Sanshiro

by Sōseki Natsume

  “Shall I tell you?”

  “Please.”

  “ ‘Stray sheep.’ Do you understand?”

  *

  Sanshirō never knew what to say at times like this. He could only regret, when the moment had passed and his mind began to function clearly, that he had failed to say one thing or another. Nor was he superficial enough to anticipate such regret and spit out some makeshift response with forced assurance. And so he kept silent, feeling all the while that to do so was the height of stupidity.

  He thought he understood the meaning of “stray sheep,” but then, perhaps he did not. More than the words themselves, however, it was the meaning of the woman who had used them that eluded him. He looked at her helplessly and said nothing. She, in turn, became serious.

  “Do I seem so forward to you?” Her tone suggested a desire to vindicate herself. He had not been prepared for this. Until now she had been hidden in a mist that he had hoped would clear. Her words cleared the mist, and she emerged, distinctly, a woman. If only it had never happened!

  Sanshirō wanted to change her attitude toward him back to what it had been before—a thing full of meaning, neither clear nor clouded, like the sky stretched out above them. But this was not to be accomplished, he knew, with a few words of flattery.

  “Well, then, let’s go back,” she said without warning. There was no trace of bitterness in her voice. Her tone was subdued, as if she had resigned herself to being someone of no interest to Sanshirō.

  The sky changed again, and a wind blew from the distance. The sun darkened, and the broad field looked coldly desolate. Sanshirō suddenly felt how the damp earth had chilled his flesh. He could hardly believe that he had continued sitting in such a place. Had he been alone, he would have gone somewhere else long ago. Mineko, too—but perhaps Mineko was a woman who would sit alone in a place like this.

  “It’s turned cold. We ought to stand up, at least. A chill could make you sick. Are you all right now?”

  “Yes, I’m all right.” Her reply was unambiguous. She stood up quickly, murmuring—almost intoning to herself—as she did so, “Stray sheep.” Sanshirō, of course, said nothing in reply.

  Pointing in the direction from which the man in the suit had come, Mineko said that she would like to go past the red peppers if there was a road there. They walked toward the house with the thatched roof and found a path behind it. They had covered half its length when he asked, “Will Yoshiko be coming to live with you?”

  Mineko gave him a crooked little smile and replied to his question with one of her own. “Why do you ask?”

  Before he could answer, they came to a mud puddle, a brimming four-foot stretch of the path, in the middle of which someone had set a stepping stone. Sanshirō hopped across without the aid of the stone, then turned to watch Mineko. She set her right foot on the stone, but it was unsteady. She rocked back and forth, preparing to spring across. Sanshirō held out his hand.

  “Here. Hold on.”

  “No, I’m all right.” She was smiling. As long as Sanshirō held his hand out, Mineko stayed where she was. When he withdrew it, she shifted all her weight to her right leg and swung her left leg across. Determined not to muddy her feet, however, she jumped too hard and lost her balance. She fell forward against Sanshirō, her hands grasping his arms.

  “Stray sheep,” she murmured. Sanshirō could feel her breath against him.

  6

  The bell rang and the instructor left the room. Sanshirō shook the ink from his pen and was closing his notebook when Yojirō turned to him.

  “Hey, let me see that, will you? I missed a few things.”

  Yojirō drew the notebook over and peered into it. The page was covered with the words “Stray sheep.”

  “What’s this?”

  “I got tired of taking notes and started scribbling.”

  “Pay more attention next time, will you? He was saying something about Kant’s transcendental idealism versus Berkeley’s transcendental realism, wasn’t he?”

  “Something like that.”

  “You weren’t listening?”

  “No.”

  “You really are a ‘stray sheep.’ Oh, well…”

  Yojirō stood up with his notebook and started away from his desk. “Come with me,” he said to Sanshirō, who followed him out of the classroom. They went downstairs and out to the front lawn. A large cherry tree stood there. The two sat down beneath it.

  This place became a field of clover in the early summer. When Yojirō had first arrived with his application for admission to the University, he had seen two students lying under the tree. One said to the other, “If they’d let me sing the oral exam, I’d have plenty of answers for them.” The second began to sing softly:

  Oh, give me a professor

  Who knows what life’s about.

  So when I take a test on love,

  I’ll pass without a doubt.

  Ever since that day, Yojirō had been fond of this spot under the cherry tree, and whenever he had something to tell Sanshirō he would bring him here. When Sanshirō heard the story, he understood why Yojirō had translated “Pity’s akin to love” like a popular song. Today, however, Yojirō was unusually serious. He sat cross-legged on the grass and pulled out a magazine entitled Literary Review, which he handed to Sanshirō open and rotated in his direction.

  “What do you think of this?” he asked.

  The open page carried the heading “The Great Darkness” in large letters. The author had signed himself “A. Propagule.”34

  Sanshirō recognized “The Great Darkness” as the phrase Yojirō always used for Professor Hirota, but he had never heard of this “A. Propagule”—if there was such a person. He looked at Yojirō before venturing a reply. Yojirō said nothing, but instead thrust his flat face toward Sanshirō, pressing his right index finger against the tip of his nose. He held this pose for some time. A student across the way started grinning at them. Yojirō noticed him and took his finger from his nose.

  “It’s me,” he said. “I’m the one who wrote it.” Now Sanshirō understood.

  “Is this what you were writing when we went to see the chrysanthemum dolls?”

  “Don’t be stupid. That was just a few days ago. They can’t print stuff that fast. The one I wrote that day will come out next month. This one I wrote a long time ago. You can guess what it’s about from the title.”

  “Professor Hirota?”

  “Of course. First I’ll arouse public opinion, then take care of the groundwork for the Professor to get into the University…”

  “Is this such an influential magazine?” Sanshirō had never heard of it before.

  “No, that’s the trouble,” Yojirō replied.

  Sanshirō could not help smiling. “What’s the circulation?”

  Yojirō avoided a direct answer. “Anyhow, it’s better than not writing at all,” he insisted.

  *

  Yojirō explained that he had a long-standing connection with the magazine, that he wrote something for nearly every issue when he could find the time, but that he changed his pseudonym with each article and, as a result, aside from two or three of the student editors, no one knew who he was. Yojirō’s lack of renown came as no surprise: this was practically the first that Sanshirō himself had heard of Yojirō’s literary associations. He failed to see the point, however, of Yojirō’s using a playful pseudonym like “A. Propagule” and publishing his “major essays” in secret. When Sanshirō was imprudent enough as to inquire if he were writing to make some spare cash, Yojirō’s eyes nearly popped.

  “Only somebody who has just emerged from the wilds of Kyushu and doesn’t know anything about the major literary trends would ask a question like that. No one with a brain in his head can stand here in the center of the intellectual world and be indifferent to the violent upheavals going on before his eyes. We young men are the ones who hold today’s literary power in our hands, so we have to take the initiative to make every word, every phrase
, count. The literary world is undergoing a spectacular revolution. Everything is moving in a new direction, and we must not be left behind. We have to make the new trends go the way we want them to, or it’s not worth being alive. The way they throw the word ‘literature’ around, you’d think it was garbage, but that’s just the ‘literature’ you hear about in places like the University. What we mean by literature, the new literature, is a great mirror of life itself. The new literature will have to influence the movement of the whole of Japanese society. And in fact it is doing just that while they’re all asleep and dreaming. It’s awe-inspiring.”

  Sanshirō listened in silence. He thought Yojirō was laying it on a bit thick, but he was certainly intense enough, and he spoke with the utmost solemnity. Sanshirō was moved. “If that’s the spirit in your work, I suppose you don’t even think about getting paid for it.”

  “Now there you’re wrong. I try to get as much as I can. Of course, the magazine doesn’t sell, so they haven’t paid me yet. We really have to figure out a way to sell more. Do you have any ideas?” Now he was asking for Sanshirō’s advice. The level of discourse had suddenly descended to practical matters. Sanshirō found this very odd, but it didn’t seem to bother Yojirō. The school bell started clanging. “Anyhow, take this copy and read my essay. Great title, don’t you think? It’s bound to shock people. If you don’t shock them, they won’t read you, damn them.”

  They went inside to the classroom and took their seats. Soon the professor came. They started taking notes, but “The Great Darkness” had aroused Sanshirō’s curiosity. He placed the open Literary Review beside his notebook and began to read the essay as unobtrusively as possible during pauses in his note-taking. Fortunately the professor was nearsighted and totally absorbed in his own lecture. Sanshirō’s delinquency was of no concern to him. Very sure of himself now, Sanshirō proceeded to alternate between taking notes and reading the essay until, in his one-man pursuit of a feat that was meant for two, he succeeded in thoroughly losing track of both “The Great Darkness” and the lecture. The only clear impression he retained was a passage of Yojirō’s: “How many aeons did nature expend in fashioning a precious jewel? And how many aeons did the jewel lie gleaming in the earth until fate brought it forth?” The rest simply passed him by. He did, however, manage to get through the hour without once writing the words “Stray sheep.”

  *

  As soon as the lecture ended, Yojirō turned to Sanshirō. “How did you like it?”

  When Sanshirō answered that he had not actually read the essay yet, Yojirō berated him for not knowing how to use his time. “Be sure to read it.” Sanshirō promised to do so at home. By then it was lunchtime. They walked out through the gate together.

  “You’ll be going tonight, won’t you?” Yojirō asked, halting at the corner of the side street leading to home in Nishikatamachi. Sanshirō had forgotten—the class dinner was tonight. Yes, he said at last, he would be going. “Stop by for me, will you? There’s something I want to talk to you about.” Yojirō had a penholder tucked behind his ear—perhaps a little too self-consciously. Sanshirō agreed to stop by.

  He took a bath and went up to his room feeling refreshed. There was a postcard on his desk. The sender had drawn a picture on one side of the card. It showed a little stream with shaggy grass on its banks and two sheep lying at the edge of the grass. Across the stream stood a large man with a walking stick. He had a ferocious-looking face modeled closely on the devil in Western paintings. Lest there be any doubt, he had been labeled “Devil” in a phonetic rendering of the English word. The card’s only return address, written in tiny script, was “Lost Child.” Sanshirō knew who that was, and it thrilled him that she had put two stray sheep in the picture, suggesting that he was the other one. Mineko had included him from the beginning, it seemed. Now at last he understood what she had meant by “Stray sheep.”

  He thought about reading “The Great Darkness,” as he had promised Yojirō, but he was not in the mood for it. He kept looking at the postcard. The drawing had a comic quality that was not to be found even in Aesop. It looked innocent, but at the same time witty and unconventional. And there was something behind it all that moved Sanshirō’s heart. In terms of technique as well, it was a thoroughly admirable job. Each detail had been rendered clearly. Yoshiko’s persimmon tree was not to be compared with it—or so it appeared to Sanshirō.

  Eventually he started in on “The Great Darkness.” He could not concentrate at first, but the essay began to draw him in after two or three pages, and before he knew it he was moving five pages, six pages ahead until he had effortlessly taken care of the essay’s full twenty-seven-page length. Only when he read the final sentence did he realize that he had come to the end. He took his eyes from the magazine and thought to himself, “Ah, now I’ve read it.”

  But in the next instant, when he asked himself what it was he had read, there was nothing. There was so much nothing, it was funny. He felt only that he had enjoyed a big, exciting read. Sanshirō was struck with admiration for Yojirō’s literary skill.

  The essay began with an attack on contemporary men of letters and ended with extravagant praise for Professor Hirota. It was particularly severe on the foreigners teaching foreign literature at the University. The University should immediately appoint a suitable Japanese to teach courses worthy of its greatness, or else the institution that was supposed to be the pinnacle of academe would be no better than an Edo temple grammar school—a great brick mummy. To be sure, the situation could not be helped if there were no suitable men, but here was Professor Hirota, a man who had taught in the College for ten long years, content with low pay and obscurity, but a true scholar nonetheless. Here was a man who deserved a professorial post at the University, who would contribute to the new trends in the scholarly world and relate to the vital forces of society. Boiled down, this was all the essay had to say, but this little bit had been stretched out to twenty-seven pages of extraordinarily reasonable-sounding prose and brilliant aphorisms.

  Among the many entertaining passages were pronouncements like these: “Only old men pride themselves on baldness.” “Venus was born from the waves, but men of vision are not born from the University.” “If the University has only Ph.Ds to boast of, then the beach at Tago-no-ura35 has only jellyfish.” But the essay had nothing else to offer. In one especially strange passage, after likening Professor Hirota to a great darkness, Yojirō compared other scholars to paper lanterns that can do no more than glow feebly on a two-foot space around themselves, precisely as the Professor had said of him. He also noted, as he had that day, that objects such as paper lanterns and slim pipes were relics of a bygone age, “of no use whatever to us young men.”

  *

  Sanshirō thought about Yojirō’s essay and concluded that it had much vitality; he wrote as if he were—all by himself—a representative of the new Japan, and this mood swept the reader along. But the thing was totally without substance, like a battle without a base of operations. Worse, it could be interpreted as a piece of political chicanery. But Sanshirō, a country boy, could not formulate his suspicions so precisely. He merely felt, once he had read the essay and considered his reactions, that something about it dissatisfied him. He picked up Mineko’s postcard again and looked at the two sheep and the devil. He found everything about it pleasing, which only served to increase his dissatisfaction with Yojirō’s piece. He stopped thinking about the essay after that and turned his attention to writing a reply to Mineko. Unfortunately, he did not know how to draw. He would compose something literary. It would have to be something worthy of the postcard. But such excellent phrases did not come easily to mind. He dawdled away the time until after four.

  Changing into formal wear, Sanshirō left for Nishikatamachi to pick up Yojirō. He went in through the back door to find Professor Hirota eating dinner at a small table on the matted floor of the sitting room. Yojirō knelt respectfully nearby, serving him and asking, “How do you like them, Prof
essor?”

  The Professor’s cheek was bulging with what appeared to be a hard object. On the table was a dish holding ten red, black, burnt things, each about the size of a pocket watch.

  Sanshirō knelt on the mats and bowed. The Professor went on struggling with the thing in his mouth.

  Yojirō plucked one of the objects from the plate with chopsticks and held it out to Sanshirō. “Here, have a taste.” Balancing it on his palm, Sanshirō saw that it was a dried clam broiled in soy sauce.

  “Big, aren’t they?” he said.

  “You bet they are!” Yojirō agreed. “And these are no ordinary clams, either. They’re idiot clams.”

  “What in the world…?”

  “You know. When they die, their shells open and this long red neck comes out—like an idiot with his tongue hanging out.”

  “Why are you eating such weird things?”

  “What do you mean, ‘weird’? They’re good. Try one. I made a special trip to get them for the Professor. He’s never had any before.”

  “A special trip? Where did you have to go for them?”

  “Downtown. Nihonbashi.”

  Sanshirō found this all very comical—rather different from the tone of the essay he had just been reading.

  Again Yojirō asked, “How do you like them, Professor?”

  “They’re tough.”

  “Maybe so, but they’re good. You’ve got to chew them well to get the flavor.”

  “If you chewed them that long, your teeth would wear out. Why did you buy such old-fashioned things?”

  “Shouldn’t I have? Maybe they’re no good for you, Professor. They’re better suited to Satomi Mineko.”

  “Why is that?” Sanshirō asked.

  “She’s so calm and patient, she would just go on chewing until the flavor came out.”

  “She’s calm, all right,” said the Professor, “but wild, too.”

  “It’s true she is wild. There’s something of the Ibsen woman about her.”