Sanshiro

by Sōseki Natsume

The portrait was unfinished, of course, but the entire canvas had paint on it, and to Sanshirō’s unpracticed eye the picture looked quite good. Whether it was in fact a skillful job, he could not tell. Incapable of evaluating technique, Sanshirō had only the feeling that technique produced, and even that seemed to him way off the mark owing to his lack of experience. But he was not wholly oblivious to the effects of art, and at least to that extent he could be said to be a man of refined tastes.

  To Sanshirō the painting looked like a single burst of light. The entire canvas seemed to have a powdery overlay of soft, glare-free sunlight. Not even the shadows were black. If anything, they had a touch of pale violet. The painting made Sanshirō feel lighthearted, somehow. It had an exhilarating effect, like a ride in a swift riverboat. And yet there was something calm and settled about it, too. It was not disturbing, certainly in no way bitter or sharp or heavy. It was very much like Haraguchi himself, thought Sanshirō. Just then Haraguchi spoke up, manipulating the brush almost casually.

  “Here’s an interesting story, Ogawa. A fellow I know got fed up with his wife and asked her for a divorce. She refused. ‘Fate brought me to this house,’ she said. ‘Even though you may be tired of me, I will never leave.’ ”

  At that point Haraguchi stepped back from the canvas to view the results of his brushwork. Then he spoke to Mineko. “I do wish you had put on summer clothes for me. I’m having a terrible time with the kimono. I’m doing it all by guesswork, and I think I’ve been a little too bold.”

  “It’s all my fault,” said Mineko.

  Haraguchi approached the canvas again without answering her. “Well, anyhow, since his wife was too firmly planted to think of leaving, my friend said to her, ‘Don’t go if you don’t want to. Stay as long as you like. I’ll go.’ —Mineko, could you stand up a second, please? No, don’t worry about the fan, just stand up. That’s it. Thanks. —So the wife said, ‘How can I stay if you leave? Who’ll support me?’ My friend told her, ‘Don’t worry, you can always find a man who will marry into the family and take your—my—name.’ ”

  “What happened after that?” Sanshirō asked.

  Haraguchi seemed to think the rest of the story was not worth telling. “Nothing happened. It’s just that you’ve got to think twice before you get married. It means the end of your freedom—freedom to separate, freedom to get together with someone else. Look at Professor Hirota, look at Nonomiya, look at Satomi Kyōsuke, and look at me—all bachelors. When women come up in the world, lots of men stay single. As a basic rule of society, women ought to advance only to the degree that you don’t produce bachelors.”

  “My brother is going to be married very soon, you know,” Mineko broke in.

  “He is? What’s going to happen to you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Sanshirō looked at Mineko. Mineko looked back at Sanshirō and smiled. Only Haraguchi was facing the portrait, and when he spoke it was mostly to himself: “ ‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘I don’t know.’ Oh well…” He started painting again.

  *

  Sanshirō took this opportunity to leave the table and approach Mineko. She had flung herself down, too exhausted to care about appearances, her lusterless head of hair drooping against the chair back, her throat arched prominently from the collar of her under-kimono. The pretty lining of her coat, which lay on the chairback, was visible above her swirling hairdo.

  Sanshirō had the thirty yen in his breast pocket. This money represented some inexplicable thing that existed between them—or at least he believed that it did. Because of this belief he had thought about returning the money but had never done it. It was also because of this belief that he was trying now to return the money once and for all. When he had given it back, they would either drift apart for lack of this mutual concern, or they would grow closer in spite of it. —Normal people might find Sanshirō a bit superstitious.

  “Mineko.”

  “Yes?”

  She looked up at him without moving her face. Only her eyes moved. They slowed to a stop when they were looking directly at him. He could see that she was tired.

  “As long as I’ve found you here, let me give this back.” He loosened a button and thrust his hand into his jacket.

  “What is it?”

  Her tone, as before, betrayed no emotion. Hand still thrust inside his jacket, Sanshirō wondered what he should do.

  “The money,” he said at last.

  “What can I do with it here?”

  She was looking up at him. She did not reach out or change her position. Her face stayed motionless. He did not understand this woman. He did not understand her question. Just then a voice behind him said, “It won’t be long now. How about it?”

  He turned to find Haraguchi facing them. A brush between his fingers, he tugged at the neat triangle of his beard and smiled. Mineko grasped the arms of the chair and sat up very straight.

  “Will this take long?” Sanshirō asked softly.

  “Another hour,” she answered just as quietly. Sanshirō went back to the round table. Mineko resumed her pose. Haraguchi lit his pipe again, and again his brush began to move.

  Turning his back to Sanshirō, he said, “Ogawa, look at Mineko’s eyes.”

  Sanshirō did as he was told. Mineko lowered the fan and broke her pose. She turned to look through the window at the garden.

  “No, you can’t move now. I’ve just started.”

  “Why did you have to say that?”

  She faced front again.

  Haraguchi explained, “I’m not making fun of you. I have something to tell Ogawa.”

  “What is it?”

  “Just listen. Come, stand the way you were. That’s it. Elbow a little more this way. Now, as I was saying, Ogawa, do you think the eyes I’ve painted have the same expression as our actual model’s here?”

  “I don’t know, really. But when you paint someone like this over a long period of time, do the eyes keep the same expression day after day?”

  “No, they change, of course. And it’s not just the model. The painter’s mood changes every day, too. There really ought to be several portraits when you’re through, but we can’t have that. The strange thing is that you end up with one fairly coherent painting. Think about it.”

  Haraguchi was manipulating the brush all the while he talked. He kept looking at Mineko, too. Sanshirō witnessed in awe this simultaneous functioning of Haraguchi’s faculties.

  *

  “When I work on a painting day after day like this, each day’s work accumulates, and soon the picture takes on a certain mood. So even if I come back from someplace in a different mood, once I walk into the studio and face the picture, I can get right into it because the mood of the picture takes over. The same thing happens to Mineko. If you just leave her to be her natural self, different stimuli are bound to give her different expressions. But the reason this has no great effect on the painting is that her pose, say, and the clutter in here—the drum, the armor, the tigerskin—naturally come to draw out one particular expression, and the habit of it becomes strong enough after a while to suppress any other expression, so that I can fairly well go on painting the look in the eyes as is. Now, I keep using the word ‘expression’ but—”

  Haraguchi suddenly broke off. He seemed to have come to something difficult. He took two steps back and started intently comparing Mineko and the picture.

  “Mineko, is something wrong?”

  “No, nothing.”

  It was inconceivable that this answer had come from her mouth, she kept her pose unbroken with such perfect stillness.

  “I keep using the word ‘expression,’ ” Haraguchi went on, “but an artist doesn’t paint what’s inside, he doesn’t paint the heart. He paints what the heart puts on display. As long as he observes everything in the display case, he can tell what’s locked up in the safe. Or we can assume that much, I suppose. A painter has to resign himself to the fact that anything he can’t see on display is beyond t
he scope of his responsibility. That’s why we paint only the flesh. Whatever flesh an artist paints, if it hasn’t got the spirit in it, it’s dead, it simply has no validity as a painting. Now take Mineko’s eyes, for example. When I paint them, I’m not trying to make a picture of her heart, I’m just painting them as eyes. I’m painting these eyes because I like them. I’m painting everything I see about them—the shape, the shadow in the fold of the lids, the depth of the pupils—leaving nothing out. And as a result, almost by accident, a kind of expression takes shape. If it doesn’t, it means I mixed the colors badly or I got the shape wrong, one or the other, because that color and that shape are themselves a kind of expression.”

  Again Haraguchi took two steps back, comparing Mineko with the picture. “Something is wrong today, I’m sure. You must be tired. If you are, let’s quit. Are you?”

  “No.”

  Haraguchi walked up to the canvas again. “Now, let me tell you why I picked Mineko’s eyes. You find a beauty in Western art, and no matter who’s painted her, she has big eyes. They all have these funny-looking big eyes. In Japanese art, though, women always have narrow eyes, from images of Kannon down to comic masks and Noh masks, and especially the beauties in ukiyo-e prints.53 They all have elephant eyes. Why should standards of beauty be so different in East and West? It seems strange at first, but actually it’s very simple. Big eyes are the only thing they have in the West, so an aesthetic selection takes place among the big-eyed ones. All we have in Japan are whale eyes. Pierre Loti made fun of them in Madame Chrysanthème.54 ‘How do they ever open those things?’ he said. You see, it’s the nature of the country. There is no way for an aesthetic appreciation of big eyes to develop where materials are so scarce. Our ideal came from among narrow eyes, where there was so much freedom of choice, and we see it prized in artists like Utamaro and Sukenobu. As nice and Japanese as they look to us, though, narrow eyes look terrible in Western style painting. People think you’ve painted a blind woman. On the other hand, we don’t have anybody who looks like Raphael’s Madonna, and if we did, nobody would consider her Japanese. That, finally, is how I came to put Mineko through all this.—Just a little while longer, Mineko.”

  She did not answer. She stood absolutely motionless.

  *

  Sanshirō found the painter’s remarks very interesting. If only he had come there specifically to hear them, he felt, their interest would have been vastly increased. The focus of his attention, however, was neither Haraguchi’s conversation nor Haraguchi’s painting. It was concentrated, of course, on the standing figure of Mineko. He heard everything the painter had to say, but his eyes never left Mineko. To him, her pose looked like a natural process caught in its most beautiful moment and rendered immobile. There was lasting solace in her unchangingness. But Haraguchi had suddenly turned his head and asked her if there were something wrong. Sanshirō felt almost terrified, as though the painter had informed him that the means of keeping this changeable beauty unchanged had spent itself.

  Now that Haraguchi mentioned it, Sanshirō noticed there might indeed be something wrong with Mineko. Her color was bad, the glow was gone. The corners of her eyes revealed an unbearable languor. Sanshirō lost the sense of comfort this living portrait had given him, and at that moment the thought struck him—perhaps he himself was the cause. An intense personal stimulus overtook Sanshirō’s heart in that instant. The communal emotion of regret for passing beauty vanished from him without a trace. So great was his influence over her! With this new awareness, Sanshirō became conscious of his entire being. But was the influence to his advantage or his disadvantage? This was a question as yet unanswered.

  Haraguchi laid his brush aside at last. “Let’s stop now,” he said. “We’ll never get anything done today.”

  Mineko dropped the fan to the floor where she stood. She picked up her coat from the chair and while putting it on walked over to Haraguchi and Sanshirō.

  “You’re tired today,” Haraguchi said.

  “Am I?” She straightened the coat and fastened the front tie.

  “Actually, I’m tired too. Let’s try again tomorrow when we have a little more energy. Have a cup of tea now—don’t run off.”

  It was a while yet before evening. But she would be on her way, Mineko said, there was something she had to do. Sanshirō also pointedly turned down Haraguchi’s invitation to stay, and he left with Mineko. Given Japanese social customs, no amount of planning could have presented him with such a perfect opportunity, and he meant to exploit it, to stay with her as long as possible. He invited Mineko to take a stroll with him through this quiet neighborhood, where there were relatively few passersby. She was surprisingly unreceptive to the idea, however, and headed straight down the hedge-lined road to the main thoroughfare.

  Walking beside her, Sanshirō said, “Haraguchi was right, wasn’t he? You are feeling out of sorts today.”

  “Am I?” she said again, as she had replied to Haraguchi. Sanshirō had never known Mineko to be overly talkative. A phrase or two was all she ever needed. And yet in Sanshirō’s ears these simple utterances produced a kind of profound resonance. There was a tone to her speech that was all but impossible to find in others. Sanshirō stood in awe of it. He marveled at it.

  When she said “Am I?” Mineko had turned part way toward Sanshirō and looked at him from the corner of her eye. A halo seemed to overlay the eye, which had a lukewarm feeling to it that he had never seen before. The cheek, too, was somewhat pale.

  “You look a little pale, I think.”

  “Do I?”

  They took several steps without speaking. Sanshirō wanted desperately to tear away the thin, curtain-like thing that hung between them, but he knew no words that would rend the fabric. He refused to speak the syrupy phrases they used in novels. The social usages of young men and women might permit it, but his personal sense of taste did not. He was hoping for the impossible—not only hoping, but struggling to devise a way to attain it as he walked along.

  *

  Finally it was Mineko who spoke. “Did you have some business with Mr. Haraguchi today?”

  “No, none.”

  “You just came for a visit, then?”

  “No, that’s not it, either.”

  “Well, then, why did you come?”

  Sanshirō seized the moment. “I came to see you.”

  He felt he had said everything he could possibly say. Mineko went on in a tone that betrayed no emotion, the tone that always had an intoxicating effect on Sanshirō. “I could hardly take the money from you there.”

  He was crushed. They took several more steps without speaking. Then Sanshirō said all at once, “I didn’t come to give you the money.”

  Mineko did not reply immediately. When she spoke, her voice was soft. “I don’t need the money, either. You keep it.”

  Sanshirō could endure this no longer. “I came because I wanted to see you,” he said, searching for her eyes.

  She would not look at him. He heard a tiny sigh escape her lips. “The money is…”

  “The damned money…”

  Both left unfinished sentences hanging in the air. They walked on another half block. This time she spoke. “What did you think when you saw Haraguchi’s portrait?”

  There were so many ways he could answer this, Sanshirō walked a little while without replying.

  “Weren’t you surprised at how quickly he was completing it?”

  “I was,” he said, but the idea had not occurred to him. Now that he thought about it, only a month had gone by since Haraguchi visited Professor Hirota’s and revealed his desire to paint Mineko, and his request to her at the museum had come even later than that. Unenlightened in the ways of art, Sanshirō found it all but impossible to imagine how much time it took to do a painting of that size. Now that Mineko had called his attention to it, he felt that the painting was indeed being completed too quickly. “When did he start working on it?”

  “He started painting in earnest only
a short while ago. But I had him doing a little bit at a time from before.”

  “When was ‘before’?”

  “You should be able to guess from my outfit.”

  Sanshirō recalled at once that hot summer day long ago when he had first seen Mineko at the pond.

  “Heavens, you must remember. You were squatting under the oak tree.”

  “You were standing on the hill, holding up a fan.”

  “Just like in the picture.”

  “Yes, just like in the picture.”

  They looked at each other. A little farther on, they would reach the top of Hakusan Hill.

  A rickshaw came dashing toward them from that direction. The passenger was wearing a black hat and gold-rimmed glasses. The glow of his complexion was obvious even at this distance. From the moment the rickshaw entered his field of vision, Sanshirō felt that the young gentleman passenger was staring at Mineko. The rickshaw stopped just ahead of them. Sanshirō watched the young man deftly thrust aside the blanket on his knees and spring down from the footboard. He was a handsome, well-built man, tall and slim with a long face, and though clean-shaven, he was thoroughly masculine.

  “You were so late, I came to get you.” He stood directly in front of Mineko. He looked down at her, smiling.

  “Oh, thank you.” She was smiling, too, as she returned his glance, but she immediately turned to Sanshirō.

  “Who is this?” the young man asked.

  “Ogawa Sanshirō of the University,” she said.

  The man tipped his hat to Sanshirō.

  “Let’s hurry. Your brother is waiting, too.”

  As it happened, they were standing at the corner where Sanshirō was to turn for Oiwake. He had still not returned the money when they parted.

  11

  Yojirō was circulating through the school, selling tickets to the Literary Society’s forthcoming drama nights. After two or three days, he seemed to have palmed tickets off on just about everyone he knew. That much accomplished, he concentrated on people he did not know. He generally caught them in the hallway, and once he had them he would never let go. He nearly always got them to buy in the end. There were times, however, when the bell would ring in the middle of his pitch, and the customer would escape. To explain these mishaps, Yojirō relied on Mencius. “The opportunity of time has not been vouchsafed me,” he would say.55 He had a similar pronouncement for those occasions when his adversary managed to put him off with smiles: “The compliance of man has not been afforded me.” Once, he caught a professor who had just emerged from the men’s room and was still wiping his hands. “Not now,” he protested and disappeared into the library. For this, Yojirō had no pronouncement. He simply watched the professor running off and informed Sanshirō, “The man has intestinal catarrh, I’m sure of it.”