Three-Cornered World

by Sōseki Natsume

  'Well, at least she escaped having to throw herself in the river.'

  'Yes, but although her husband thought her beautiful, charming and talented, and paid her every attention, somehow things did not go very well because she had been forced into the marriage in the first place. This state of affairs worried her parents very much. About this time the war broke out, and the bank for which her husband worked was ruined and had to close down. Soon after that she went back to live with her father, and since that time people have been saying what a callous, unfeeling woman she is. She used to be such a retiring, gentle girl, but lately she's become quite spirited and wild. Every time Gembei comes up here, he says how worried he is about her . . .'

  I knew if I listened to any more my illusions would be spoiled. I had managed by degrees to reach an enchanted land from which I could look down on the world with complete detachment, but I felt now as though someone was demanding that I return the cloak of immortality. If, having laboriously fought every inch of the way up that steep and twisting track, I were to be foolish enough to allow myself to be dragged back down to the common everyday world, the whole point of my leaving home suddenly and wandering off like this would be lost. It is all very well to have a gossip and a chat, but you reach a point when you feel as though the smell of this wretched and unsavoury world were seeping into you through the pores of your skin, and your whole body feels heavy with dirt.

  'There's just the one track leading straight the way down to Nakoi, isn't there Obahsan?' I asked standing up, and throwing a silver ten sen coin down on to the table with a clatter.

  'If you turn off to the right just past the Nagara pagoda, and go down that way, it will save you about half a mile. The road's bad, but that won't worry a young man like you.— This is more than enough for the tea, thank you very much.— Mind how you go.'

  Footnotes

  1 Translucent paper sliding screens.

  1 A raised passage covered with a roof, which runs obliquely through the auditorium from the dressing rooms and wings to the stage proper. It is along this that the actors make their entrances and exits.

  1 Obahsan literally means grandmother, but is often used to any elderly woman as a friendly or affectionate term.

  1 A Japanese bird of the nightingale family.

  2 In Japanese mythology the Tengu is a goblin with a long pointed nose.

  1 The Russo-Japanese war.

  2 Inen was a disciple of Basshd, who loved the tranquillity of nature.

  1 Sōseki was writing a Hokku (Haiku).

  2 Obasan literally means aunt, but is used in the same way as Obahsan.

  1 This is a high and very elaborate style worn particularly by brides. It somewhat resembles the style of the 'Geisha'.

  I had a most unusual experience that first night at Shioda's. It was about eight o'clock when I arrived, and so I was unable to see what sort of house it was, or the layout of the garden. In fact it was so dark that I could not even tell which was East and which was West. I was hauled along a sort of winding corridor, and eventually shown into a small room about twelve feet by nine. This was not at all as I had remembered the place from the last time I was there. I had had my supper and a bath, and was sitting in my room drinking tea, when a young girl came in, and asked if it was all right to make the bed.

  What struck me as rather odd was that the girl who had ushered me in when I had arrived, the girl who had served supper and shown me the way to the bathroom, and the girl who was now taking the trouble to make my bed for me, were all one and the same. She had, moreover, scarcely said a word the whole time. I do not mean to imply by this, however, that she was just a solid country lass.

  She had tied the red obi1 which was around her waist with a simplicity which suggested a young girl's indifference as to whether or not it enhanced her charms. Carrying an old-fashioned taper in her hand, she had led me to the bathhouse now this way now that, around bend after bend along what appeared to be passageways, and down flights of stairs. In front of me all the time were that same red obi and that same taper, and it seemed as though we were going along the same passage and down the same staircase again and again. Already I had the feeling of being a painted figure moving about on a canvas.

  When she had come to serve supper, she had apologised for putting me in one of the family rooms, but had said that since nobody had been there recently, the guest rooms had not been dusted. Now, having made my bed, she wished me good night, and went out of the room. Her voice was certainly human enough, but in spite of this, in the silence that followed, after I had heard her footsteps gradually receding along those winding corridors and down those flights of stairs, I suddenly had the uncanny impression that there was not a living soul in the whole place.

  Only once before had I ever had such an experience. A long time ago I went from Tateyama right across the province of Boshu to the Pacific coast, and then following the coastline I walked from Kazusa to Chosi. One evening during the trip I stopped somewhere and asked if I could put up there for the night. I say somewhere because I can no longer remember the name of the inn, or whereabouts it was. In fact I am not even sure that it was an inn at all. It was a large high house in which two women lived all alone. In reply to my request to stay the night, the elder of the two said,'Certainly,' and the younger one said,'This way, please.' She led me to the centre of the house past one spacious room after another, each of which was in a state of dilapidation and disrepair. The ground floor in this part of the house was built on a split level, and I had to go up three steps to get to my room. Just as I was about to go from the passageway into the room, a clump of bamboo growing slantwise under the eaves was caught by the evening breeze, and brushed first against my shoulders, and then up the back of my neck. A shiver of fear ran through me.

  The floor boards of the verandah were already badly decayed, and I remarked that next year the shoots would push their way through, and the room would be alive with bamboo. The young woman gave a broad grin, but went out without saying a word.

  That night I was unable to sleep because of the bamboo rustling so near to where my bed was. I opened the shōji, and in the bright summer moonlight allowed my gaze to wander over the grass-grown expanse of the garden which, unhindered by fence or wall, ran right down to an overgrown bank. Beyond this the ocean roared, and its large breakers rolled in to threaten the security of the world of men. I could not close my eyes all night, but lay in my ineffective mosquito net tense and watchful until the dawn. This, I thought, might well be a scene from some story book.

  Since that time I had been on many trips, but not until now on my first night in Nakoi, had I felt like that again.

  I was lying dozing in bed when, opening my eyes, I happened to see high up on the wall a scroll in a red-lacquered frame. Even lying on my back as I was, I could read clearly the Chinese characters written on it. They said:

  Bamboo sweeps across the stairs,

  But no dust rises

  For 'its but a shadow.

  It was signed 'Daitetsu'. I am by no means a connoisseur of art, but I have always loved the style of calligraphy of Takaizumi who was a priest of the Obaku sect.1 Ogen, Sokuhi and Mokuan all have their good points too, but Takaizumi's writing is the boldest and most elegant of all. Looking at these characters on the scroll, I was certain that they had been written by Takaizumi, because of the light and shade in the strokes, and because of the movement of the brush. But the signature 'Daitetsu' showed that in fact I was mistaken. Perhaps, I thought, Daitetsu had also been a priest of the Obaku sect. If this were so, however, I could not account for the fact that the paper looked so extraordinarily new. Yes, there was no doubt about it, this scroll had been written very recently.

  Looking sideways, my eyes lighted on a picture of a crane by Jakuchu hanging in an alcove. When I had first entered the room my professional instinct had told me immediately that this was a masterpiece. Most of Jakuchu's pictures are full of the most delicate colours, but this crane had been painted wi
th one stroke of the brush, making no concession to popular taste. The way in which the egg-shaped body perched lightly on the one slender leg on which the crane was standing, showed that the artist had painted this to suit himself. His light-heartedness and disregard for convention were expressed right down to the tip of the bird's beak. Next to the alcove was a simple arrangement of shelves, and then an ordinary cupboard. I wondered what was in there.

  I began to drift gently into sleep and into dreams.

  There was the maid of Nagara with her long billowing sleeves, riding a white horse through a mountain-pass, when out leapt the two men Sasada and Sasabe, and each tried to drag her off. Suddenly the girl turned into Ophelia; first climbing out along the branch of a willow, and then being carried away by the stream, singing in a beautiful voice. Thinking to save her, I grabbed a long pole and ran after her along the shore of Mukojima.1 She did not seem in the least unhappy, but smiling and singing drifted with the current down to wherever it would take her. I put the pole on my shoulder, and yelled, 'Hey, come back! Come back!'

  At this point I awoke to find that I was damp with perspiration under the arms. What a strange conglomeration of the poetic and commonplace that dream had been, I thought. Long ago during the Sung dynasty in China a Buddhist priest named Ta Hui said that having attained a state of supreme enlightenment, there was nothing he could not do if once he set his mind to it. Nevertheless, he was a victim of mundane thoughts in his dreams, and for a long time this caused him a great deal of suffering. I can quite imagine how he felt. It must have seemed to a man who had devoted his whole life to the arts, that not to be able to dream beautiful dreams was a sign of still being shackled by the world. I felt that most of my last dream was material for neither a picture nor a poem. Turning over in bed to try to get to sleep again, I saw that the moon was now shining on the shdji, casting on them oblique shadows of two or three branches of the tree outside. What a beautifully fresh and crisp spring night it was.

  I thought that it was perhaps just my fancy, but I had the feeling that somebody was singing softly. I strained my ears to try and determine whether a song had broken out of my dreams into reality, or whether this was a real voice which, because of my drowsiness, seemed to have been drawn into the obscurity of some distant land of dreams. Yes, somebody was definitely singing. The voice was undeniably thin and low, but nevertheless there it was, a gentle pulse rippling through the spring night which was all but asleep. The strange thing is, however, not that I heard the tune, but that when I listened for the words they came to me clearly, although there was no reason why they should have done, since they were not being sung anywhere near where I was sleeping. They were the words of the maid of Nagara's song, and seemed to be repeated over and over again.

  From leaves of autumn flushed with love,

  A pearl of dew shakes free

  And falls to shatter on the earth beneath.

  So too must I, to flee Love's stifling folds,

  Drop from the world.

  The voice had at first sounded near the verandah, but had now faded away into the distance. It is true that when something comes to an end suddenly it gives a feeling of suddenness, but you do not, however, feel the loss too keenly. When a voice ceases cleanly and decisively, it arouses a corresponding feeling in the listener. However, when faced with a phenomenon like this song, which can go on and on becoming fainter and fainter until eventually it disappears without your realising it, you find yourself breaking the minutes up into seconds and dividing the seconds into fractions, trying to pinpoint the exact time at which it will end; and all the time the pain caused by the anticipation of the loss grows more and more acute. It is like being with a sick man who appears ever on the verge of death but never dies, or watching a flame which gutters continually but never quite goes out. It throws your feelings into complete confusion, and drives out every thought save the one: Is this the end? Is this the end? There was something in this song which embodied all the regrets of mankind at the transience of spring in this ephemeral world.

  Until now I had resisted the temptation to get up, and had lain quietly in bed, but as the voice went farther and farther away it seemed to call to me more and more strongly. I knew it was luring me on, but nevertheless I wanted to follow. The fainter it grew the more I longed to rush headlong after it, so that even if I could not be where it was, at least my ear could keep track of it, and it would not be lost to me completely. Just then, it seemed that the next instant, however pleadingly I might listen, there would be no response, and unable to bear it any longer, I slipped out of. bed in spite of myself and slid back the shōji. As I did so the lower part of my body from the knees down was bathed in moonlight, and the wavering shadow of a tree fell slantwise across me.

  I did not of course notice such things as these immediately upon opening the shōji. I peered straight ahead of me in the direction from which my probing ear told me the voice was coming. There reclining against the trunk of what, judging by the blossoms, I took to be an aronia, was a dim shadow which appeared to shun all contact with the moonlight. I had my wits about me sufficiently to notice this, but before it could really register properly, the black shape moved sharply away to the right, crushing the shadows of blossom underfoot as it went. I had a fleeting glimpse of the tall smoothly gliding figure of a woman, before she was hidden from view by an angle of the overhanging roof.

  I stood there in a daze with my hand still on the shōji, clad only in the yukata1 that had been laid out for me. Presently, however, as I came to myself, it was born in upon me just how cold spring can be in the mountains. 'Well, that's that,' I thought, and climbing back in between the sheets, I fell to thinking. I pulled out my watch from under the pillow and looked at the time. Ten past one. I pushed it back under the pillow again and returned to my thoughts. What I had seen could not possibly have been an apparition. If not an apparition then, it must have been human; and if human it must have been a woman. Perhaps it was Shioda's daughter. If this were so, however, I did not consider it exactly the height of propriety that she, a woman divorced from her husband and now back living with her father, should, in the middle of the night, be out in the garden running as it did straight out on to the mountainside. It was no good, I just could not sleep. I lay there listening to the tick-tick-tick-tick of the watch under my pillow. I had never before been troubled by the ticking of a watch, but that night it sounded as though it were saying, 'Think-think-think-think, think-think-think-think,' and repeating the same piece of advice over and over again: 'Don't-sleep-don't-sleep, don't-sleep-don't-sleep.' Confound it!

  Even something frightening may appear poetic if you stand back and regard it simply as a shape, and the eerie may make an excellent picture if you think of it as something which is completely independent of yourself. Exactly the same is true with disappointed love. Providing that you can divorce yourself from the pain of a broken heart and, conjuring up before you the tenderness, the sympathy, the despair and yes, even the very excess of pain itself, can view them objectively, then you have aesthetic, artistic material. There are those who purposely imagine their hearts to be broken, and crave for the pleasure they get from this form of emotional self-flagellation. The average person dismisses them as foolish, or even a little mad, but there is absolutely no difference, inasmuch as they both have an artistic standpoint, between the man who draws an outline of misery for himself and then leads his life within it, and him whose delight it is, to paint a landscape which never existed, and then to live in a potted universe of his own creation. This being the case then, there are many artists who, outside their everyday lives, in the role of artist are more foolish, more insane than the ordinary man. We tramp around the countryside in search of suitable material, continually complaining from morning till night of the hardships we have to undergo. When, however, we are describing our journey to someone else, we show not even the slightest hint of discontent. Not only do we tell of the interesting and pleasant things that happened to us, which is
only natural, but we even babble on proudly about those hardships long ago of which at the time we complained so bitterly. This is not done with any conscious intent of deceiving or cheating the listener. The inconsistency arises because while actually on the journey our feelings are just the same as those of anyone else. It is only afterwards when we tell our experiences to others that we revert to being artists. Putting it as a formula, I suppose you could say that an artist is a person who lives in the triangle which remains after the angle which we may call common sense has been removed from this four-cornered world.

  Because of this lack of common sense, the artist is not afraid to approach those areas, both in the natural and in the man-made world, from which the average person shrinks back, and in consequence is able to find the most exquisite pearls of beauty. This portrayal of beauty where it is commonly believed that none exists, is generally called 'poetic embellishment'. It is nothing of the sort. There is, in fact, no need for embellishment, since in all things there lies beneath the surface an intrinsic beauty which is a reality, and which has always existed in all its brilliance merely waiting to be discovered. The reason why nobody appreciated the beauty there is in a steam engine before Turner depicted it on canvas, or realised that a ghost may be a thing of beauty until Ohkyo pointed it out to them, is threefold. First, most people walk around in a stupor, half blinded by the mundane nature of their thoughts; secondly, the fetters and bars of mediocrity make this world a difficult place to break out of; and finally, the man in the street is constantly being goaded by worries of whether or not such and such will get him a good reputation, or whether a certain course of action will be to his advantage.

  The shadow I had just seen, considered simply as a shadow and nothing more, was charged with poetry. So much so, that nobody who saw or heard it could possibly fail to appreciate the fact.—A hot-spring in a secluded village—the shadow of blossoms on a spring night—a voice singing softly in the moonlight—a figure flitting through the shadows—every one of them a subject to delight any artist. Yet for all that I had engaged in an investigation which was quite out of keeping with the situation, and probed about pointlessly trying to find reasons for everything. I had been privileged to see the world of pure poetry, and had tried to apply to it the yardstick of logic. Moreover, all because of an unpleasant sensation, I had ridden roughshod over the rarest delicacy and elegance crushing them into the ground. My claim to be able to rise above human emotions then, was obviously nothing more than idle boasting. I should still have to discipline myself more before I could say with any confidence that I was a poet or an artist. I remember hearing once that long ago an Italian painter named Salvador Rosa was so set on studying the ways of robbers that he risked his life by joining a band of mountain brigands. It was a shameful thing if I, having wandered off suddenly from home with just a sketchbook tucked inside my kimono, did not have the same amount of resolution.