Three-Cornered World

by Sōseki Natsume

  'Did she really? I. . . .' said the girl's father with a sickly grin. He then turned the conversation sharply back to curios with: 'I'd like you to have a look at this.'

  The old damask silk bag which he had just taken down from a rosewood book-shelf appeared to contain something quite heavy.

  'Have you ever seen this, Abbot?'

  'What on earth is it?'

  'An ink-stone.1'

  'Oh, really. What kind of an ink-stone?'

  'Well, it is said to have been a prized possession of the calligrapher Sanyo, and . . . .'

  'No, I've never seen it.'

  'The spare lid was decorated by Shunsui, and____'

  'No, I don't think I've ever seen it. Come on, hurry up.'

  With an air of great importance Mr Shioda untied the string at the neck of the damask bag, exposing one corner of a red oblong stone.

  'It's a lovely colour, isn't it?' remarked the abbot. 'Is it "Tankei" stone?'

  'Oh yes, of course. It's of excellent quality, and it has "bird's-eye" markings in the grain.—Nine of them.'

  'Nine!' The abbot appeared very impressed.

  'And this is the spare lid which was decorated by Shun-sui,' went on the old man, taking out a thin lid from its figured satin wrapping. On it was written a Chinese poem of seven characters in Shunsui's handwriting.

  'Ah yes. Shunsui has a nice hand; a very nice hand. But I think that Kyohei was the better calligrapher.'

  'I think that the least skilful of all was Sanyo. There's no doubt he was a genius, but I find his writing singularly uninteresting.'

  'Ha, ha, ha. I know how much you dislike Sanyo's writing, Abbot, so I've taken his scroll down from the wall for today, and put another one up in its place.'

  'Oh, have you?' said the abbot, turning round to look at the alcove behind him where the scroll usually hung. In the alcove was a low wooden dais which had been polished until it shone like a mirror. On this stood an old tarnished copper vase in which magnolia sprays about two feet high had been arranged. The present scroll was by the Chinese calligrapher Wu Tsu-lai, and around the edges was the dark lustre of gold brocade with which it had been carefully bound. The scroll itself was not of silk but paper. The passage of time, however, had matched the colour of the paper with that of the cloth on which it was mounted, giving to the whole a harmony which was independent of the writing it contained. I felt sure that the gold brocade too had not possessed its present dignity when it had first been .woven, for now the colours had faded, and the gold thread frayed. The more gorgeous parts had become obliterated, making the sober portions more prominent. The ivory rod from which the scroll was suspended could be seen protruding from both sides, its whiteness standing out in sharp relief against the dark red of the wall. In spite of this splash of colour, and the magnolias which appeared to be floating there lightly in space, the whole alcove seemed very dull, even gloomy.

  Still looking at the scroll the abbot said, It's by Tsu-lai, isn't it?'

  'Yes. I wasn't sure whether you liked his work very much either, but I thought at least he would be better than Sanyo.'

  'He's far and away the better calligrapher. The Japanese scholars who lived when Yoshimune was Shogun1 copied everything Chinese slavishly, and their writing wasn't very good. But for all that, you know, there is a certain quality about it.'

  'Wasn't it Tsu-lai who said that generally speaking the Japanese were better calligraphers than the Chinese?'

  'I don't know. I don't think they were as good as all that. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.'

  'By the way, Abbot, who did you learn calligraphy from?'

  'Me? Why, Zen priests don't go in for reading and writing you know.'

  'No, but who did you learn from?'

  'I studied Takaizumi's writing a little when I was young, that's all. But I'm always willing to write something if anyone asks me to. Ha, ha, ha. By the way,' he urged, 'how about showing us that ink-stone.'

  All eyes now turned to the ink-stone as it was very slowly drawn out of the damask bag. It was about twice the usual thickness, measuring roughly two inches, and it was approximately four inches wide by six inches long, which is the average size. On the lid, which was of pine-bark polished in its natural rough state, were two unreadable Chinese characters written in red lacquer.

  'This lid,' began the old man, 'this lid is no ordinary one, and so as you can see, although it is undeniably of pine-bark . . .' So saying he let his eyes rest on me. As an artist, however, I felt unable to enthuse about the origin and history of a pine-bark lid, so I said, 'I think a pine lid is rather common, don't you?'

  Mr Shioda raised his hands in a horrified gesture, and seemed on the point of saying, 'Good gracious!' Instead he replied, 'If it were just any old pine lid, it might be common I agree, but this one was made by Sanyo himself from bark that he stripped from a pine tree in the garden when he was in Hiroshima.'

  Thinking that, as I had suspected, Sanyo had been a man of little taste, I said, 'Now I know that it was made by Sanyo himself, it seems even more clumsy than before. I feel that it would have been better had he left the rough bark alone, and not polished it like that.'

  Hereupon the abbot let out a loud guffaw, and came to my support by saying, 'You're absolutely right; it makes the lid look cheap and tawdry.'

  The young man looked pityingly at old Mr. Shioda's face. Mr Shioda himself pushed the lid sullenly to one side, thus revealing the true shape of the ink-stone underneath.

  The most striking and attractive thing about the stone was the figure which had been carved on the upper surface. In the middle, a lump of the stone had been left slightly raised up in relief, and this was in the form of a spider's body. Radiating from the body were the eight legs, each of which ended at one of the 'bird's-eye' markings. The remaining 'bird's-eye' was in the centre of the body, and gave the impression that a drop of yellow juice had been spilled there and then smudged. A channel about an inch deep had been gouged out around the perimeter, beyond the compass of the legs. Surely, I thought, one was not supposed to mix the ink in there, for it looked as though it would hold over a quarter of a pint of water. Presumably one took a drop of water from the container with a small silver spoon, poured it on to the spider's back, and there ground down a little of the precious ink tablet. If this were not so, then in spite of its name the ink-stone was really no more than a desk ornament.

  The old man opened his mouth to speak, and looked as though at any moment he were going to dribble. 'Look at the arrangement and the markings. They're beautiful.'

  He was quite right. The more one looked, the more attractive the colours became. I could imagine breathing on the cold surface, and watching the breath absorbed and turned into a mist which would permeate the richness of the colour beneath. The most remarkable thing was the colour of the 'eyes', or rather the almost imperceptible way in which their colour gradually merged and blended with the surround, throwing one's vision out of focus. When I readjusted my gaze, the 'eyes' looked as though they were right down in the transparent depths, like black beans set in a mauve-coloured jelly. An ink-stone which has even one or two of these 'bird's-eyes' is rare, and there are scarcely any at all which have nine. Should all these markings be spread equidistantly, then to think that the stone has been artificially made, is to commit a gross and unpardonable slander against one of Nature's greatest rarities.

  'Yes, it certainly is wonderful. Not only is it pleasant to look at but it feels nice too,' I said, passing the ink-stone to the young man next to me.

  'Do you understand such things, Kyuichi?' asked the old man with a laugh.

  'No, I don't!' replied Kyuichi, flinging the words out roughly. He then passed the incomprehensible ink-stone back to me, as if he thought it a waste for him to be gazing at it. After I had turned it round once more, carefully feeling the pleasant surface beneath my fingers, I handed it on politely to the abbot. He placed it on the palm of his hand and stared at it for a time, and then as though this did not satisfy him, he polis
hed the back of the spider on his brown cotton robe in the most inexcusable fashion, and once again gazed with admiration at its lustre.

  "You know, Mr Shioda,' he said, 'this really does have a lovely colour. Have you ever used it?'

  'No. If anything happened to it, it could never be replaced, so I've kept it just the same as the day I bought it.'

  'Yes, I expect this type of ink-stone is rare even in China.'

  'Yes indeed.'

  'I'd very much like one too. Perhaps I'll ask Kyuichi to get one for me. How about it Kyuichi; will you bring one back with you?'

  'I'll probably be killed before I have a chance to find one,' laughed the young man.

  'Oh, I was forgetting. This is no time to be talking of ink-stones. When do you leave?'

  'Within the next two or three days.'

  'Are you going down to Yoshida to see him off, Mr Shioda?'

  'Well, I'm getting old, and in the normal way I would just say good-bye here. But since I don't know whether I'll ever see him again, I have decided to go.'

  'You don't have to go to all that trouble, uncle,' Kyuichi said. Apparently then he was the old man's nephew. Now I came to think about it, there was a resemblance between them.

  'Let your uncle come and see you off,' put in the abbot. "There's no reason why he shouldn't if he goes downriver by boat, is there, Mr Shioda?'

  'No. It would be very difficult if I had to cross the mountains, but by boat, even though it is a long way. . . .'

  This time the young man kept silent and raised no objection.

  'Are you off to China then?' I asked him.

  'Yes.'

  Although I felt this monosyllable to be scarcely an adequate answer, I had no reason to pry into his affairs, so I let the matter rest. I looked at the shoji and noticed that the 'haran' leaves had moved.

  'Kyuichi! What are you thinking of?—He's been called up to go to the war because he was with the volunteers before.'

  The old man went on to explain to me that his nephew would have to leave very soon for the Manchurian plains.

  Since my arrival I had been under the impression that this was an idyllic dream-like mountain village where birds sang, petals fell to the earth and hot water gushed forth in streams, but where nothing else ever happened. How wrong I had been, for Reality had crossed the seas and mountains to this isolated old village to call again to battle the descendants of that once mighty clan, the Taira, the warriors of Mediaeval days. The time might now come when this young man's blood would trickle from his veins to be lost in a greater crimson tide that would stain the bleak and barren plains of Manchuria. Or possibly the time might come when from the point of the long sword he had buckled on, he himself would send another rivulet to join the tide, and another soul wafting upwards like a wisp of smoke. Yet here he sat now, next to a painter for whom dreaming was the only thing of value that life had to offer. He sat so close that had that painter listened carefully he could have even heard the beat of the young man's heart— a beat in which perhaps already were echoes of a rising tide rolling across a plain hundreds of miles away. Fate had brought these two together under the same roof, and then had left without a word.

  Footnotes

  1 An opaque, paper-covered sliding door or screen.

  1 A stone on which a solid stick of ink is rubbed down and mixed with water.

  1 Tokugawa Yoshimune was Shogun (military leader) of Japan from 1716 to 1735.

  'Are you studying?' asked a woman's voice. I had come back to my own room, and was reading one of the books which I had brought along on the trip tied to my tripod.

  'Come in. You're not disturbing me at all.'

  Without any further preamble the woman walked boldly into the room. Her well-shaped neck rose gracefully from the neck-band of her kimono, and the first thing that caught my attention as she knelt down in front of me was the contrast between the pallor of her neck and the subdued colour of the neck-band.

  'I see you're reading a foreign book. I expect it's all about the most complicated things, isn't it?'

  'Not really.'

  'Well then, what is it about?'

  'That's a difficult question. To tell you the truth I'm not absolutely sure myself.'

  'Ha, ha, ha. And you call that study?'

  'It isn't meant to be study. I just lay the book open on the desk, and pick out passages to read at random.'

  'Do you enjoy that?'

  'Yes, I enjoy it.'

  'Why?'

  'Why? Well, because that's the most interesting way to read a novel.'

  'What a strange person you are to be sure.' 'Yes, I suppose I am a little odd.'

  'What's wrong with reading a novel from the beginning?'

  'Because if you start reading from the beginning, you have to go on to the end.'

  'That seems a peculiar reason. What's wrong with reading to the end?'

  'Nothing at all, naturally. I do it myself when I want to read the story.'

  'But if you don't read the story, what else is there left?'

  'Yes, she's a woman all right,' I thought, and decided to test her a little.

  'Do you like novels?'

  'Me?'—a pause, and then, 'Well—you know,' she added vaguely. Apparently not very much.

  'You don't know yourself one way or the other, do you?'

  'I don't really mind whether I read them or not,' she said in a voice which suggested that in her eyes novels had no claim to existence.

  'If that's the case, surely it doesn't matter whether you start from the beginning, from the end, or pick out odd pieces here and there. I can't see why you find my way of reading so curious.'

  'Ah, but you and I are different.'

  'How?' I asked, looking deep into her eyes. Her gaze, however, did not waver for an instant, which made me feel that it was I who was being examined.

  'Ha, ha, ha. You mean you don't know?'

  At this I stopped my frontal attack and decided to try a flanking movement. 'But surely you must have read quite a bit when you were young.'

  'I still consider myself to be young even now, you unkind man.' Yet again the hawk I sent up missed its prey. The woman was constantly on her guard.

  'If you can say that in front of a man, you must be getting on in years,' I remarked, returning with some difficulty to press my original attack.

  'You must be quite old yourself if you have enough experience to make such a statement. Are you still interested in the flights and frolics of love at your age?'

  'Yes, very. I shall be interested in them as long as I live.'

  'Really? I suppose that is what makes you an artist.'

  'Exactly. And because I am an artist I find any passage of a novel interesting even when it is out of context. I find it interesting talking to you—so much so in fact that I'd like to talk to you every day while I'm here. I'll even fall in love with you if you like; that would be particularly interesting. But however deeply I were to fall in love with you it would not mean that we had to get married. If you think that marriage is the logical conclusion to falling in love, then it becomes necessary to read novels through from beginning to end.'

  'What an inhuman way of falling in love you artists have.'

  'Not "mhuman"; non-human. It is because we read novels with this same non-human, objective approach that we don't care about the plot. For us it is interesting to flip open the book as impartially as if we were drawing a sacred lot, and to read aimlessly at wherever it falls open.'

  'Hm, it does sound interesting, I agree. Tell me a little about the passage you were just reading. I want to know where its interest lies.'

  'It's no good telling you about it. A painting isn't worth a brass farthing if you just describe it to someone, is it?'

  'Ha, ha, ha. Well, read it to me.'

  'In English, you mean?'

  'No, in Japanese.'

  'It will be a job to read English as Japanese.'

  'That's all right; it will give you the right feeling of detachment.
'

  I thought that this might be amusing for a little, so I consented to her request. Very slowly and hesitantly I began to translate the part of the book I had been reading into Japanese. If there is such a thing as an objective way of reading, then mine was certainly it. The woman too seemed to be listening in a completely detached manner.

  '"Waves of tender emotion radiated from the woman— from her voice, from her eyes and from her skin. Helped by the man she went aft. Did she go to look at Venice in the dusk, and did the man give her his hand to set the lightning coursing through his veins?"' Since I'm being objective about this, I'm just giving you the gist of what is written. I may leave out some parts.'

  'That doesn't matter at all. I don't even mind if you put in some things of your own.'

  ' "They stood side by side leaning on the rail, separated by less than the width of the woman's hair ribbon which fluttered in the wind. Together they said farewell to Venice as the palace of the Doges faded from view in a pale flush of red like a second sunset."'

  'What is a Doge?'

  'That isn't important. The Doges were the ancient rulers of Venice. I don't know for how many generations they ruled, but anyway their palace is still standing even to this day.'

  'Who are the man and woman in the story?'

  'I don't know either. That's what is so interesting. It doesn't matter what their previous relationship might have been. Don't you see that there is something interesting about that situation, which is independent of what comes before or after, just as there is about you and I being together here?'