Modern Japanese Literature

by Donald Keene

  Otoyo had more on her mind than cherry blossoms. She was at her wits’ end. Chokichi, on whom all her hopes were founded, had not only failed his examinations but declared that he hated studying and no longer wanted to attend school. Otoyo, at a loss what to do, decided that the only course left her was to discuss the matter with her brother Ragetsu.

  An old rickshaw coolie, the third man Otoyo bargained with, finally agreed to take her to Koume at her price. An immense crowd flowed over Azuma Bridge in the afternoon sunlight and the dust. The old coolie tottered along, steering his vehicle through the midst of the swiftly pulled rickshaws bearing young men and women in holiday finery to see the cherry blossoms. As soon as they crossed the bridge the excitement of the cherry blossoms was left behind. The only things which suggested spring in this neighborhood were the sunlight shining on the shabby roofs and the bright blue of the sky mirrored in the silent waters of the canals. The street was quite deserted except for clusters of children playing games and spinning tops. Ragetsu’s wife, a former geisha, was fulling cloth on a board in front of her house. She had a towel under the neck of her cotton kimono as she worked, and the sun fell harshly on a face wrinkled by years of wearing heavy make-up. When she saw the rickshaw pull up and Otoyo step from it, she rushed into the house, leaving the door wide open. “Guess who’s here!” she cried, “Your sister’s come from Imadol”

  Her husband was sitting at a little desk on the veranda, grading haiku for a competition. Ragetsu took off his glasses and moved from his desk to the middle of the room. His wife entered with Otoyo. Since they were women of about the same age, they went through a long series of bows and compliments. From one exchange—“And how is Chokichi?” “He’s well, but I simply don’t know what to do with him.”—Ragetsu learned more quickly than he had expected the reason for Otoyo’s visit. He placidly knocked the ashes out of his pipe, and when his opinion was asked, held forth to the effect that every young man goes through a period of confusion; that while in this state, as he himself could well remember, the advice of parents is repugnant; that the best course was not to interfere but to let the boy have his way for the time. But there was no place in a mother’s heart, filled with apprehension for the unknowable future, for the tolerant philosophy of a man of the world. In a hushed voice, and at immense length, Otoyo recounted the evil forebodings aroused in her for Chokichi’s future when she discovered that he had often stolen her seal to forge excuses in her name for absences from school.

  “When I ask him what he intends to do if he won’t go to school, he says he thinks he’ll become an actor. An actor! What shall I do? To think that Chokichi has gone bad that way—I feel so mortified I don’t know what to do.”

  “He wants to become an actor?” Ragetsu recalled after a first moment of surprise how Chokichi as a boy of six or seven used to love to play with a samisen. “If that’s what he really wants, there’s nothing we can do about it. Still, it is a problem.”

  Otoyo went on to relate how misfortune had driven her to becoming the teacher of professional entertainers, but if she were to permit her son to take up so base a profession, it would be an unpardonable insult to the tombs of her ancestors. Ragetsu, at the allusion to the bankruptcy and collapse of the family, recalled—with such acute embarrassment that he wanted to scratch his bald head—how his life of dissipation had led to his disinheritance. Having always had a great fondness for the world of entertainers, he would have liked to attack Otoyo’s prejudiced views, but he feared that if she went on to a lengthy discussion of the “tombs of our ancestors” it would prove too much for him. He tried to think of some quick and painless way of calming Otoyo.

  “I’ll talk to him. Personally, I think it’s better in the long run for a boy to be unsettled when he is young. But tell Chokichi to come and see me tonight or tomorrow. I’m sure I can get him to improve his conduct. You needn’t worry so much. Things aren’t as bad as your fears make them.”

  Otoyo begged him to do what he could and, declining her sister-in-law’s invitation to stay longer, left the house. The spring sunset was reddening the sky beyond Azuma Bridge, throwing into sharp relief the crowds crossing the bridge on their way back from viewing the blossoms. Otoyo noticed a student, his school uniform glittering with gold buttons, making his way energetically through the crowd. She could not actually tell whether or not he was a university student, but seeing him awoke in her a quite unbearable grief that, after having struggled unaided for so many years to raise her son to be a fine student like that boy, the light of her hopes, which was her very life, had now been completely extinguished. Even though she had asked her brother’s help, she still could not feel reassured, and this was not in the least because of his youthful indiscretions. The thought occurred to her that it did not lie within human powers to instill ambitions in Chokichi: she would have to ask help of the gods and Buddha. Acting on an impulse, Otoyo asked the rickshaw coolie to stop near the Kannon Temple. She hurried up to the sacred hall, quite unaware of the milling throngs. After murmuring a prayer, she bought a sacred fortune at a booth nearby. The scrap of yellowed paper she drew had been printed from a wood block.

  No. 62 Great Good Fortune

  Misfortunes steadily withdraw; good fortune will come your way.

  Your fame and glory will grow throughout the land.

  Old things will change for the better; you will again enjoy rewards.

  Success and prosperity will be yours.

  Your prayer will be answered. The sick person will recover. The lost object will be returned. The person you are waiting for will come. There is no obstacle to building a house or moving. The time is good for making a journey. All is propitious for marriages, coming of age ceremonies, and engaging servants.

  Otoyo felt much relieved when she saw the words “Great Good Fortune,” but she recalled then that “Great Good Fortune” is all too apt to change into misfortune and, again giving way to the imagining of fears of every sort, she returned home quite exhausted.

  9

  There was to be a meeting of haiku poets in the afternoon at the library of the Ryugan Temple. When Ragetsu and Chokichi (who had come that morning) finished eating lunch, they set out for the temple together, walking along the canal. The noon ebbtide revealed the black muddy bottom of the canal, and the warm April sunshine drew from the water a powerful stench of muck. The air was filled with flying cinders from a chimney somewhere, and the whir of machinery in a nearby factory could be heard. The houses along the street were built lower than the street itself, and as they passed they could plainly see the dark interiors where housewives, indifferent to the spring sunshine, were busily sewing to earn a few extra pennies. At the corners of these little houses, on dirty billboards were numerous posters calling for factory girls, as well as the usual advertisements of patent medicines and fortunetellers. Presently, however, the dreary street climbed a little in its meandering way, and its aspect was suddenly changed by the red-painted wall of the Myoken Temple on one side, and the pleasantly faded fence of a restaurant on the other. This marked the end of the poor district. Across the wooden bridge spanning the river, beyond the grass-covered bank, was a broad expanse of fields and trees, radiant in the colors of spring.

  Ragetsu stopped. “I’m going to the temple across the river over there. You can see the roof by the pines, can’t you?”

  “Well,” Chokichi said, all too quickly taking off his hat, “I think I’ll be saying good-bye here.”

  “There’s no hurry. I’m thirsty. How about resting for a minute or two?”

  They followed the wooden fence to a teahouse sheltered with reed blinds, and there Ragetsu seated himself. The straight canal was dirty here too, but a delightful breeze blew from the distant fields, and on the opposite embankment, where a torii was visible, young leaves of the willows were fluttering. Sparrows and swallows kept up an endless chirping on the roof of the temple gate directly behind them. Here and there, it is true, columns of smoke were rising from factories, bu
t one could still find pleasure in the peace of a spring afternoon far from the city. Ragetsu gazed at the surroundings, then glanced casually at Chokichi. He said, “You agreed, I take it, to what we were talking about before?”

  Chokichi, who had just taken a sip of tea, could only nod.

  “Be patient for another year. If you can manage to graduate from your present school. ... Your mother is getting older now, and she can’t remain so stubborn forever.”

  Chokichi nodded again, and stared vacantly into the distance. Two or three coolies were going back and forth carrying earth from a barge tied up in the canal to a factory on the other bank. Some rickshaws suddenly raced up from the bridge along the deserted nearer bank of the canal, and stopped before the temple gate. These were probably visitors who had come to pay their respects at the family graves. A woman got out of a rickshaw and went in the gate, holding by the hand a little girl.

  Chokichi and his uncle parted on the bridge. Ragetsu turned with a worried expression for a final word. “Well,” he said after a pause, “I know you must hate it, but for the time being please be patient. You’ll never regret having been a good son.”

  Chokichi removed his hat and bowed slightly. He walked off quickly, almost at a run, in the direction from which he had come. Ragetsu disappeared behind the weed-covered embankment. Nothing in all of his close to sixty years had ever bothered him quite so much and given him so painful an emotion as what had happened today. His sister’s request had not been an unreasonable one, but at the same time he could not find it in himself to disapprove of Chokichi’s ambition to enter the theatre. He was convinced that different people have different temperaments and that it was wrong to force them all into one mold, whatever the motive. Ragetsu, caught in a dilemma, was unable to side completely with either his sister or his nephew. He knew instinctively from his own past experiences exactly what lay at the very bottom of Chokichi’s heart, even without asking. How painful and depressing he had found it when he was young to be compelled to waste a lovely spring day working in the darkness of the family pawnshop. How much more enjoyable it would have been to read an amusing book in a cheerful room overlooking the river than to sit under a dim lamp entering sums of money received and disbursed in the great ledger. Chokichi had said that he would rather make a living by something which he liked than become a punctilious functionary with a mustache. Both were possible ways to spend a lifetime. But Ragetsu, in his capacity as the boy’s counselor, could not very well reveal his own feelings. The best he could do was to offer the temporizing comfort he had already given the boy’s mother.

  Chokichi walked aimlessly from one desolate street to another. He had no thought of taking a short cut which would lead him straight back home to Imado. Nor was he thinking of returning in a roundabout fashion, stopping off somewhere on the way. He was utterly overwhelmed by despair. Chokichi’s only hope for support in his plan of becoming an actor had been to gain the sympathy of his kindly uncle. He had been sure that his uncle would help, but in this hope he had completely deceived himself. His uncle, it is true, had not voiced point-blank and violent opposition as his mother had, but, after citing the proverb, “A paradise on hearing, a hell at sight,” Ragetsu had recounted at great length the difficulties of succeeding in a theatrical career, the hardships of stage life, the troublesome nature of the world of entertainers, and many similar things. He had gone on to urge Chokichi to show consideration for his mother, and had enjoined on him various things which Chokichi understood perfectly even without his uncle’s advice. Chokichi had at last become aware of the convenient faculty that human beings possess for forgetting the sufferings and uneasiness of their youth when they grow old, so that they can with supreme indifference admonish and criticize young people of later generations. He felt with a stab of pain that there existed between the old and the young an unbridgeable gap.

  The streets were narrow and the ground dark and dank wherever he walked. Most of the streets were mere alleys, so twisted that he wondered at times whether they might prove to be blind. The irregular rows of dismal little houses stretched on endlessly—shingled roofs covered with moss, foundations rotting, posts tottering, dirty boards, rags and diapers hanging out to dry, cheap sweets and pots and pans spread out for sale in the streets. Occasionally an unusually large entranceway could be seen: it invariably proved to be to a factory. The towering tiled roofs belonged to temples, usually utterly desolate; through the broken walls one could see all the way to the graveyards behind the temple buildings. Gravestones covered with moss stains and bundles of memorial tablets had fallen into the old ponds, which looked like vast, unbounded puddles. On the graves, it goes without saying, there was not a single fresh flower. Frogs could already be heard croaking in the ponds, and last year’s withered grass rotted in the water.

  Chokichi noticed by chance on one of the houses of the neighborhood a sign with the name of the street. He recalled at once that this was the very street mentioned in The Calendar of Plum Blossoms,4 which he had avidly read not long before. Ah, he sighed, did those ill-starred lovers live in such a dark, sinister street? Some of the houses had bamboo fences exactly like the ones in the illustrations to the book. The bamboo was withered and the stalks were eaten at the base by insects. Chokichi thought they would probably disintegrate if he poked them. An emaciated willow tree drooped its branches, barely touched with green, over the shingled roof of a gate. The geisha Yonehachi must have passed through just such a gate when, of a winter’s afternoon, she secretly visited the sick Tanjiro. And it must have been in a room of such a house that the other hero, Hanjiro, telling ghost stories one rainy night, dared to take his sweetheart’s hand for the first time. Chokichi experienced a strange fascination and sorrow. He wanted to be possessed by that sweet, gentle, suddenly cold and indifferent fate. As the wings of his fancy spread, the spring sky seemed bluer and wider than before. He caught from the distance the sound of the Korean flute of a sweet-seller. To hear the flute in this unexpected place, playing its curious low-pitched tune, produced in him a melancholy which words could not describe.

  For a while Chokichi forgot the dissatisfaction with his uncle that had taken root in his breast. For a while he forgot the anguish of actuality.

  10

  There is a time between the end of spring and the beginning of summer, like the season when late summer turns to autumn, when heavy rains fall intermittently. This year, as usual, there was flooding, and Ragetsu, wondering how Otoyo’s neighborhood had fared, decided to call one evening on his way back from an errand in that part of town. There had been no flooding there, but he was amazed by an even stranger calamity: Chokichi lay in a stretcher, and at the moment that Ragetsu arrived, noisy preparations were being made for sending him to the isolation hospital. Otoyo told him how Chokichi had gone out in his thin summer kimono to see the floods. He had walked around in the muddy water from evening until late at night, and had caught a cold which developed into typhoid fever. This was the doctor’s explanation, and when Otoyo had finished recounting it, she followed the stretcher out, weeping. Ragetsu was obliged to look after the house until Otoyo’s return.

  After the confusion, like that of a spring cleaning or a moving, caused by the fumigation of the house by a man from the district office, there descended a loneliness devoid of all human feeling, rather like the atmosphere after a coffin has been sent off to a funeral. A strong wind sprang up at nightfall, and the shutters all began to rattle. The weather became unpleasantly chilly, and the wind which blew in now and again through holes in the battered kitchen door shook the flame in the dim hanging lamp in the sitting-room so violently as almost to extinguish it; each time the black oil smoke clouded the lamp chimney, and the shadows of the household furniture, set haphazardly around the room, moved on the dirty matting and the peeling wall. A voice in a nearby house somewhere began to intone the million invocations to the Buddha, and the sound fell plaintively on Ragetsu’s ears. Time hung heavily now that he was alone. He was bore
d and rather lonely. At such a time, he thought, one needs a drink, and he wandered around the kitchen looking for some liquor. But in this household run by a woman there was not so much as a wine cup. He retraced his steps to the front window and, opening one of the shutters a crack, looked up and down the street. There was nothing resembling a wineshop in the houses on the opposite side. Most of the shops on the street were already shut although it was still early in the evening, and the gloomy voice intoning the million invocations could be heard all the more distinctly. The fierce wind from the river made the telegraph wires above the roofs sing, and this sound, together with the clearness of the stars, created an impression of coldness as if winter had suddenly returned this night.

  Ragetsu closed the shutters and again sat vacantly under the hanging lamp. He smoked one pipe after another, and watched the hands of the grandfather clock move. Occasionally mice scurried inside the ceiling making a dreadful noise. It occurred to Ragetsu that there might be something to read in the room. He searched everywhere, on top of the chest of drawers, in the cupboard, but the only books he could find were singing-manuals and old almanacs. Taking the lamp in one hand, he climbed upstairs, where Chokichi’s room was.

  A number of books were piled on the desk, and there was also a bookcase. Ragetsu took out his spectacles and opened with curiosity one after another of Chokichi’s books bound in Western style. Something fell out of one of them. He picked it up and discovered it was a photograph of Oito in the spring finery of a geisha. He continued idly leafing through the books, when this time he discovered a letter. The letter had apparently never been completed, and there were places where the words were lost because the paper had been torn. The general meaning, however, was clear from the words which were still legible. Chokichi and Oito were day by day growing further apart, even in their hearts, because of the difference in their circumstances; it seemed that in spite of their childhood friendship they were doomed finally to become utter strangers. Even supposing they occasionally exchanged letters, they would never be able to share the same feelings. He had decided to become an actor or an entertainer, but this ambition had been thwarted, and now he was condemned to the tedium of spending his days without purpose, vainly envying the happiness of Kitchan, the barber’s son. At the moment he lacked the courage to kill himself, but would be very glad if he could take sick and die.