel much better now.”

  “Shall we rest a while?”

  “Yes, let’s.”

  “Can you walk a little farther?”

  “I think so.”

  “Good. There’s a much nicer place over there where we can sit down.”

  “All right.”

  *

  A hundred yards upstream they came to another bridge. It was an old plank, perhaps a foot wide, that had been thrown across the stream. Sanshirō strode over and Mineko came after him. He turned and waited for her. She walked as easily here as anywhere, it seemed to him. She moved ahead in even strides with none of that affectedly feminine tiptoeing. There would be no point in offering her his hand.

  They saw a thatched roof farther on. The entire wall below the roof was red. Moving closer, they found the color was that of red peppers hung up to dry. Mineko stopped walking when they were close enough to make this out. “How lovely,” she said, sitting down on the narrow band of grass that bordered the stream. What little grass there was had lost its summer greenness. Mineko showed no concern that she might soil her bright kimono.

  “Can you walk on a little farther?” Sanshirō urged, still standing.

  “Don’t worry, this is fine.”

  “You’re not feeling better?”

  “I’m just tired.”

  Sanshirō relented and sat on the dirty patch of grass several feet away from Mineko. The stream ran by just below them. It was shallow now that the water level had fallen with the coming of autumn, shallow enough for a wagtail to fly over and perch on a jutting rock. Sanshirō gazed long into the clear water. It gradually began to turn muddy. A farmer upstream, he saw, was washing radishes. Mineko was looking into the distance. A broad field lay on the other side of the stream, beyond the field some woods, and above the woods stretched the sky. The color of the sky was changing little by little.

  Streaks of color began to trail across its monotonous clarity. The deep, transparent blue background grew slowly more diffuse, and a heavy, white pall of cloud came to overlay it. The overlay began to melt and stream away, but so languidly that it was impossible to distinguish where background ended and cloud began. And over all of this drifted a soft hint of yellow.

  “The sky was so clear before,” said Mineko. “Now the color is all muddied.”

  Sanshirō took his eyes from the stream and looked up. This was not the first time he had seen a sky like this, but it was the first time he had heard the sky described as “muddied.” And she was right, he saw. There was no other way to describe this color. Before he could say anything in reply, however, Mineko spoke again.

  “It’s so heavy! It looks like marble,” she said, using the English word. She was looking up high, eyes narrowed. Then she moved her narrowed eyes slowly, until they were turned upon Sanshirō. “It does look like marble, don’t you think?”

  Sanshirō had no choice but to agree. “Yes, it looks like marble.”

  Mineko fell silent. After some minutes, it was Sanshirō who spoke.

  “Under a sky like this, the heart becomes heavy, but the senses become light.”

  “What do you mean by that?” Mineko asked.

  Sanshirō had not meant much of anything by it. Instead of answering her question he said, “It’s a comforting, dreamy sort of sky.”

  “It seems as if it’s about to move, but then it never does.”

  Mineko began watching another far-off cloud.

  *

  Every now and then, they would hear the cries of the chrysanthemum doll ticket-takers welcoming customers.

  “What loud voices they have.”

  “It’s amazing they can shout like that all day long,” Sanshirō said. He suddenly recalled the three companions they had left behind. He started to say something, but Mineko replied to him first.

  “It’s their business—just like the beggar at the Ōgannon Temple.”

  “They’re in the wrong place, then?” Sanshirō brought forth an unaccustomed flash of wit and enjoyed a good laugh at his own joke. Hirota’s comment on the beggar had struck him as very funny.

  “The Professor is always saying things like that, you know,” Mineko said softly, almost as if she were talking to herself. Then she added with
sudden life, “We could be very successful beggars sitting here like this!” Now it was her turn to laugh at her own humor.

  “Nonomiya was right, though. We could wait here forever without anyone coming along.”

  “All the better, don’t you think?” she shot back, but continued, “We’re beggars who don’t beg, after all.” It sounded as if she had added this to elucidate the first remark.

  Just then a stranger appeared. He had emerged from the shadows of the house where the red peppers were drying and at some point had crossed to the other side of the stream. Now he moved steadily in their direction. He wore a suit and had a mustache, and he seemed to be about Professor Hirota’s age. When he came opposite, he jerked his head around and glared directly at them with a look of unmistakable loathing. Sanshirō found it difficult to go on sitting there. The man eventually passed them by, walking off with his back to them. Sanshirō watched the man’s receding shadow and said, as if it had just occurred to him, “I’m sure Professor Hirota and Nonomiya have been looking for us.”

  “Don’t worry,” Mineko responded coolly. “We’re big boys and girls. It won’t matter that we’re lost.”

  “But we are lost, and I’m sure they’ll try to find us,” he insisted.

  Mineko’s coolness only increased. “All the better for someone who likes to avoid responsibility.”

  “Who do you mean? Professor Hirota?”

  Mineko did not answer.

  “Nonomiya?”

  Still she did not answer.

  “Are you feeling better now? We ought to go back,” he said, starting up.

  Mineko looked at him. He sat on the grass again. It was then that Sanshirō knew somewhere deep inside: this woman was too much for him. He felt, too, a vague sense of humiliation accompanying the awareness that he had been seen through.

  Still looking at him, Mineko said, “Lost child.”

  He did not respond.

  “Do you know how to translate that into English?”

  The question was too unexpected. Sanshirō could answer neither that he knew nor that he did not know.