The Great Passage

by Shion Miura

  Next to him, Majime had various types of dictionaries spread open on his desk. He’d brought in a magnifying glass from somewhere and was using it to make minute comparisons of numbers and symbols, his hair flying every which way as usual. Nishioka almost reached out and gave him a whack on the back of his head.

  “Well, I’m off to the university.” He sprang up and felt a bolt of pain shoot up his back.

  Seemingly oblivious to Nishioka’s muffled groan, Majime kept looking through his magnifying glass. “Goody,” he said absentmindedly. “See you tomorrow.”

  Goody? What the heck was that supposed to be? Goody?

  Nishioka left the office in high dudgeon, but as he had to avoid sudden, painful movements, he crept with the stealth of a burglar.

  Pale winter afternoon sunshine lit up the mosaic-tiled stair landing. Nishioka climbed to the fourth floor of the old, imposing staircase, holding on to the wooden railing, and went to the door of the professor’s office. Before knocking, he took off his coat and laid it neatly over his arm, following proper etiquette. With one hand he massaged the small of his back, and with the other he knocked.

  In answer to the response from within he opened the door and found the professor, a specialist in medieval Japanese literature, just finishing lunch at his desk.

  “Oh, Mr. Nishioka!” The professor swiftly wrapped up the lunch box in a large handkerchief.

  “I’m sorry to interrupt you at lunchtime.”

  “It’s fine. I just finished. Have a seat.”

  Nishioka pulled up a chair covered in books and perched on the edge. “Does your wife make your lunch for you?” he asked sociably.

  “Ah, well.” The professor uneasily stroked his fine head of silver-gray hair. “If it’s the dictionary entries you’re here for, I’m afraid they’re not done.”

  “Please do finish them by the deadline, if you would.” Nishioka then sat up straighter. “I came here today to let you know that next year I will be transferring to the company’s advertising department. Someone else from the Dictionary Editorial Department will work with you from now on.”

  The professor frowned slightly and leaned forward. He looked either concerned or eagerly curious, Nishioka couldn’t tell which.

  “So the rumor is true?” he asked.

  “What rumor would that be?”

  “I heard that Gembu isn’t on board with the new dictionary. That must be why they’re reducing staff.”

  “Not at all.” Nishioka smiled. “If that were true, we would hardly be asking you to write contributions for us.”

  “Good to know.” The professor seemed to take this at face value, but shrewdly added, “I hate to say it, but considering the work involved, writing dictionary entries certainly doesn’t pay. Of course, dictionaries are invaluable and I intend to do my best, but you need to understand that my time is taken up by meetings and academic conferences and such. I have very little time to myself. Which is why I would be disturbed to find the Dictionary Editorial Department had bitten off more than it can chew.”

  “Sir, only you can help us with entries relating to medieval Japan. When the time comes I’ll be back to introduce the new member of the editorial staff. Thank you for your understanding.” Nishioka bowed politely.

  College professors. If they weren’t babes in the woods who knew nothing outside the covers of their books, they were political savants with one ear always to the ground. But when it came to reconnaissance, Nishioka himself was no slouch. He knew full well that those boxed lunches were prepared not by the professor’s wife but by his mistress. And if he had to, he was prepared to use that information to get the entries on time.

  Worn out by his encounter with the professor, who looked so distinguished on the outside and was such a sleazeball on the inside, Nishioka went home and got into a hot tub. Almost immediately, he fell asleep. The next thing he knew, he was sputtering in water that had cooled to lukewarm.

  Later he poked his head into the living room. “Hey! You didn’t notice I was in the bath too long? I nearly drowned!”

  “Oh, no!” Remi never took her eyes off the television. “I did think you were taking your time, but I was busy so I didn’t go check. Sorry.”

  On the screen, a comedian was yammering about his favorite electrical appliance. A weird show, Nishioka had always thought, but when it was on he couldn’t help getting caught up in it. Listening to the guy go on about people and things he cared about was annoying and ridiculous, but there was something about it that amused Nishioka at the same time. Before he knew it he found himself drawn in, interested despite himself. Kind of like the way he felt around Majime and the others.

  The program ended, and they sat on the sofa sipping hot tea.

  “So what do you think about dictionaries?” Nishioka asked casually. He offered the conversation topic the way you might fill an empty space with a potted plant.

  His surprisingly serious expression gave her pause.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Oh, you know. What kind do you like, what kind did you use in school, that kind of stuff.”

  “Huh?” Her eyes grew so wide, you’d have thought she’d been startled by a voice from the dead. “You mean some people have likes and dislikes about dictionaries?”

  Right. Of course. That’s how normal people react. Nishioka thought perhaps he’d caught the dictionary bug at work, after all. The thought scared him a little, but it was reassuring to know that Majime and the rest, all of whom could spend hours debating which dictionaries they liked and why, were really cranks.

  “Some do.”

  “Yeah? I couldn’t even tell you the name of the one I used to use.”

  She set her cup on the coffee table and drew her legs up onto the sofa, arms around her knees. “But now that you mention it, back in junior high the expression ‘fish and chips’ came up in our English textbook, and I didn’t know what it meant.”

  “Oh, right, you grew up somewhere out in the sticks where there were no pubs.”

  “Give me a break. I was in junior high. What would I know about pubs?” She gave his knee a little kick and went on. “Anyway, I looked it up in the dictionary, and what do you think it said? Fisshu & chippusu.”

  Nishioka hooted. “Some help. They call that a definition?”

  “I know! Isn’t it awful?” She laughed, too, and rocked back and forth on her bottom. “Masa, make a good dictionary, okay?”

  With painful swiftness, a hot lump rose in his throat. The reason he’d stayed with Remi all this time, stuck it out, hit him with force: he loved her. She drove him crazy sometimes, but he could never—would never—let her go. I love you, Remi. You may be no beauty, but you’re adorable to me.

  He opened his mouth to say the words, but he heard his hoarse voice say something completely different. “I can’t.” It wasn’t just his throat now—even his eyes felt hot. He looked down. “I’m being transferred to advertising. I’m off the team.”

  It was demoralizing to sound like a whiner. Pitiful. But finally he’d been able to get it off his chest. Finally he had been able to give voice to how demoralized he felt, the sense of emptiness that had been like a small sharp stone cutting into his flesh.

  Remi sat silent and motionless for a moment. Then without a word she drew his head to her breast, as if scooping up a flower fallen onto the water.

  The professor sent in his entries at the end of February. Nishioka opened the attached file, read it over, and groaned. The professor had been asked to write definitions for terms relating to medieval Japanese literature as well as encyclopedic entries for major authors and works. Nishioka had given him guidelines and models, yet every entry was over the word limit and full of personal opinions.

  His offering for Saigyo was typical:

  Saigyo (1118–1190) A priest and a poet who was active from the late Heian period through the beginning of the Kamakura period. Born with the name Sato Norikiyo. Served as a guard to retired emperor Toba, but at the ag
e of twenty-three, for reasons of his own and over the protests of his weeping child, he became a priest. From then on he traveled all over the archipelago, writing numerous poems. “Let me die in spring/under the cherries in bloom/and let it be/in Kisaragi month/at the time of the full moon!” This poem is familiar to one and all. Any Japanese person would be deeply moved by the scene Saigyo paints and share his wish. In his works Saigyo created a unique poetic style that skillfully evokes nature and human emotion, shot through with a sense of life’s ephemerality. He died in Hirokawa Temple in Kawachi.

  Well, Nishioka thought, I’m Japanese, but this poem doesn’t particularly move me. Perplexed, he printed out the document. A dictionary was supposed to be precise. Was it all right to write “any Japanese person”? What if other people who failed to be moved sent in complaints?

  Probably the professor’s thoughts had gone along these lines: “February is almost over. In classical poetry, the second lunar month is Kisaragi—the month that comes up in that poem by Saigyo. That reminds me, I’m supposed to write something for the new Gembu dictionary. Might as well do the entry for Saigyo right now.” He then sat down and dashed off this text. Nishioka was annoyed that the writing was so perfunctory.

  “Hey, Majime. Take a look at this.” He handed the printout to Majime, who was sharpening a red pencil with a penknife. Majime took the paper respectfully in hand and held it before his face like a new pupil the teacher had called on to read aloud.

  The half-sharpened pencil rolled across the desk. The tip was still round, despite Majime’s intense efforts to whittle it to a point. The wood bore gouges—the blade hadn’t been put to effective use. Jeez, Nishioka thought, the guy’s all thumbs, and he started to sharpen the pencil for him.

  As Majime pored over the paper, Nishioka silently whittled. It was still morning, so the part-time student workers hadn’t shown up yet. Only he and Majime were in the office. The room was still.

  He pared the dry wood and gradually exposed the red core, sharpening it to a point. He liked sharpening pencils with a penknife or a box cutter. The pencil core made him think of bone marrow. Something secret . . . a hidden life force . . . never-ending. In elementary school, he used to use freshly sharpened pencils that smelled fragrantly of wood to draw pictures of robots and monsters in his notebook. He felt he could draw better when he sharpened them by hand, so he had never used a pencil sharpener.

  It made him nostalgic, remembering those old drawings. He hadn’t thought about that notebook in twenty years. He held up the pencil to inspect his handiwork. The tip was so narrow it seemed to melt into the air. Satisfied that he hadn’t lost his touch, he thought, Majime ought to buy himself a pencil sharpener. After I leave, he’s likely to cut off a finger with this knife.

  Majime grunted and laid the paper on his desk. He twisted his hair with his left hand while his right hand groped blindly on the desktop. Nishioka put the pencil between his fingers, and Majime looked up.

  “Thank you. You know, this needs drastic revision.”

  “Thought so.”

  “Did you get the guy’s permission to revise what he wrote?”

  “Well, of course. When I first went to see him I told him we might have to make some changes. But he can be difficult.” Nishioka peered at the entry. “To be on the safe side, I guess I’d better let him know about any changes we make.”

  Majime nodded, picked up the red pencil, and set to work.

  “First off, there are too many unnecessary words. And subjective opinions have no place in a dictionary. It should just be the facts. Also, he’s written the poem using modern orthography, which is not how Saigyo wrote it.”

  “Do we even need the poem?”

  “We can think about it again later, but for now I think it’s okay to leave it out.”

  Saigyo (1118–1190) A poet and priest of the late Heian and early Kamakura periods. His religious name was En’i, his lay name Sato Norikiyo.

  “Wasn’t Saigyo the name he took as a priest?”

  “No, that’s his pen name. His name as a priest was En’i.”

  “Okay. This is already a lot better. What else should we fix? The line ‘for reasons of his own’ is full of holes.”

  “Yes, it is. Some say he decided to become a priest because the death of a friend made him feel the frailty of life, others say it was because of an unhappy love affair. There are various theories but no one knows for certain.”

  “How could they? I bet he himself couldn’t have put it into words all that easily.”

  “That’s right,” said Majime with a faint smile. “What lies deep inside the heart can be a mystery even to oneself.”

  “And what about ‘over the protests of his weeping child’? Who was watching, I’d like to know?”

  “That part is vague, so let’s cut it. Okay, this still needs work, but how about something like this?”

  A palace guard of the retired emperor Toba, he entered the priesthood at twenty-three. After that he traveled the land writing poems on nature and human emotions, creating his own poetic style. The eighth imperial anthology, Shinkokinshu, (ca. 1205) contains ninety-four poems by Saigyo, more than by any other poet. His poetry collections include Sankashu. He died in Hirokawa Temple in Kawachi.

  Now it was sounding like a dictionary. Nishioka looked admiringly at the corrected text, but Majime seemed still unsatisfied.

  “Defining ‘Saigyo’ only by explaining the man is hardly enough, though.”

  “You mean the word has another meaning?”

  “It also means fujimi, as in ‘invulnerable, immortal.’”

  “How come?”

  “There was a time when people liked to paint pictures of Saigyo looking at Mount Fuji. The characters for ‘looking at Mount Fuji’ are also read fujimi, so both meanings became associated with him.”

  “A lame joke.”

  “A play on words.”

  Nishioka felt discouraged. Why would people want to paint pictures of Saigyo looking at Mount Fuji in the first place? He had no idea. What would be fun about painting some itinerant priest?

  “Besides that—”

  “There’s more?”

  “Oh, yes. Since Saigyo traveled his name also took on the meaning of ‘wanderer’ or ‘pilgrim.’”

  Nishioka took down a volume of the Great Dictionary of Japanese from the shelf and looked up Saigyo. Majime was right. After the man himself, various associated meanings were listed. Evidence of the affection people had for Saigyo, how close they felt to him.

  “What else?” he said, sneaking a look at the page. He felt like testing Majime.

  “I think the mud snail tanishi used to be called saigyo. And there’s a Noh play called Saigyozakura.” (Saigyo and the Cherry Tree.) “Wearing a traditional bamboo hat pushed back on your head is called Saigyo-kazuki, and carrying a bundle wrapped in a furoshiki cloth and tied on the diagonal on your back is Saigyo-jiyoi. We also might need to include Saigyo-ki.” (Saigyo Memorial Day.) “That refers to February 15, the day he died—a word used in haiku to indicate that time of year.”

  Nishioka thumbed through not just the Great Dictionary of Japanese but also Wide Garden of Words and Great Forest of Words to verify what Majime had said. Beyond impressed, he was in awe. “Man, don’t tell me you sat down and memorized a bunch of dictionaries?”

  “As if anybody even could.” Majime hunched his shoulders apologetically. “Anyway, we won’t have space in The Great Passage for all these meanings. Which ones do you think we should include?”

  “I vote for ‘wanderer, pilgrim’ and ‘invulnerable, immortal.’”

  “Why?”

  Faced with Majime’s quiet question, Nishioka folded his arms and looked up at the ceiling. He had voted by gut instinct, so being asked to defend his choices left him at a momentary loss.

  “I guess it’s because not many people use traditional cloth wrappers or bamboo hats anymore. But suppose I’m carrying something wrapped in a furoshiki on my back, tied on the d
iagonal, and I run into a buddy of mine and he says, ‘Hey, that’s Saigyo-jiyoi!”

  “Hmm, that’s not happening anytime soon.”

  “That’s just a hypothetical example. When he says that, I think, Aha, so this way of carrying something is Saigyo-jiyoi! Or what about this. Say the company sends out a memo: ‘Employees are requested to forgo briefcases and use Saigyo-jiyoi.’”

  “That’s never happening.”

  “Like I said, these are hypotheticals. When I get the memo, I say, ‘What’s Saigyo-jiyoi?’ Somebody explains, and I get the picture. What I’m saying is, the meanings of both Saigyo-jiyoi and Saigyo-kazuki are easy to guess from context, and if somebody describes them in words, they’re easy to visualize.”

  “Ah. So you’re saying there’s little practical need for them in a dictionary.”

  “Right. Same goes for Saigyozakura. Chances are, anybody who sees or hears the word will already know it’s a Noh drama. Nobody starts a conversation or a letter right off the bat with ‘Now, take Saigyozakura . . .’ As long as someone could guess it was a Noh drama, all they’d have to do is look it up in a dictionary of Noh.”

  “And Saigyo Memorial Day is self-explanatory. But what about calling mud snails saigyo? There I think you’d have a hard time figuring out the meaning.”

  “Who calls mud snails that anymore? Nobody. If they did, all you’d have to do is ask them what they were talking about.”