Sanshiro

by Sōseki Natsume

  Sanshirō replied that he would not. He said goodbye and was getting to his feet when Yoshiko announced that she would be leaving, too.

  “We haven’t had our talk yet,” her brother reminded her.

  “That’s quite all right,” she declared.

  “It is not all right.”

  “Yes it is. I just don’t know.”

  Nonomiya stared at his sister.

  She continued, “Don’t you see how pointless it is? What can I say when you ask me if I’ll marry a total stranger? I don’t love him, I don’t hate him, I don’t know him—literally. I just don’t know.”

  Sanshirō saw now what Yoshiko meant by “I just don’t know.” He left the brother and sister alone and hurried outside.

  *

  He emerged from the deserted lane, where door lamps were all that illuminated the darkness. On the main street again, he found the wind blowing, and when he turned north, it struck him full in the face. The wind blew from the direction of his lodgings in rhythmic gusts. Sanshirō thought to himself: through this wind, Nonomiya will be walking soon, accompanying his sister back to Satomi’s.

  He could still hear the wind even after he had climbed the stairs to his room and sat down on the matted floor. The word “destiny” came to mind whenever he heard the wind blowing like this. He felt like cringing whenever it came howling at him. He had never considered himself a strong man, and now that he thought about it, his destiny since coming to Tokyo had been largely shaped by Yojirō—shaped in a way that put him, to some extent, at the mercy of Yojirō’s genial whims. Yojirō was a lovable mischief-maker, he knew, and his destiny would remain in the hands of this lovable mischief-maker for some time to come. The wind never let up. Surely the wind was something greater than Yojirō.

  Sanshirō placed the thirty yen from his mother by his pillow. This thirty yen had also been given birth to by a whim of fate. What tasks would it perform? He would bring it back to Mineko, and when she took it, she was certain to fan the flames again. Let her come at me as boldly as she knows how, thought Sanshirō.

  With that he fell asleep. It was a sleep too sound for either destiny or Yojirō to touch. He woke to the ringing of a fire bell. There were voices. This was his second Tokyo fire. He pulled a coat on over his sleeping robe and opened the window. The wind had died down considerably, but amidst its ongoing roar, the two-story house across the way looked pitch black, black because the sky behind it was so red.

  Sanshirō stared at this redness for a while, enduring the cold. In his mind, destiny shone a brilliant red. He crawled back under the warm covers, and there he forgot about the lives of all those people raging about inside the red destiny.

  The next morning, he was an ordinary person again. He put on his uniform, picked up his notebook, and left for school. The one unusual thing this morning was the money, and this he did not forget to put in his pocket. His schedule that day was not a good one, however. It was full until three o’clock. If he went after three, Yoshiko would probably be home from school. The brother he knew only as Satomi Kyōsuke might also be there. He felt quite incapable of returning the money if anyone else was going to be present.

  He ran into Yojirō, who picked up where he had left off. “Did you get your lecture last night?”

  “No, I wouldn’t call it that.”

  “I thought so. Nonomiya’s no fool,” he said and went off somewhere.

  Sanshirō saw Yojirō in another class two hours later. “Things look very good for Professor Hirota,” Yojirō said. Sanshirō asked how far the campaign had advanced. “Don’t worry, I’ll tell you all about it when we have time. The Professor’s been asking for you. You ought to go and see him more often. He’s a bachelor, after all. We have to cheer him up. Buy him something next time.”

  Yojirō gave his orders and disappeared again. He materialized once more in the following class. This time, in the middle of the lecture, something possessed him to pass a white slip of paper to Sanshirō with a telegraphic note: “Received money?” Sanshirō considered writing an answer, but he looked up to find the professor staring straight at him. He crumpled the paper and threw it to the floor. Yojirō had to wait for his answer until class was over.

  “Got it. It’s right here.”

  “Good. Are you going to give it back?”

  “Of course I am.”

  “You ought to. The sooner the better.”

  “I’m going over with it today.”

  “She might be there if you go late in the afternoon.”

  “Why? Has she been going out?”

  “Has she! She goes out every single day to have her picture painted. It must be pretty much done by now.”

  “At Haraguchi’s?”

  “Right.”

  Sanshirō asked Yojirō for Haraguchi’s address.

  10

  Having heard from Yojirō that Hirota was not well, Sanshirō came to pay a sick call. He went in through the gate and saw a pair of shoes in the hallway. Perhaps they were the doctor’s. Walking around to the kitchen door as usual, he found no one. He wandered in as far as the sitting room. There were voices in the parlor. Sanshirō stood still, his large cloth bundle dangling from one hand. It was full of persimmons. He had bought them in Oiwake in compliance with Yojirō’s orders. All of a sudden there were some heavy thumps and grappling sounds in the parlor. It had to be a fight. Still holding the cloth bundle, he shot the sliding door back a foot and glared inside. Professor Hirota was pinned under a large man in a brown divided skirt. Straining to lift his face from the mats, Professor Hirota looked at Sanshirō with a broad grin and said, “Hello there, come in.”

  The man on top glanced at Sanshirō and continued with the match. “Sorry, Professor, but try to get up,” he said. He seemed to have the Professor’s arms twisted behind his back with the elbows pinned to the floor beneath his knees. The Professor replied from underneath that he would never be able to get up. With that, the man released his grip, lifted his knees, straightened the pleats of his skirt, and sat up on the matted floor. Now Sanshirō could see what a powerfully built man he was.

  The Professor also sat up. “I see what you mean,” he said.

  “It’s a dangerous technique. If you fight it you can break your arms.”

  Sanshirō now realized what they had been doing.

  “I heard that you were sick, Professor. Are you all right now?”

  “Yes, I’m fine.”

  Sanshirō untied the cloth bundle and spread the contents of the package between the Professor and his guest.

  “I bought you some persimmons.”

  Professor Hirota went to his study and came back with a pen-knife. Sanshirō brought some knives from the kitchen. The three of them began to eat. Hirota and the unknown man talked incessantly of provincial middle schools—the difficulty of making a living, the student strikes, the man’s inability to stay put for long, his extra-curricular teaching of judo, the economies of a colleague who retied old thongs to new wooden clogs, the difficulty of finding work now that he had resigned, and his decision to send his wife home to her parents until a new job turned up.

  Spitting out persimmon stones, Sanshirō watched the man’s face and started feeling miserable. It was almost as if this man and his present self were of wholly different races. “I wish I could be a student again. The student life is the most carefree in the world.” The man repeated this several times. When Sanshirō heard it he wondered vaguely if two or three “carefree” years might be all that were left to him. This was not the lighthearted mood that accompanied eating noodles with Yojirō.

  Professor Hirota stood up and went to his study again. He came back holding a book with a dark red cover and dust-blackened edges. “This is the book I told you about the other day, Hydriotaphia.49 Have a look at it if you’re bored.”

  Sanshirō thanked him and took the volume. A passage caught his eye: “But the iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy, and deals with the memory of men without disti
nction to merit of perpetuity.”

  The Professor was free now to continue his conversation with Dr. Judo. “We hear about the way middle-school teachers and such live, and it all seems terribly sad, but the only ones who really feel sad are the men themselves. That’s because modern-day people are fond of facts but they habitually throw out the sentiments that accompany the facts—which is all they can do, because society is pressing in on us so relentlessly we’re forced to throw them out. You can see this in the newspaper. Nine out of ten human interest stories are tragedies, but we have nothing to spare, nothing that enables us to feel them as tragedies. We read them only as factual reports. In the newspaper I take I often see the headline, ‘So-and-so Many Die,’ under which the name, address and cause of death of everyone who has died of unnatural causes that day is listed in small type, one line per person. It’s the ultimate in concision and lucidity. There’s also a column called ‘Burglaries at a Glance,’ in which all the burglaries are lumped together so that you can tell literally at a glance what kind of burglaries have been committed where—another great convenience. You have to realize that everything is like this. It’s the same with a resignation. To the man concerned, it might be an incident bordering on tragedy, but it’s important to face the fact that others don’t feel it with the same intensity. You would probably do well to keep this in mind when searching for work.”

  “Still, Professor,” said the judo man, looking serious, “if someone had as much to spare as you, I’d think it would be all right for him to feel things with a little intensity.” At this, Professor Hirota, Sanshirō, and the man himself all laughed. It seemed as though the man was never going to leave. Sanshirō borrowed the book and went out by the kitchen door.

  *

  “To subsist in lasting monuments, to live in their productions, to exist in their names and predicament of chimeras, was large satisfaction unto old expectations, and made one part of their Elysiums. But all this is nothing in the metaphysicks of true belief. To live indeed, is to be again ourselves, which being not only an hope, but an evidence in noble believers, ’tis all one to lie in St. Innocent’s church-yard, as in the sands of Egypt. Ready to be anything, in the ecstasy of being ever, and as content with six foot as the moles of Adrianus.”

  He read the concluding paragraph of Hydriotaphia as he ambled down the street toward Hakusan. According to Professor Hirota, this writer was a famous stylist, and this essay the best example of his style. “That’s not my opinion, of course,” he had laughingly confided. And in fact Sanshirō could not see what was so remarkable about this style. The phrasing was bad, the diction outlandish, the flow of words sluggish. It gave him the feeling of looking at some old temple. In terms of walking distance, it had taken him three or four blocks to read, and still he was not very clear about what it said.

  What he had gained from the paragraph wore a patina of age, as if someone had rung the bell of the Great Buddha in Nara50 and the lingering reverberation had faintly reached his ears in Tokyo. Rather than the meaning of the passage itself, Sanshirō took pleasure in the shadow of sentiment that crept over the meaning. He had never thought keenly about death; his youthful blood was still too warm for that. A fire leapt before his eyes so gigantic that it could singe his brows, and this feeling was his true self. Now he was headed for Haraguchi’s house in Akebono-chō.

  A child’s funeral procession came toward him. Two men in formal coats were the only mourners. The little coffin was wrapped in a spotless white cloth, a pretty pinwheel attached to its side. The wheel kept turning. Each of its five blades was painted a different color. They blurred into one as the wheel turned. The white coffin moved past him, the pinwheel spinning constantly. He thought it a lovely procession.

  Sanshirō had viewed another’s writing and another’s funeral from a distance. If someone were to come along and suggest that, while he was about it, he should look at Mineko from a distance, he would have been shocked, for his eyes were no longer capable of doing that. First of all, he was not conscious of a distinction between the distant and the not-distant. He knew only that, while he sensed a tranquil beauty in the death of another, there was a kind of anguish beneath the beautiful pleasure he felt from the living Mineko. He would move straight ahead, trying to sweep away this anguish. If he went forward, it seemed, the anguish would leave him. He never dreamed of stepping aside to shed it. Incapable of such a thought, Sanshirō viewed the rites of extinction from afar, as words on a page, and he felt the pathos of early death from a place apart. What should have brought him sadness he viewed with pleasure and a sense of beauty.

  When he turned into Akebono-chō, there was a large pine tree. Yojirō had told him to look for this, but when he reached the tree, it was the wrong house. There was another pine tree further on. And one beyond that. There were lots of pines. It was a nice neighborhood, thought Sanshirō. He passed several of the trees and turned left. There was a hedge and a handsome gate. The name plate of this house did in fact say “Haraguchi.” It was a dark strip of wood with convoluted grain, the name lavishly inscribed on it in green oil paint. The calligraphy was so ornate that the characters looked more like abstract designs. Nothing stood between the gate and the front door; it was clean and fresh. Grass grew on either side of the path.

  *

  Mineko’s wooden clogs were arranged neatly in the hallway. He recognized them because the right and left thongs of each were different colors. The maid said that Haraguchi was at work on a painting, but Sanshirō could come in if he liked. He followed her into the studio. It was a large room, stretching a long way north and south. On this long floor lay an odd assortment of items befitting an artist’s space. One area was covered with a rug. Out of proportion to the size of the room, it seemed less a rug than an elegantly figured, colorful swatch that had been tossed there as a decoration. The same was true of the large tiger skin that lay farther on. It did not seem to have been placed there as a cushion for sitting. Its long tail stretched out at an angle incongruous to the rug. There was a large jar that looked as though it had been molded from sand. Two arrows protruded from its mouth. Between the rows of gray feathers, the shafts were decorated with shiny gold leaf. Next to the jar was a suit of armor with overlapping plates of white and yellow-green. This, thought Sanshirō, was probably what the medieval war tales called unohana-odoshi.51 In the far corner was something brilliant and eye-catching. It was a violet robe of wadded silk, with gold thread in the skirt’s lavish embroidery. It had been hung as if for summer airing, with a cord passed through the short, cylindrical sleeves. This must be what they call a Genroku.52 In addition to these objects, the room had many paintings. The ones on the walls alone came to quite a number, of all sizes. Others with no frames, possibly roughed-out canvases, lay in loose rolls with the edges exposed.

  The portrait that was being painted at the moment stood amidst this spread of dazzling colors. The person who was being painted stood against the far wall, holding up a round fan. Shoulders hunched, the man who was doing the painting began to rotate, palette in hand, until he was facing Sanshirō. His teeth clenched a thick pipe.

  “Well, look who’s here,” he said, taking the pipe from his mouth and setting it down on a small, round table where an ashtray and matches lay. Next to the table was a chair.

  “Have a seat. This is it,” he said, looking toward the unfinished canvas. It was a full six feet high.

  Sanshirō said only, “It is big, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, pretty big,” said Haraguchi, more to himself than to Sanshirō. He started painting where the hair and background met. Now at last, Sanshirō looked at Mineko. Her white teeth gleamed faintly in the shadow of the fan.

  For several minutes everything was silent. The warmth of a stove filled the room. Even outside it was not especially cold today. The wind had died down. A withered tree stood there soundlessly, enveloped by the winter sun. When shown into the studio, Sanshirō had felt as if he were entering a mist. Elbow on the small round table
, he gave himself over to this silence more total than night’s. Within the silence there was Mineko and there was the image of Mineko gradually taking shape. All that moved was the fat painter’s brush. It moved only for the eye; to the ear it was silent. The fat painter also moved at times, but his steps were soundless.

  Sealed in silence, Mineko remained utterly still. In her standing pose with the fan held aloft, she was already a picture. As Sanshirō saw it, Haraguchi was not painting Mineko; he was copying a painting of mysterious depth, using all his energy to make an ordinary picture that lacked precisely this depth. And yet, within the silence, the second Mineko was moving ever closer to the first. Sanshirō imagined that between these two Minekos lay a long, silent time untouched by the sound of the clock. As that time passed by, so quietly the artist himself was unaware of it, the second Mineko would at last catch up. And when the two were on the verge of meeting and melding into one, the river of time would suddenly shift its course and flow into eternity. Haraguchi’s brush could go no farther. Sanshirō followed his musings to this point, then came back to himself and glanced at Mineko. She remained motionless, as before. Sanshirō’s mind had been on the move in this quiet air without his realizing it. He felt intoxicated. All of a sudden Haraguchi laughed.

  *

  “All right, I can see you’re suffering again.”

  Without a word, Mineko broke her pose and plopped into the easy chair nearby. Again there was a white flash of teeth. As the sleeve of the upraised arm swept past her face, she looked at Sanshirō. Her glance pierced his brow like a meteor.

  Haraguchi walked over to the round table. “How do you like it?” he asked Sanshirō. He struck a match and lit his pipe again. Pressing the large wooden bowl between his fingers, he released two thick puffs of smoke through his mustache, then turned until his rounded back faced Sanshirō again and approached the portrait. He started touching up various parts of the picture at will.