Sanshiro

by Sōseki Natsume

  A little before the play ended, the man next to Sanshirō said to the man next to him that the actors all spoke as if they were having a nice family chat in the living room; they were utterly undisciplined. His neighbor responded with the criticism that none of the actors knew how to stand still; they were all fidgeting. The two men knew the actors’ names. Sanshirō listened closely to their conversation. Both men were handsomely dressed. He thought they must be famous. He felt certain, however, that if he could let Yojirō hear their remarks, he would disagree with them. Just then, a man in the rear shouted his approval like some Kabuki claque.59 The two men looked around. After that they stopped talking. Then the curtain fell.

  Here and there, spectators left their seats. From the stage ramp to the exit, a great milling of people began. Sanshirō raised himself slightly and, in this uneasy crouch, looked all around. There was no sign of the one he had hoped to see here. He had done his best during the performance to hunt her out. When that had failed, he had counted on finding her between plays, and now he was a little disappointed. All he could do was face front again.

  The two next to him appeared to be men of broad acquaintance. Turning right and left, they produced a steady stream of famous names—over there was so-and-so, over here was such-and-such. They exchanged bows across the hall with one or two. Thanks to them, Sanshirō learned who were the wives of a few famous men. One was a recent bride whom Sanshirō’s neighbor was also seeing for the first time, apparently; he went to the trouble of wiping his glasses and looked at her, saying, “Oh yes, oh yes.”

  Just then Yojirō came scurrying across the front of the curtained stage, stopping about two-thirds of the way toward Sanshirō’s end. He bent over slightly and started talking into the audience. Sanshirō followed his line of vision—and there, several yards directly ahead of Yojirō, was Mineko in profile.

  *

  The man next to her had his back to Sanshirō, who kept wishing that something would cause the man to look in his direction. Almost in response, the man stood up, probably tired of sitting cross-legged in the matted box. He sat on the low railing and looked all around the theater. It was then that Sanshirō recognized the broad forehead and large eyes of Nonomiya Sōhachi. As Nonomiya stood up, Sanshirō caught sight of Yoshiko behind Mineko. He tried to ascertain if there was anyone else in the party, but the audience was packed together so tightly that, from this distance, everyone in the front of the theater might as well have been with them. Mineko and Yojirō appeared to be exchanging remarks from time to time. Nonomiya also seemed to contribute an occasional word or two.

  Suddenly Haraguchi came out through the curtain. He stood next to Yojirō and stared into the audience. He, too, was probably moving his mouth. Nonomiya nodded as if in a signal, and Haraguchi slapped Yojirō on the back. Yojirō spun around and, diving under the curtain, disappeared. Haraguchi came down from the stage and made his way through the crowd to Nonomiya, who straightened up and let him go by. Haraguchi plunged into the crowd and disappeared somewhere near Mineko and Yoshiko.

  Sanshirō, who had been watching every movement of this group with far greater interest than he had experienced in watching the play, suddenly felt envious of this Haraguchi style of doing things. It had never occurred to him that one could approach people in such a convenient way. Perhaps he ought to try imitating Haraguchi? But the very consciousness that it would be an imitation destroyed whatever courage he might have had to try. Further restrained by the unlikelihood of there being any space left into which he might wedge himself, Sanshirō stayed where he was.

  Soon the curtain rose again and Hamlet started. Once, at Professor Hirota’s, Sanshirō had seen a photograph of a famous Western actor dressed as Hamlet. The Hamlet that appeared before him now was in much the same costume as that one. The faces, too, were similar. Both had brows knit in anguish.

  The movements of this Hamlet were wonderfully nimble. He moved grandly across the stage and imparted grand movement to the others. This was vastly different from Iruka’s restrained Noh style.60 Especially when he stood in the middle of the stage, stretching his arms out wide or glaring at the sky, he aroused such excitement that the spectators were conscious of nothing but him.

  The dialogue, however, was in Japanese, translated Japanese, Japanese spoken with exaggerated intonations, unusual rhythms. It poured forth so fluently at times it seemed almost too eloquent. It was in a fine literary style, but it was not moving. Sanshirō wished that Hamlet would say something a little more characteristically Japanese. Where he expected him to say, “Mother, you must not do that. It is an affront to Father’s memory,” Hamlet would suddenly bring in Apollo or someone and smooth things over. Meanwhile, both mother and son looked ready to burst into tears. Sanshirō was only dimly aware of the inconsistency, however. The courage to pronounce the thing absurd was not forthcoming.

  And so, whenever he tired of Hamlet, he would look at Mineko, and whenever Mineko was hidden behind someone, he would look at Hamlet. When Hamlet told Ophelia, “Get thee to a nunnery,” Sanshirō thought of Professor Hirota. No one like Hamlet could possibly marry, the Professor had said, which seemed true enough when you lingered over the poetry in the book, but on stage it seemed that Hamlet might just as well marry. After careful consideration, Sanshirō concluded that this was because the line “Get thee to a nunnery” was no good. The proof of this was that even after Hamlet had said it to Ophelia, you didn’t feel sorry for her.

  The curtain came down again. Mineko and Yoshiko went out, and Sanshirō followed their lead. When he reached the corridor, he saw them farther down, talking to a man who stood half inside the door that opened into the corridor from the left-hand seats. Sanshirō drew back as soon as he saw the man’s profile. Instead of returning to his seat, he reclaimed his shoes and left the theater.

  *

  The night, in its true form, was dark. Passing beyond this place illuminated by the power of men, he thought he could feel an occasional drop of rain. The wind sighed in the trees. Sanshirō hurried back to his room.

  The rain came late at night. Listening to it in bed, Sanshirō made “Get thee to a nunnery” into a pillar and wandered round and round it. Professor Hirota might also be awake. What kind of pillar would he be embracing? And Yojirō—Yojirō was sure to be out cold, buried in his great darkness.

  Sanshirō ran a slight fever the next day. His head felt so heavy he stayed in his futon, sitting up amid the still-spread-out bedding to eat his lunch. After another nap, he woke perspiring, his mind in a fog. At that point Yojirō charged in. He had not seen Sanshirō at the theater last night or in class this morning. What was wrong? Sanshirō thanked him for coming.

  “But I was there last night. I was there. I saw you come onto the stage and talk to Mineko out in the audience.”

  Sanshirō was feeling a little dizzy. Once he started talking, the words slipped out of him. Yojirō pressed his hand to Sanshirō’s forehead. “You’ve got a real fever. You need some medicine. This is a bad cold.”

  “The theater was too hot and too bright, and outside all of a sudden it was too cold and too dark. It’s not good for you.”

  “Maybe it’s not good for you, but there’s nothing you can do about it.”

  “Maybe there’s nothing you can do about it, but it’s still not good for you.”

  Sanshirō spoke in ever shorter snatches, and while Yojirō was humoring him, he fell asleep. He opened his eyes again an hour later.

  “You’re still here?” he said when he saw Yojirō. Now he was his normal self. Yojirō asked how he was feeling. He said only that he felt heavy in the head.

  “Must be a cold.”

  “Must be a cold.”

  They agreed on that point. A moment later, Sanshirō said, “Remember, the other day, you asked me if I had heard about Mineko?”

  “Mineko? Where?”

  “At school.”

  “At school? When?”

  Yojirō could not seem to remember. Sanshirō had
to go into detail.

  “Oh, sure, I might have mentioned something like that to you,” Yojirō said. Sanshirō found him highly irresponsible. Yojirō himself had a twinge of conscience and did his best to recall the day for his friend. Finally he said, “Maybe this was it. Maybe I was going to tell you that Mineko is getting married.”

  “Is it definite?”

  “It was when I heard it. I’m not sure.”

  “Nonomiya?”

  “No, it’s not Nonomiya.”

  “Then it must be…” he started to say, and stopped.

  “Do you know who it is?”

  “No,” he declared.

  Yojirō moved a little closer to him. “I don’t understand exactly, but something weird is going on. I guess it’ll be a while before we know what it is.”

  Sanshirō wished that Yojirō would come out with the weird something, but Yojirō blithely kept his view of the situation—and the weirdness—to himself. Sanshirō stood it as long as he could, but finally he demanded that Yojirō tell him every last thing he knew about Mineko. Yojirō laughed. And then—perhaps to comfort Sanshirō—he turned the subject in a wholly new direction.

  *

  “You’re crazy to fall in love with a woman like Mineko. It’s hopeless. First of all, she’s the same age as you. Women don’t go for men their own age anymore, not since O-Shichi,61 the greengrocer’s daughter.”

  Sanshirō kept silent, but he had no idea what Yojirō was talking about.

  “Now, let me tell you why. Put a twenty-year-old man and a twenty-year-old woman side by side, and what have you got? She has the upper hand in everything, and he looks like a fool. No woman wants to marry a man she can’t respect—except maybe a woman who thinks she’s the greatest thing in the world. She has to marry an inferior man or live single. You’ve heard how often that happens with rich girls and such. They’re happy enough to get married but they end up looking down on their husbands. Well, Mineko is a lot better than that. She would never marry a man she can’t respect. Anyone who thinks he’s going to marry her had better realize that—which is why guys like you and me don’t qualify to be her husband.”

  So Sanshirō ended up in the same camp as Yojirō. Still, he remained silent.

  “Look at it this way. Both of us are way ahead of Mineko. Right now. You and me. Just the way we are. But she won’t be able to see that until another five or six years go by. Of course she’s not going to sit around waiting that long, so you’ve got as much chance of getting together with her as a horse and cow in heat.”

  Yojirō chuckled to himself over that one. “Think about it. Another five or six years and there’ll be way better women than Mineko. The women outnumber the men in Japan even now.62 It’s no use catching a cold and running a fever over one of them. I mean, there’s a world full of women out there: it’s not worth the worry. Tell you the truth, I’ve got a few myself, but one of them was giving me so much trouble I told her I had to go to Nagasaki on official business.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “What do you mean, what am I talking about? A woman of mine.”

  Sanshirō was astonished.

  “Well, she’s not the kind of woman you’ve ever gotten close to. Anyhow, I told her I had to go to Nagasaki for a bacteria test and I wouldn’t be able to see her for a while. But she said she’d bring me some apples when she came to the station to see me off. I didn’t know what to do!”

  Sanshirō was more and more astonished, but he managed to ask, “So what happened to her?”

  “I don’t know. She was probably waiting at the station with her apples.”

  “You rat! How could you do such a rotten thing?”

  “Yes, I know it was rotten and she didn’t deserve it, but I didn’t know what else to do. Fate just kept things moving that way, one small step at a time. Actually, I was a ‘medical student’ from early on.”

  “Why did you have to lie to her?”

  “I don’t know, it just sort of happened. It got me in trouble one time, though. She got sick and asked me to examine her.”

  Sanshirō was beginning to see the humor in all this.

  “I looked at her tongue and tapped her chest and gave her this phony doctor act. So far so good, but then she asked if I could give her a thorough examination in the hospital.”

  Sanshirō finally burst out laughing.

  “So don’t worry. These things happen all the time,” Yojirō concluded. Sanshirō had no idea what that was supposed to mean, but he was feeling happy now.

  Yojirō chose this moment to explain the “weird something” about Mineko. Both Yoshiko and Mineko, he said, had received proposals of marriage. That in itself was nothing special, but it was apparently the same man in both cases. That was what was weird.

  Sanshirō, too, found it somewhat mystifying, but the Yoshiko part, at least, was true. He had heard it with his own ears. He might have been confusing Mineko’s with Yoshiko’s, but Mineko’s marriage was no lie, either, it seemed. He wanted to know the facts, and since Yojirō was here, it was Yojirō he asked for them. Yojirō agreed without hesitation. He would have Yoshiko pay a sick call, he said, and Sanshirō could ask her directly. An excellent solution.

  “So you’ll have to take your medicine and wait here in bed.”

  “I will, I will—even if my cold clears up.”

  They laughed and Yojirō went out. On the way home he arranged for a neighborhood doctor to visit Sanshirō.

  *

  The doctor came that evening. Sanshirō was a little flustered at first, never having received a doctor by himself before, but the man wasted no time in taking his pulse, and this calmed him down. The doctor was a polite young man. Sanshirō thought he must be a medical assistant. Within five minutes his illness was diagnosed as influenza. He was ordered to take a single dose of medicine that night and avoid drafts.

  Much of the heavy feeling in his head was gone when he awoke the next day. Lying in bed, he felt practically normal. Away from the pillow, however, he was unsteady. The maid came and said the room smelled of fever. Sanshirō ate nothing, but lay looking at the ceiling. He dozed off now and then. He had clearly surrendered himself to fever and exhaustion. While he remained in their power, unresisting, drifting between sleep and wakefulness, he found a certain pleasure in submitting to nature. This was, he decided, because his illness was a minor one.

  When four hours, then five hours had gone by, he began to feel the tedium. He tossed back and forth. Outside, it was a lovely day. The sun moved shadows slowly across the shoji’s translucent paper. Sparrows chirped. Sanshirō hoped that Yojirō would come again today.

  The maid slid back the shoji and announced the arrival of a lady guest. He had not been expecting Yoshiko to come this soon. Yojirō had done his job with typical dispatch. Sanshirō lay in bed, eyes fixed on the open doorway, when at last a tall figure appeared at the threshold. She was wearing a purple divided skirt today. Standing in the hallway, she seemed a little hesitant to enter. Sanshirō raised his shoulders from the mattress and said, “Come in.”

  Yoshiko closed the shoji and sat down near his pillow. The small room was a jumble and seemed all the more cramped for not having been cleaned this morning.

  “Don’t bother to get up,” she said to him. Sanshirō rested his head on the pillow again. As far as he could tell, he was calm.

  “It must smell bad in here.”

  “Yes, a little,” she answered, but her face expressed no discomfort. “Do you have a fever? What’s wrong with you? Has the doctor been to see you?”

  “The doctor came last night. He said it’s influenza.”

  “Yojirō came early this morning and told me to make a sick call. He said he didn’t know what you had but that it looked serious. Mineko and I were both shocked.”

  Yojirō had been stretching the truth again. He might even be said to have lured Yoshiko out under false pretenses. Sanshirō was too good not to feel bad about this. He thanked her for her con
cern. Yoshiko untied a cloth wrapper from a basket of mandarin oranges.

  “Mineko suggested I buy these on the way,” she said frankly. He could not be sure whose gift it was. He thanked Yoshiko and let it go at that.

  “Mineko was supposed to come too, but she’s a bit busy these days. She sends her regards.”

  “Has something special come up to make her busy?”

  “Yes, something very special.” Her large black eyes fell on Sanshirō where he lay, head propped on his pillow. He looked up at her pale forehead and thought of the time, long ago, when he had first met her in the hospital. Even now, she appeared languid and, at the same time, vivacious. She brought to Sanshirō’s sickbed a total comfort in which he could place his trust.

  “Shall I peel an orange for you?”

  She drew a fruit from the mass of green leaves. In his thirst, he drank deeply of the sweet dew, its fragrance overflowing.

  “I’m sure they’re delicious. They’re from Mineko.”

  “I’ve had enough.”

  She brought a white handkerchief from her sleeve and wiped her hands.

  “Yoshiko, whatever happened to that marriage proposal?”

  “Nothing. That was the end of it.”

  “I’ve heard there was one for Mineko too.”