Modern Japanese Literature

by Donald Keene

  Sure enough, in the entrance was something which might well be a sake stall. It was difficult to be certain in the dark, but in one corner of the entrance there appeared to be an object like a stove, with embers glowing red beneath it. A straggle of smoke curled up, lightly enfolding the lantern. He could read the writing on the lantern: “Sweet Bean Soup. 5 Sen.”

  He moved forward to see better. In the darkness at one side of the entrance he could make out a low stone step. This is the place, he thought. His first reaction, on realizing that now he might rest, was a feeling of unutterable content. Silently and stealthily he mounted the stone step. It was dark inside. He could not be sure, but he seemed to have entered a corridor. He pushed at what he thought was the first door, but it would not open. Two or three steps farther on was another door. He pushed, but again it would not open.

  He went farther inside.

  The corridor came to an end. There was no turning. Not knowing what to do next he pressed against the wall on his right, and suddenly the darkness was broken. A door swung back. He could see nothing inside the room, but stars were shining at him, and he knew that in front was a glass window.

  He set down his rifle, unhitched his pack, and dropped, suddenly, full length to the floor. He drew a deep, laborious breath. He had reached his haven of peace.

  Beneath the feeling of satisfaction a new uneasiness was advancing and taking possession of him. Something akin to fatigue, mental exhaustion, and despair pressed heavily upon his whole being like a weight of lead. Recollections came in disjointed fragments, sometimes flashing at lightning speed, sometimes growing slowly upon his consciousness with the ponderous insistence of a bullock’s breathing.

  There were throbbing pains in his calves like those of cramp. He writhed on the floor. His body was nearing the limit of its endurance. He tossed and turned, without knowing what he did.

  The pain advanced on him like the tide. It raged with the ferocity of a great wind. He raised his legs and banged them on the hard wooden boards. He rolled his body to this side and to that. “This pain... !” Not thinking or knowing what he said he cried aloud.

  In reality the pain did not yet seem unbearable. It was severe, but he told himself constantly that he must reserve his strength for the next great pain, and that helped, if only a little, to lessen the suffering of the moment.

  He did not think so much how sad it was to die, but rather how best to conquer this pain. The weak, tearful, spiritless despair which gripped him was more than matched by this positive will to resist, which stemmed from his conviction, as a human being, that he had a right to live.

  He was beyond knowing how much time had passed. He wished the doctor would come, but he had little leisure to dwell on the thought. New pains gripped him.

  Nearby, beneath the floor boards, a cricket was singing. Even as he struggled in agony he said to himself that a cricket was singing. The insect’s monotonous note of melancholy sank deep into him.

  The cramp was returning. He writhed on the boards.

  “This pain, this pain, this pain!”

  He screamed the words at the top of his voice.

  “This pain! Somebody ... is there no one here?”

  The powerful instinct to resist, to live, had fast dwindled, and he was not consciously calling for assistance. He was almost in a stupor. His outbursts were the rustling of leaves disturbed by forces of nature, the voices of waves, the cries of tragic humanity.

  “This pain, this pain!”

  His voice echoed startlingly in the silence of the room. In this room, until a month ago, officers of the Russian railway guard had lived and slept. When Japanese soldiers first entered it they had found a soot-stained image of Christ nailed to the wall. Last winter those officers had looked out through this window at the incessant snowstorms sweeping across the Manchurian plain, and they had drunk vodka. Outside had stood sentries, muffled in furs. They had joked among themselves about the shortcomings of the Japanese army, and they had bragged. In this room, now, sounded the agonized cries of a dying soldier.

  He lay still a moment. The cricket was singing the same melancholy, pleasing song. A late moon had risen over the broad Manchurian plain, the surroundings had grown clearer, and the moon light already illuminated the ground outside the window.

  He cried again. Moaning, despairing, he writhed on the floor. The buttons of his blouse were torn away, the flesh on his neck and chest was scratched and bloody, his army cap was crushed, the strap still about his chin, and one side of his face was smeared with vomit.

  Suddenly a light shone into the room. In the doorway, like some statue in its niche, he saw a man, a candle in one hand. The man came silently into the room and held the candle above the sick soldier, where he lay twisting and turning on the floor. The soldier’s face was colorless, like that of a dead man,

  “What’s the matter?”

  “This pain, this pain!”

  The man hesitated to touch the soldier. He stood by his side a while, looking down; then he placed the candle on the table, fixing it firmly in drops of molten wax, and hurried out of the room. Every object in the room stood clearly revealed in the candlelight. He saw that the untidy bundle in the corner of which he had been dimly aware was his own rifle and pack.

  The flame on the candle flickered. The wax rolled down like tears.

  After a while the man returned, bringing a soldier with him. He had roused one of a unit lodged for the night in a house across the way. The soldier looked at the sick man’s face, and glanced around the room. Then he peered closely at the regimental markings on his shoulder.

  The sick man could hear everything they said.

  “He’s from the Eighteenth Regiment.”

  “Is that so?”

  “When did he come in here?”

  “I’ve no idea. I woke about ten to hear someone screaming in pain. I couldn’t make it out—there shouldn’t have been anyone in the rest of the house. After I’d listened for a while I heard the cries again, getting louder, and I came here to see what was wrong. It’s beriberi. ... a heart attack, too. There’s nothing anyone can do about it.”

  “I suppose there’s a doctor at the depot?”

  “There is, but I doubt whether he’d come so late as this.”

  The two stood in silence.

  The pain came flooding back again. He groaned. Cry followed cry, in unbearable crescendo.

  “He’s suffering terribly. Where’s he from, I wonder?”

  He felt the soldier searching in his breast pocket, removing his regimental paybook. He saw the man’s dark, strong features, and he watched him walk close to the candle on the table to examine what he had found, his form dark against the light.

  He heard the soldier read, every word reaching him distinctly. ... Private Katō Heisuke, Fukue Village, Atsumi District, Province of Mikawa. Again images of home floated before his eyes. His mother’s face, his wife’s face, the great house standing amid camphor trees, the slippery rocks on the beach, the blue sea, the faces of the fishermen he had known so well.

  The two watchers stood in silence. Their faces were white. From time to time they muttered words of sympathy. He knew now that he was going to die, but the knowledge did not carry with it any particular terror or sadness. He felt that the object which those two were regarding with such anxiety was not himself, but some inanimate thing in which he had no part. If only he could escape from this pain, this intolerable pain!

  The candle flickered. The cricket sang on.

  At dawn, when the doctor arrived from the depot, the soldier had been dead an hour. He died at about the time that loud cheering from the depot workers announced the departure of the first ammunition train for Anshan, while the morning moon, pale and wan, hung in the sky.

  Soon the steady rumble of the guns was heard again. It was the morning of the first of September, and the attack on Liaoyang had begun.

  TRANSLATED BY G. W. SARGEN’

  THE RIVER SUMIDA

  [Sum
idagawa, 1909] by Nagai Kafū (born 1879)

  The River Sumida is a poetic evocation of Tokyo in 1890, at a time when the old city was gradually being destroyed by the new civilization from the West. Most of the people of the story have been left behind by the changes; Ragetsu, the professional haiku poet, his sister Otoyo, a teacher of tokiwazu (a kind of dramatic recitation to music), and even the boy Chokichi, belong to the disappearing world of the old Tokyo. The author stated that he was stimulated to write The River Sumida by Les Vacances d’un jeune homme sage (1903), a novel by Henri de Régnier, but the resemblances between the two works are exceedingly slight. Régnier wrote of his book that it was built around little happenings of childhood which, when recollected in later years, “make us smile, as one smiles over the past, with regret and melancholy.” This may have been Nagai Kafū’s point of departure.

  •

  The haiku master Ragetsu had decided to pay a summer visit to his younger sister, a teacher of tokiwazu in Imado, on the other side of Tokyo. He naturally did not propose to go out in the heat of the day, but when evening came he went to the bamboo fence overgrown with morning-glory by his kitchen door, and bathed himself by dashing a few bucketfuls of water over his body. Still stark naked, he poured himself a drink. By the time that he pushed his dinner tray from him the dusk of a summer evening had darkened into night, and a smoke of mosquito incense rose in all the little houses of the neighborhood. Through the blinds of his windows filled with pots of miniature trees could be heard the sounds of the street—the staccato clatter of geta, workmen humming as they went by, snatches of conversation. Ragetsu, warned by his wife that it was growing late, went out the door, fully intending to go at once to Imado, but being called to from the bench where the old men of the neighborhood were enjoying the cool, he sat down for a moment. Soon he was engaged, as every night, in the idle banter of those who love to talk when slightly drunk.

  The days had become exceedingly short, just now when one was beginning to feel that the mornings and evenings were somewhat cooler and pleasanter. The morning-glories grew smaller with each day that passed, and when the western sun poured like burning flame into the little houses, the incessant shrilling of the cicadas dinned more frantically than ever. August was somewhat more than half-gone, and the rustle of the wind blowing through the maize fields behind the house could sometimes be mistaken for the autumn rain. Ragetsu, as a memento of the life of wild dissipation he had led when young, felt pain in the joints of his bones as soon as the seasons were about to change, and was always aware before anyone else of the approach of autumn. At the thought that autumn had come he would grow unaccountably excited.

  After several false starts Ragetsu flew into a panic of fear that he might fail to visit his sister altogether, and one evening when the moon, still pure white but almost full, hung in the twilit sky, he set out on foot for Imado.

  Following along the canal, he turned sharp left into a narrow lane so meandering that only a person born in the quarter could retain his bearings, circled around the Inari Shrine, and came to the bank of the River Sumida. In some of the filled-in rice fields along the lane stood rows of newly constructed tenements, still empty. In others were nurseries with large garden stones ranged outside the entrances; in others a scattering of thatched houses so rustic one could imagine oneself in the country. Through the cracks in the bamboo fences of some of these houses he could get a glimpse of women bathing themselves in the moonlight, and Ragetsu, whom the years had changed very little, stopped here and there for a peep, always with an innocent air of not looking. For the most part, however, he saw only unexciting housewives, and having looked he would hurry away, a disappointed expression on his face.

  By the time he reached the banks of the river it was already growing dark under the cherry trees, and lamps flickered in the houses across the water. Yellow leaves caught in the river-wind were fluttering down in twos and threes. Ragetsu, at his destination at last after his long unbroken walk in the heat, heaved a sigh of relief and began to fan his bare chest. He saw a teashop which had not yet shut for the day, and hurried there. “A cup of cold sake, please,” he said, sitting down. In the River Sumida little boats were plying to and fro, their sails swollen with the evening wind. As the surface of the water darkened with the twilight the wings of the seagulls seemed of an extraordinary whiteness.

  Ragetsu drained the liquid that the waitress poured into the thick-rimmed glass, and went without further hesitation to board the ferry. Halfway across the river the combination of the cold sake and the rocking of the boat began gradually to affect him. The light of the evening moon as it first touched the leaves of the cherry trees seemed indescribably cool, and the smooth waters of the river in full tide flowed by with pleasant indolence. The haiku master shut his eyes and hummed to himself.

  When he reached the opposite bank he suddenly remembered that he would have to buy a present, and he looked for a sweetshop in the neighborhood. He crossed Imado Bridge and went down the straight street that leads from it, feeling quite steady on his feet although he actually staggered a bit as he walked.

  Here and there a shop sold Imado pottery, the only thing which distinguished, however slightly, this side street from similar ones in any part of the Tokyo suburbs, with their monotonous rows of little, squat houses. In the pale light of the lanterns hanging at the doorways the summer kimonos of people taking the evening cool shone white as they stood talking in the shadows of their houses or by the corners of the alleyways. The streets were hushed; somewhere a dog barked and a baby was crying. Ragetsu came in front of the Imado Hachiman Shrine, where a clump of trees stood tall against the Milky Way in the clear sky, and soon he recognized in the row of lanterns hanging before the houses along the street his sister’s, with the words Tokiwazu Motoji Toyo written in old-fashioned script. Two or three people had stopped in the street in front of the house and were listening to the lesson going on inside.

  The oil lamp, with a clouded glass and a wick turned three-quarters down, hung from a ceiling where mice occasionally scurried by, and shed its feeble light over the room, dimly illuminating the storage cupboard patched with advertisements for patent medicines and pictures of beautiful girls cut from the New Year’s supplement of the newspapers, a chest of drawers aged amber in color, and old walls showing stains where the rain had leaked in. It was too dark to tell whether or not there might be a little garden beyond the shabby reed-blinds on the porch, but a bell hanging from the eaves tinkled sadly in the wind and insects hummed softly. Otoyo was seated with her back to an alcove, in which were displayed some potted plants, bought at a temple fair, and a hanging scroll. She held on her knee a samisen which she played, occasionally scratching her forehead with the plectrum. A man of about thirty, with the look of a businessman, was chanting in an alto voice, from a practice-book opened before him, the lovers’ journey from Koina Hambei: “What shall we say? Now we are too much in love to call each other brother and sister.”

  Ragetsu sat on the porch twitching his fan, waiting for the lesson to end. Every now and then he would unconsciously begin singing between his teeth, in unison with the man having his lesson, no doubt because the sake had not yet entirely worn off. Sometimes he would shut his eyes and give forth an unrestrained belch, after which he would look innocently at Otoyo’s face, lightly rocking his body from one side to the other. Otoyo must be over forty now, and the dim light of the hanging lamp made her thin little body look even older. At the sudden recollection that once, long ago, she had been the adored daughter of a well-to-do pawnbroker, it was not so much an actual emotion of sadness or nostalgia that Ragetsu experienced as an overwhelming astonishment. In those days, after all, he too had been young and handsome, was liked by women, and had led such a life of dissolution that he was eventually disinherited “for all eternity” by his family. The events of those days had now lost all reality and he could think of them only as dreams. His father, who had once struck Ragetsu’s head with an abacus; the faithful ol
d family clerk who had remonstrated with him, tears in his eyes; Otoyo’s husband, who had discovered her in the pawnshop—all had scowled, laughed, wept, rejoiced, worked themselves into a sweat without complaining, and every one of them was dead now. Really, when one stopped to think of it, it did not make the least difference today whether these people had ever come into the world or not. They would be remembered only as long as he and Otoyo remained alive, and when, one of these days, they too had died, all would have disappeared completely, vanished into smoke.

  Otoyo suddenly called to him, “You know, I’d been planning to visit you in a day or two.”

  After the man having his lesson had run through Koina Hambei, he rehearsed once or twice the recitatives from a similar piece and left. Ragetsu, a grave expression on his face, moved inside. He pensively beat his knee with his fan.

  “As a matter of fact,” Otoyo started again, “I hear the temple in Komagome is going to be torn down because of a change in city districts. That means we’ll have to move Father’s grave somewhere else. Four or five days ago a man came from the temple, and I was just thinking of coming over to discuss it with you.”

  “That’s right,” nodded Ragetsu, “you can’t very well neglect a thing like that. Let’s see, how many years has it been since the old man died...?”

  He leaned his head to one side in thought, but Otoyo relentlessly pursued the subject: how much the rent on a plot of land would be at the Somei cemetery, what sort of gratuity should be given to the temple. She concluded by saying that she would like Ragetsu, who was a man, to take care of everything and relieve her of the responsibility.

  Ragetsu had started life as the heir to the Sagamiya, a prosperous pawnshop, but after his disinheritance had led the life of an idle young gentleman. With the death of Ragetsu’s stubborn old father, the clerk (who had in the meantime married Otoyo) took over the shop and ran it responsibly. However, the changes that took place after the Meiji Restoration had brought a gradual decline in the family fortunes, and when a fire damaged the shop, the business collapsed. Ragetsu, who had devoted himself to refined pastimes, had no choice but to make a living with his haiku; and Otoyo, after the additional misfortune of the death of her husband, came to earn her living as a teacher of tokiwazu, thanks to a proficiency in that art which had brought her some celebrity in her girlhood days. Otoyo had an only son who was seventeen this year, and now that she had fallen on evil days, her sole pleasure in life was bound up with the hope of seeing him succeed in life. Bitter experience had taught her that disaster may lurk around the corner for one in business for himself. She had therefore decided that, even if it meant eating only two meals a day, she would some day put her son in a university and make a fine salaried man out of him.