Modern Japanese Literature

by Donald Keene

  8

  They fly impatiently up at night, and they leave sadly in the morning, carrying away memories of dawn farewells. Here a hat pulled low over the eyes, there a face deep in a scarf—it would be best not to look too closely. The delicious smart of her farewell slap sinks to his very bones, and that foolish smile makes one a little uncomfortable. Take care when you get to Sakamoto; you might be run down by the vegetable carts. To the corner of the Mishima Shrine it is well named the Street of the Lunatics. Carefully composed features somehow fall into disorder and—one has to admit it—he has the look of having been an easy victim for the ladies. He may be worth something over there, say the town wives who see him pass; but I wouldn’t give two cents for him this morning.

  One does not have to be reminded of the daughter of the Yang11 who was loved by an emperor and celebrated in the “Ballad of the Everlasting Wrong” to know that there are times when daughters are more valuable than sons. Princesses enough have emerged from these back alleys. One beautiful lady, for instance, now removed to the heart of the city, is said to have noble friends. What sort of trees does rice grow on, she asks her newest friend, with all the guilelessness of the cloistered maiden; but for all that she grew up here, and she tied her sash as immodestly as the rest of them back in the days when she made playing cards to fill out the family income. But she has gone, and talk of her has given way to a newer success story. Kokichi, second daughter of the dyer, reigns over the house called New Ivy, and she is one of the attractions that bring people north of the park.

  Talk of those who have succeeded has to do only with daughters. Sons are about as useful as the tail of the spotted mongrel nosing the garbage there. Stout young fellows, glib and swaggering at sixteen, get together in groups called the Five and the Seven. Not yet complete gallants, not yet dandies with flutes tucked into their belts, they put themselves under leaders with brave names. Sporting emblazoned lanterns and matched headbands, they loiter before the gay houses. It will be a while yet before they are gambling with verve and bantering the ladies with complete assurance. Honest workers in the daytime, they come from the bath in the evening with dragging sandals and boldly cut kimonos and give their views on the latest topics. Have you seen the new one at the So-and-so? She looks like the girl at the thread store only her nose is twice as flat. Such are the things that are important. At each house they beg tobacco unblushingly, and each exchange of playful pinches and slaps is the honor of a lifetime. The heir of the stern, frugal family has changed his name to Roisterer and stands at the main gate picking fights.

  The power of women. The prosperity of the Five Streets knows no spring and no autumn. Processions of great ladies are going out of fashion, but still the sandals of the servant girls and the singing and the dancing send out their insistent rhythm. What is it the throngs pour in to seek? Scarlet lining and swept-up hair, flowing skirts, dimpled cheek, and smiling eye. One would be hard put to say why, but the name of the prospering beauty commands respect hereabouts. You who live farther away may find it hard to understand.

  It was not strange that Midori had caught the blight. She saw nothing in men to be afraid of, she saw nothing in her sister’s calling to be ashamed of. The tearful farewell when that sister left for the city was a dream from the distant past, and now Midori rather envied the prosperous Omaki, able at the very peak of her profession to do so much for her mother and father. Midori knew nothing of Omaki’s sorrows and struggles. Everything was so delightful—the litde coaxing noises to tempt the passing townsman, the raps on the wall for good luck, the playful pinches and slaps for the departing guest. And—it was a little sad—she ran about town calmly using the special vocabulary of the quarter. She was thirteen. She caressed her doll just as the prince’s daughter must caress hers, but courses in deportment and domestic management were for the classroom only, and what really commanded her attention was gossip about guests liked and unliked, fine dresses and cushions to advertise one’s prosperity, tips for the teahouse that had introduced good customers. The flashy was good, the more restrained a failure. Midori thought she had reached the age of discretion, but that confidence was premature. She let her natural intractability lead her to whatever unformed schemes and aspirations it would. The flower before her eyes was still the best.

  Street of the Lunatics, Street of the Late Sleepers. Presently here too the walks were swept and sprinkled. Then—down the street they came, each a performer with his one act, from Mannenchō and Yamabukicho and Shintanimachi where they had nested for the night. They too called themselves artists. Jugglers who hawked sweets, clowns, and umbrella dancers and lion dancers, their attire as varied as their talents, one in a smart summer kimono, another in faded cotton tied with a narrow black sash. Men and pretty women. Companies of six and seven and ten and a forlorn old man walking alone with a battered samisen under his arm. A girl of four or five with a bright red ribbon to tie up her sleeves had to dance to the Kinokuni.12 Their goal was the quarter, where they would entertain guests who had stayed on for the day and dispel the sorrows of the ladies, the profits enough to keep those who had once tried their hand at the business from ever giving it up. The procession moved on with no thought for the small gains to be had in these outlying streets. Not even the beggar in tatters bothered to stop.

  A lady minstrel walked by with the brim of her hat low over her face, and what one saw of her cheeks made one want to see more. She was famous for her voice and her playing. The wife at the paper shop would have liked to hear her just once.

  “You want to hear her?” Midori, back from her morning bath, pushed her hair up with a wooden comb and ran out to stop the singer. One would guess, though Midori herself said nothing, that she pushed some money into the lady’s sleeve. The song was a favorite of Midori’s and it told of tragic love. The lady moved off with a gracious request for future patronage—knowing how little she could expect it.

  What a thing to do—and a mere child, too. Midori drew more attention from the crowd than the lady.

  It would be fun to stop the best of them, to make the street echo with flute and samisen and drum, to make people sing and dance, to do what no one else does.

  9

  “So did I hear it spoken,” the sutra began. It was the august temple, and the chanting voice borne on the soft pine breeze should have cleaned the dust from one’s heart.

  Smoke rose from the roasting fish in the kitchen, and diapers had on occasion been seen drying over the tombstones. Nothing one could point to as violating the discipline,13 indeed, and yet those who would make of the clergy so many sticks of wood might have found here signs of a turn too fleshly. The body of the reverend priest had filled out with his fortune. His stomach was a thing of beauty. And where would one find words to praise the luster of his complexion? Not the pale pink of the cherry blossom, nor yet the deeper pink of the peach. A fine coppery glow from the top of his shaven head down over his face to his neck, never a spot to mar it. When he raised his thick eyebrows, somewhat grizzled now, and broke into that laugh of his, one was a little uneasy lest Buddha in the main hall start up in surprise and tumble from his stand.

  The wife of the temple was not many years past forty. Her skin was white and her hair was thin, done up in a slight little bun. Not notably unattractive, one could say of her. She was gracious to the devout, and even the sharp-tongued florist’s wife in front of the gate had nothing bad to say about her—the harvest of small favors, no doubt, handed-down kimonos and leftover tidbits.

  She had been a member of the congregation, and she had been left a widow early. With nowhere to turn she had moved into the temple, where, if he would but give her a little to eat, she would serve as a maid. She took over the housework, from the laundry to the cooking, she even helped the men who tended the cemetery. The reverend priest thought the economics of the matter over carefully and presently deigned to favor her. She knew that the arrangement did not look as wholesome as it might. There was twenty years’ difference in their age
s. But where else could she go? She came to think of the temple as a good place to live and to die, and she learned not to worry too much about prying eyes. While to the faithful the situation was a little disconcerting, there was no harm in the woman and they could not find it in themselves to reproach her.

  She was carrying her first child, O-hana, when a retired oil dealer named Sakamoto, fond of performing such services, intervened for the congregation to patch up appearances—it would be too much perhaps to say that he arranged the marriage.

  She had two children, this O-hana and later Nobu. A pious, eccentric boy brooding in his room all day, and a winsome girl with a smooth skin and a round little jaw. O-hana was not a real beauty, but she was at her best age and she was much admired. It would be a shame not to use her talents, and yet it would hardly do to set up the daughter of a temple as a professional entertainer. While there may be worlds where the Buddha himself strums the samisen, in this world one did have to worry sometimes about what people thought. The reverend priest therefore opened a pretty little shop on a busy street in Tamachi to sell young tea, and he put O-hana behind the counter where she might make good use of her charms. Young men who knew little about measures and less about prices began to come in. There was hardly a day now when the place was empty before midnight.

  The busy one was the reverend priest. Collecting bills, looking after the shop, officiating at funerals. There were sermons to be preached so many times a month, accounts to be kept, sutras to be read. No telling how much longer he could keep it up, he would sigh to himself as he took his flowered cushion out to the veranda in the evening and sat fanning himself, half-naked, a glass of raw gin before him. He liked fish, and most especially he liked broiled eels. It was Nobu who would be sent out to the main street after them—big oily coarse ones, please. Nobu, squirming with distaste for the errand, would walk along looking at his feet. If the paper shop across the way had its usual crowd of children, he would walk coolly past the eelshop, afraid of being caught in an unpriestly performance, and from the corner he would turn back and dart into the shop when no one was in sight. Never in his life would he eat fish himself.

  The reverend priest was a pragmatist to the core. He had acquired something of a reputation for greed, but he was not so timid as to be called off by malicious gossip. When he had a little spare time, he thought, he might try making some rakes for Otori day himself. He had early considered the possibility of setting up a stall in front of the temple gate. He would have his good wife tie her hair up like a shopkeeper, he decided, and sell hair ornaments guaranteed to be particularly auspicious. At first the lady held back, but then she heard of the vast profits being made by amateur shopkeepers all up and down the street. There would be such a crowd, and no one would be looking for her, and especially after sunset no one could possibly notice. In the daytime she had the florist’s wife take charge, and when evening came she went out hawking hair ornaments herself. Might it be greed?—her shyness disappeared, and before she Knew it she was shouting with the best of them. “Everything cut-rate, everything cut-rate.” She would run out and tug at a customer’s sleeve. In the press of the crowd he would soon lose his eye for quality and forget too that but a couple of days earlier he had appeared at this same temple gate in quest of salvation. “Three for seventy-five sen.” Her price allowed for bargaining. “Too much. Make it five for seventy-three.”

  There were no doubt all sorts of ways to make a shady profit, Nobu thought. Even if word of the enterprise did not get to the congregation, there was the matter of what the neighbors would think. And might not his school friends hear about it, and whisper to each other that the Ryugeji had gone into the hair-ornament business and Nobu’s good mother was out hawking with an enthusiasm near lunatic?

  “Wouldn’t it be better to stop?”

  But the reverend priest laughed and laughed. “Quiet, quiet. You know nothing about it.” There was no need to discuss the matter with Nobu.

  Prayers in the morning, accounts in the evening. The reverend priest smiled happily as he did a sum on his abacus. Nobu watched with revulsion. What could have made the man become a priest?

  Two parents and two children, a tranquil self-sufficient family. There was no reason for Nobu’s moodiness. He had always been a quiet child, and no one had ever paid the least attention to his suggestions. His father’s enterprises, his mother’s deportment, his sister’s education, all seemed to him the most complete mistakes, but he knew that he would not be listened to, and he nursed his objections in silence. However perverse and haughty his acquaintances might think him, he was a weakling at heart. There was no help for it. He had not the courage to go out and protest when he heard that someone had maligned him. He could only shut himself in his room, too timid to face his detractor. His grades in school were good and his station was not a lowly one, and no one guessed his weakness. Nobu makes me nervous, someone complained; he’s cold inside like a half-cooked dumpling.

  10

  Nobu was away on an errand to his sister’s the night of the festival. He came home late and knew nothing of what had happened in the paper shop. When he heard the details the next morning from Ushimatsu and Bunji and the rest he was shocked afresh at Chokichi’s violence, but there was after all no point in reproving him for what was past. Nobu did feel wronged, however, at the way his name had been used. He had had no part in the incident, and yet he seemed to carry a major share of the blame.

  Chokichi perhaps sensed that he had gone too far, and for three or four days he avoided Nobu. Presently the furor seemed to have died down.

  “I know what you’re thinking. But it just happens this way. How are we to know Shota’s not around? We don’t have to pay any attention to that woman, maybe, and we don’t have to beat up Sangoro. But here we are shaking our lanterns, see, and what can we do? We just want to show a little life. But I admit it. I always forget what you tell me. You won’t let me down now, will you, Nobu? We’ve got something to go on, just having you with us, and you can’t let us down now. I’ll tell you what: you be chief of the gang. Even if you don’t want to. We’ll do better next time.”

  It’s not for me, Nobu would have liked to say. But the apology was too abject, and his reproaches melted away. “Well, I’ll do what I can. But you just hurt yourselves when you go around fighting people who can’t fight back. Don’t get excited about Midori and Sangoro. Take on Shota when he has his gang with him, don’t go around picking fights with other people.”

  The innocent one was Sangoro. Kicked and beaten quite to the satisfaction of his attackers, he could hardly stand up for the next two or three days. In the evening when he had to take his father’s empty rickshaw to the teahouse, his friend the caterer would stop him along the way. “What the devil’s the matter with you, Sangoro? You look all beaten up.” But his father was “Bowing Tetsu,” who had never been known to lift his head to a superior. Tetsu was not one to protest the worst injustice, be it one of the gentlemen in the quarter who wronged him or the owner of his house or the land it stood on. Sangoro knew better than to go crying to his father. “They own this house, you know that well enough. I don’t care if you were right and he was wrong, you don’t fight with Chokichi. Go and apologize, go and apologize. I don’t know what’s to be done with you.” There was nothing for it but to suffer in silence.

  In a week or ten days, however, as the pain wore off, the resentment too vanished. Soon he was back tending Chokichi’s baby brother, happy at the thought of the two sen it would bring him. “Go to sleep. That’s right, that’s right.” He was fifteen, that most arrogant of ages, but he seemed not to mind the figure he cut with the baby strapped to his back. He even strolled out to the main street, there again to become the sport of Midori and Shota. “Sangoro’s no man,” they would laugh, but that never drove him away.

  In the spring the cherries bloom and in the summer come the lanterns for the late Tamagiku.14 In the autumn during the Yoshiwara carnival someone counted seventy-five ricksh
aws in ten minutes coming down this street alone. At the end of the carnival, when red dragonflies are darting over the paddy fields, the morning and evening winds are cold. Soon quail will be calling in the Yokobori Ditch. Mosquito incense in the shops gives way to charcoal for pocket warmers, the mortars have a sad ring to them, and in the quarter the clock on the Kadoebi15 seems to have turned melancholy too. Fires glow at Nippori,16 whatever the season, but it is now that one begins to notice them:“That is the smoke from the dead?” A samisen refrain drops down on the road behind the teahouses, and one looks up and listens. It is from the white hand of a geisha. The refrain itself is nothing—“Here, where we pass our night of love”—and yet it strikes the ear with a special poignancy. Guests who make their first visits to the quarter at this time of the year, a woman who used to be there says, are not the lighthearted roisterers of the summer. They are men with a deep seriousness about them.

  It would be a chore to write down everything. This was the sort of thing they were talking about before the Daionji Temple. A blind masseuse, aged twenty, unhappy in love and despondent over her handicap, drowned herself in the lake at Mizunoya. Someone asked Kichigoro the grocery boy why Takichi the carpenter’s apprentice did not seem to be around much any more. Taken in for this, said Kichigoro, shaking an imaginary dicebox. No one seemed to care about the details. Out on the main street three or four little children played ring-around-a-rosy, and even their chanting voices seemed quiet, subdued. But the rickshaws on the way to the quarter moved by as briskly as ever.

  It was the sort of melancholy night when there comes first a touch of autumn rain, and then, before one is ready for it, a sudden downpour pounding at the roof. Since the paper shop seldom attracted chance passers-by from the street, the front shutters had been closed since dark. Inside, playing marbles, were Midori and Shota as usual, and two or three small children.