Three-Cornered World

by Sōseki Natsume

  Since, looked at in this light, the barber would have made a fine subject for a painting or a poem, I remained parked where I was, chatting with him about this and that, long after my shave was finished. While we were talking, a young priest popped his small head under the entrance curtain and said, 'Hullo. Shave, please.' He was wearing a white cotton kimono tied with a padded obi. Over the top of this was a loose robe of coarse material, which looked like a mosquito net. He seemed a very happy-go-lucky fellow.

  'Ah, Ryonen. How are you? I bet you got a good tickin' off from the abbot for wastin' your time the other day.'

  Oh no I didn't. He said I'd done very well.'

  'Oh, so he praised you for stoppin' to go fishin' while you was out on an errand, did he?'

  'Yes. He said, "Ryonen, you were quite right to play on the way. It shows a maturity beyond your years."'

  'And as I might have expected, his praise has given you a swelled head. Look at it; all lumps and bumps. It's a shockin' job to shave a freak of a head like this. I'll let you off this time; but don't come in again until you've kneaded it back into shape.'

  'If it were in good shape, I'd go to a better barber.'

  'Ha, ha, ha. Your head may be a queer shape, but it doesn't affect your tongue.'

  'Yes, and your hand may not be very steady when you're working, but it doesn't stop you lifting a glass, does it?'

  'Why, you young whippersnapper. Whose hand isn't. . .

  'I didn't say it, the abbot did. And don't get so angry; remember your age.'

  'Huh! That's not funny.—Is it, sir?'

  'Hm? What?' I said.

  'Confounded priests. Bloody well livin' up there high above the stone steps, with nothin' to do, and all day to do it in. I suppose that's why they all have such a ready tongue. Even this baby priest here doesn't mind what he says. Hey! Lean yer head back a bit.—"Back," I said.—If you don't do as I tell you, you'll get cut. Understand? The blood will flow!'

  'It hurts. You don't have to be so rough.'

  'If you can't even stand this, how do you expect to become a priest?'

  T am a priest already.'

  'Gercha, you're still only half-baked. By the way, how did Taian die?'

  'He isn't dead.'

  'Not dead? What do you mean? He must be.'

  'After that business, he pulled himself together and went to the Daibanji temple in Rikuzen. He's devoted himself to his studies. Everyone says he's become very wise. It was a good thing that that happened to him.'

  'What was good about it? I can't see that it's good, even for a priest, to take off in the middle of the night. You want to be careful. Women always bring you nothin' but trouble. —Talkin' about women, does "Nut-case" still come up to see the abbot?'

  'I've never heard of a woman called "Nut-case".'

  'You know who I'm talkin' about idiot. Does she, or doesn't she?'

  'No "nut-case" as you call it comes; but Mr Shioda's daughter does.'

  'She'll never get any better, however much the abbot prays for her. She's under a curse from her former 'usband.'

  'Mr Shioda's daughter is a fine woman. The abbot speaks very highly of her.'

  'I dunno. Everythin' up there above them stone steps is upside down. But I don't care what the abbot says; once mad, always mad.—Well, there you are: all shaved. Run along an' get another tickin' off.'

  'No, I think I'll take my time so I'll be praised again.' 'Please yerself, you prattlin' imp.'

  'Huh! You withered up piece of human refuse.'

  'What did you say!'

  But the newly shaven head, covered now only with dark blue shadow, had already darted beneath the curtain, and was being fanned by the spring breeze.

  I had slid open all the imprisoning screens, and was sitting at my desk in the fading twilight. The hotel was comparatively large, and my room was separated from the region of human activity where the few other occupants lived by innumerable twisting corridors, with the result that no sound came to disturb my thoughts. Today, things were particularly quiet. I wondered perhaps whether the landlord, his daughter, the young maid and the man servant had all slipped away somewhere without my knowing. If they had, I thought, it would be no ordinary place to which they had gone, but a land of haze or of clouds. Or possibly they had drifted far across a languid sea, never touching the tiller, and not caring whether or not they were moving, until they had reached that place where sky and ocean meet, and where it becomes difficult to distinguish the white sail from the clouds and the water, and eventually even the sail is puzzled to know where to draw the line between itself and its surroundings. It also occurred to me that they might simply have vaporized and become part of the spirit of spring. If this were so, then their hitherto substantial forms would now be no more than haunting currents, swirling somewhere between heaven and earth, so completely invisible that even with a microscope no trace of them would be found. My next idea was that they had all turned into larks and, having sung to their hearts* content, translating the golden colour of spring rape-blossoms into music, had now flown off into the deep-purple folds of dusk. Or could they have lengthened the already long spring day by becoming gad-flies, to whom a day is a lifetime? Perhaps engrossed in their unsuccessful attempts at sipping the sweet dew from the stamens, they had been trapped beneath a falling camellia blossom, and were even now lying amidst the fragrance contentedly sleeping their lives away. Anyway, be that as it may, everything was completely quiet and still.

  The spring breeze, which was passing drowsily through the empty house, came neither to gratify those who welcomed it, nor to spite those who wished to keep it out. It came and went quite naturally: an expression of the impartiality of the universe. I sat with my chin resting in my hands, thinking that if only my heart were as free and open as my room, the breeze would, unbidden, have found its way there too.

  You are conscious of the ground you are standing on, and so fear that it may give way beneath you. You are aware that the heavens are above you, and so you quake with the fear of being struck by lightning. Life is an inescapable rat-race in which you are constantly being spurred on by materialistic values to wrangle and squabble with your neighbour. For us who live in this world with its East and West, and who have to walk the tight-rope of advantage and disadvantage, love which is free of self-interest is an enemy. And yet, visible Wealth is as worthless as dust, and fame which has been avidly grasped is, it seems to me, like stolen honey which looked sweet while in the making, but in which the cunning bee has left his sting. The so-called pleasures in life derive from material attachments, and thus inevitably contain the seeds of pain. The poet and the artist, however, come to know absolute purity by concerning themselves only with those things which constitute the innermost essence of this world of relativity. They dine on the summer haze, and drink the evening dew. They discuss purple, and weigh the merits of crimson, and when death comes they have no regrets. For them, pleasure does not lie in becoming attached to things, but in becoming a part of them by a process of assimilation. And when at last they succeed in this, they find there is no room to spare for their ego. Thus, having risen out of the quagmire of materialism, they are free to devote themselves to the real essentials of life, and thereby obtain boundless satisfaction. I have not written about these things with the intention of holding up a bogy-man to frighten the corrupt and mercenary children of the city, nor because I wish to prove that I as an artist am more exalted than they are. My sole purpose has been to point out the gospel contained in this state of affairs, and to invite all those who so desire to take advantage of it. Let me be more precise: the road which leads to the realm of poetry and art is open to everybody without exception. It is, I agree, pointless merely to count off on your fingers the years you have spent on this earth, and to pine for your lost youth. Nevertheless, by looking back over your life and reviewing all its various events in turn, you should be able to recall those times when, with heart aflame, you lost yourself in pure happiness. If you cannot do this,
then you have nothing left to live for.

  I do not say that pleasure for the poet lies in devoting himself exclusively to one subject, or being transformed into just one thing. Sometimes he will become a solitary petal; sometimes a pair of butterflies. He may even, like Wordsworth, become a host of daffodils: his heart brushed and set dancing by a gently rustling breeze. There are times, however, when he finds himself absorbed into his natural surroundings, without being aware of precisely what it is that has captured his heart. One man might explain the way he felt by saying that he had been mesmerized by the brilliance of Nature; another that it was as if he could hear the notes of an ethereal harp coming from somewhere deep within his soul. Yet another might describe his condition by saying that he seemed to be wandering on and on through a vast expanse, but getting nowhere because he was unfamiliar with the ground and everything there was incomprehensible to him. Everyone is at liberty to describe this condition any way that seems best to him. I was in just such a state of mind as, with my elbows resting on the ebony desk, I sat there gazing vacantly into space.

  I was not thinking of anything, and I was certainly not looking at anything. Moreover, since nothing particularly striking had entered my field of consciousness, I could not be said to have been absorbed by anything either. I was, however, moving. It was not motion within the world, or even outside it; but for all that, I was moving. I was not going towards a particular flower or bird, nor against humanity. I was simply being carried along in a trance.

  If pressed for an explanation, I would say that my soul was moving with the spring. Imagine all the colours, breezes, elements and voices of spring solidified, ground to powder and blended together to form an elixir of life, which had then been dissolved in dew gathered from the slopes of Olympus, and evaporated in the sun of fairyland. I felt now as though the vapour rising from just such a precious liquid had seeped through the pores of my skin and, without my being conscious of it, saturated my soul. The reason why the process of being assimilated into an object is pleasant is that it is usually accompanied by stimulation. In my case, however, this was not so, since it was impossible to say into what I had become assimilated. This absence of stimulation meant that I was filled with an indescribably profound and beautiful calm. Mine was no fleeting sense of wild elation like a wave raised momentarily by the wind only to subside again in an instant. No, the state I was in may best be likened to that of a vast ocean flowing across its unfathomable bed from continent to continent. The only difference is that I did not possess quite the same degree of vital energy as the ocean. This in fact was a good thing, for the manifestation of great vitality automatically gives rise to the anticipation of its exhaustion. Where it exists in a normal degree, however, there is no such worry. Not only had my soul become so faint that I seemed far removed from all anxiety as to whether or not my strength would some day drain from me, but it had also risen above its usual state of mediocrity. When I say that it had become faint, I do not mean to imply that it had grown weaker in any way, but simply that it had become more tenuous. I think the words 'nebulous' and 'limpid' which poets often use, describe this state admirably.

  I wondered how it would be if I tried to express this condition on canvas, although I realised of course that it was not at all suitable material for a conventional picture. What the majority of people call a picture is nothing more than a direct reprint on silk of what the painter has seen around him, possibly after it has been filtered through an aesthetically critical eye. For them a picture has fulfilled its purpose if a flower looks like a flower, water reflects the light like water, and people behave as they do in real life. The only way the artist can create a painting which is not just simply run of the mill, is to bring his subject to life by giving it his own interpretation. No artist who tries to do this would consider that he had succeeded in producing a picture, unless his own personal viewpoint were apparent in every single brush stroke, for he is concerned with trying to highlight exactly what it is about the corner of Creation he is embracing that has inspired him. Moreover, he would not make so bold as to claim that the picture were his own unless it clearly expressed his conviction, that although his opinions and perceptions owe nothing to those who have gone before, and are not governed by old traditions, yet nevertheless they are the most correct and the most beautiful.

  However great the difference in depth of perception between these two types of artist may be, they have one thing in common: they both wait for some definite outside stimulus before putting brush to canvas. In my case, however, there was no such clearly defined subject. Although all my senses were on the alert, search as I might, I was unable to find in the objects around me any combination of shape, light and shade, strength and delicacy of line, and of course colour which was suitable for expressing how I felt. Since this feeling of mine had not come from without, or if it had, not from my visible surroundings, I could not point out any one thing as its source. Sometimes, as then, the feeling of inspiration exists by itself, independent of any material object, and my present problem was how I might express such a feeling as a picture. No, that is not strictly true: the real question was what object could I find which embodied it to such a degree that others looking at my painting would be able to feel as nearly as possible the way I was feeling at that moment.

  All that is required to produce the average picture is something to paint. With the second type that I mentioned, however, it is necessary that the artist's feelings should be compatible with his subject. There is yet a third case in which he has to choose a subject which fits his inspiration. This is easier said than done, for very often even if he succeeds in selecting the components of his picture, he cannot cast them into any definite form. Let us suppose, however, that he does manage to produce such a form; the chances are that it will not be anything recognizable, and thus in the eyes of the general public it cannot be considered a picture. Even the artist himself will acknowledge that it does not represent anything which exists in the natural world. He will consider it a great achievement if he can convey a fraction of what he felt at the time he received his inspiration, and if he can bring that same unshakable tranquillity to even a few lives. I do not know whether anyone in the past has ever achieved this tremendous feat completely, but there are works in which the artist has had some degree of success. There are for example the paintings of bamboo by Wen Tung, the landscapes of various types by the Unkoku school and by Ike Taiga, and the character sketches of Buson.1 Since the vast majority of Western painters only take a fleeting glance at the substantial world, and are not at all concerned with matters which lie on such a refined and non-material plane, I should imagine that very few of them would be able to express so ethereal a sense on canvas.

  It is unfortunate that the type of feeling which Sessyu2 and Buson strove so hard to convey tends to be over simple, and is lacking in variety. From the point of view of technique, I could not of course hope to equal such great masters, yet the feeling I wished to depict was slightly more complex than theirs. It was this complexity which made it impossible for me to capture it completely within the bounds of a single picture. I now changed my position, and instead of resting my chin in my hands, continued to think with my arms folded on the desk. It made no difference; the ideas still would not come. You have to paint as though, in the instant when the right colours, shapes and mood all fell into place, your soul suddenly became aware of its own existence. You must feel like a father who has searched the length and breadth of the land for his long lost child, with his purpose never out of his thoughts whether sleeping or waking, and who one day chances to meet him at some cross roads and cries instantly, Ah, here you are—at last!' This is a very difficult thing to do, but if I could do it, it would not matter to me what the people who saw my picture said about it. I would not be in the least upset even if they sneered and said it was not a picture at all. If something of what I felt were contained in the harmony of the colours; if I could breathe some of this power into the curve and swe
ep of the lines; if the overall tone of the picture spoke even fractionally of the pleasure I had experienced, then I would not care if the resulting shape were a cow, a horse, or somewhere between the two. No, I would not mind in the least, but somehow the ideas just would not come. I sat staring at my sketchbook until my eyes almost bored through the page. I schemed, and thought, and contrived, but it was no good: I could not give shape to my feelings.

  I realised that it had been a mistake ever to try and turn such an abstract condition into a painting, and I put my pencil down. Since people are not all that different from one another, there must have been somebody, somewhere who had felt the same as I, and had tried to perpetuate his feel ings by some means or other. Yes, but by what means I wondered.