The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature: From Restoration to Occupation, 1868-1945: vol. 1 (Modern Asian Literature Series)

by J. Thomas Rimer

  In time, Awano’s strange, lonely feeling vanished without a trace. But he felt a queer twinge of conscience whenever he passed the Kanda shop, and in the end he became unable to do so. He also became unwilling to go to that sushi stall by himself.

  “It doesn’t matter,” his wife laughed. “Order some by telephone. Then we’ll all be able to have a treat.”

  Awano unsmilingly said: “That’s not the sort of thing a timid person like myself finds so easy to do.”

  For Senkichi, “that customer” became an ever more unforgettable figure. By now, it hardly mattered whether he was a human being or a supernatural being. There was only this great thankfulness. Although he’d been asked back two or three times by the proprietor and his wife, he felt no desire to regale himself again. The idea of taking such advantage frightened him.

  Always, at lonely or difficult times, he thought of “that customer.” Just thinking about him became a sort of consolation. Senkichi believed that some day “that customer” would come to him again, bringing an unexpected blessing.

  Here the writer lays down his pen. Actually, he’d thought of ending the story this way: the shopboy, wanting to know the true identity of “that customer,” learns his name and address from the clerk and goes looking for the place. Instead of a house at that address, he finds a little shrine to the fox god. The shopboy is astonished. But the writer came to feel that such an ending would be somewhat cruel to the shopboy. And so he decided to lay down his pen at the aforesaid place.

  TAKEDA RINTARŌ

  Takeda Rintarō (1904–1946) initially combined stylistic innovations and left-wing sympathies in his early works, but by the 1930s he had begun to concentrate on stories that simply sketched the life of the poor and downtrodden who tried to make a life for themselves in Tokyo. His episodic structure and careful observation of the details of daily life are distinctive.

  Takeda’s story “The Lot of Dire Misfortune” (Daikyō no kuji), published in 1939, provides an example of his black humor as well as his ability to observe the details of the sometimes sordid life he found around him.

  THE LOT OF DIRE MISFORTUNE (DAIKYŌ NO KUJI)

  Translated by Donald Keene

  When you’re walking down the street in a brand-new kimono, it doesn’t matter how shoddy it is, nothing is more depressing, more miserable, than to be caught in a sudden downpour. But my nervous temperament is such that I am just as likely to feel unbearable revulsion from sweating a little, from being blown on by a dusty wind, or else from the dirtiness of the seats on a train or in somebody’s house. I remember one summer day when I was walking in a slum near Asakusa—the story I’m about to relate describes a man with whom I struck up an acquaintance while in that slum—I saw in a lopsided house with a tin roof facing a narrow, grubby back alley a half-naked man sewing a magnificent, luxurious kimono that could only have come from a geisha, and it sent a shudder through me. Unfortunately, I don’t know enough about kimonos to describe in detail the material or the pattern, but in any case, something strangely alluring about this garment recalled momentarily the charm of the limbs of a woman walking with trailing skirts and even the fragrance of her rouge and powder. And the garment, draped over a man’s hands that were so swarthy as to make me wonder if even the sweat oozing from his fingertips would not be a dark brown, lay carelessly over his sticky, shining crotch and arms. Assailed not so much by feelings of incongruity as by unbearable disgust, I averted my eyes. I sometimes think I have no business acting as if I am the only person to insist on cleanliness when heaven knows how many times I have been stained by other people’s sweat and grime; but all the same, when I am first wearing a new kimono, I try to avoid any and all dirt, or, to exaggerate a bit, I am petrified by fear it may get dirty.

  But that is true only at the very beginning. After I have worn the kimono a while and it has naturally become somewhat soiled, its lack of cleanliness no longer disturbs me. It can be soaked in the rain or splashed with muddy water, or I can even sleep in the kimono on a tatami marked with dirty footprints, and it won’t bother me in the least. The change is so big it seems funny even to myself.

  Again, nobody enjoys taking a bath as much as I do. Sometimes, depending on the circumstances, I may bathe two or three times a day, and I’m even accustomed when I’m out on a job to jump into the first bathhouse I run across, a place I’ve never seen before, and each time I never leave the bathhouse until I have thoroughly washed and purified myself; but in spite of that, if for some reason I fail to take a bath for a day or two, I seem to forget completely how refreshed and light my whole body feels after taking a bath, and the wonderful sensation of exhilaration and well-being it brings. Then, as the days go by, the thought of taking a bath becomes more and more tedious and bothersome by geometrical progression. The dirt accumulates under my nails, my skin gets sweaty, shiny grease runs from the sides of my nose down to my chin, the mucus in my eyes accumulates uncontrolled, the snot in my nose becomes black, and even though I am aware that each time I move my body it undoubtedly gives off a foul odor, it no longer bothers me at all. Far from it. At times I even drive myself on, asking myself why I don’t try getting even dirtier. I seem to enjoy having a thick coating of something like moss steadily accumulate over my skin.

  I wonder, readers, if you know about my teeth? Two of the upper front teeth have been extracted to the roots, and the remaining two are so decayed that they barely manage to survive. Cavities have also developed in the lower front teeth from the inside, and I have no idea how long they will last. As for the rear molars, they are in even a more perilous state. You can count the number that haven’t been laid waste. The question is, will I die before the whole lot of them are devastated, or will I have to submit to the discomfort of living with a complete set of false teeth? My teeth were originally quite sound, but (whenever it was) first I was bothered with one bad tooth, and the decay gradually spread to others. Initially, I was treated by a dentist, but because I couldn’t visit him regularly, the treatment tended to break off halfway, and the teeth the dentist had begun to work on ended up by actually promoting the spread of the erosion. One after the other of my teeth was affected, so rapidly that it made me jittery. At this point my bad habit manifested itself. I began to think that even the very ordinary care I had been giving to my teeth was a waste of time. I ended by giving up hope and abandoning them. Inevitably, trouble started, and the worsened state of my teeth became plainly visible. I thought for a while I might do something to stop the decay, only for the conviction to grow that in the end it wouldn’t make any difference. I decided that, rather than submit to the bother of looking after this tooth and that tooth, one at a time, the best thing was to have done with the nuisance once and for all and get rid of them all.

  A propensity of this kind would hardly fail to reveal itself in other aspects of my life. From the time I was in elementary school until I entered middle school I managed to maintain, though it was a little difficult, a record of perfect attendance, never once arriving late or leaving early; but after my mother suddenly died and I missed school for the first time, I became quite nonchalant about playing hooky, even if there was no reason for it. In the end I flunked out of high school for not having attended a sufficient number of days during the three years.

  People who are familiar with my everyday behavior are surprised that contrary to their expectations, I can be as serious and diligent as a model pupil. They probably have no choice but to recognize that I am able to dispose of many different kinds of work in an extremely businesslike way. I can get up early in the morning and throw myself into my job just like the average workman, maintaining my life on an even keel. I can not only cut down on my drinking, though I am extremely fond of saké, but I can stop drinking altogether without experiencing the least pain. Normally I spend my time, day in and day out, as a truly innocuous city dweller, a convinced believer in secularism, and the conscientious provider for a large family.

  But then, a casual incident�
�the immediate cause can be anything at all, the most trivial thing can serve as a pretext—may upset the discipline a bit, and if this throws me from the tracks even slightly, I am unable to control myself any longer. The tendency to vagabondism that normally I hide is a contributing factor. I completely neglect my business and my family, behave in whatever way I please, and never give a thought to where this self-indulgence may lead me. Even if I try somehow to change the wild course on which I have embarked and to realign myself with my normal condition, unless a favorable opportunity presents itself, it’s beyond my powers to do anything. The truth is probably that the effort of trying hard to make a change is no more than a pretense directed at myself, and I am in fact leaving everything completely to blind chance, not caring what may happen. Days when I am bored I cover my eyes to the fact that my life has a great deal of meaning and content, and tell myself that I’ve had enough, that I’m fed up, that I want to get rid of absolutely everything, that I want to escape from all the things that bother me. At times I even reach a state where, in my wholesale rejection of everything, I feel no particular attachment even for my life and think I would be happy to offer it to someone quite simply, as a matter of course. It also happens sometimes that practical aspirations, melting away with unbelievable speed, give rise to a far less ambitious desire to become one with the clouds or water.

  I have spent any number of days in this way, distancing myself from normal life, wasting time, and not regretting anything. Then as punishment, something like the thick, mosslike layer of dirt on my skin comes to weigh heavily at the bottom of my heart, but feigning apathy, I remain insensible to what normally would be unbearable.

  Sneaking away from work, family, friends, and other this-worldly relationships, I give myself to self-indulgence, physical and mental. While in that state, I sometimes walk wherever my fancy takes me, through the dreary towns in nearby prefectures or along the banks of the rivers—the Tone, the Tama, the Sagami, and still others. These walks are rather good for my health, but at other times my wanderings take me from drinking place to drinking place, imitating whoever it was who said, “The true hermit hides in the marketplace.” In the end, I discover myself in the corner of a flophouse district. Leaving aside the rights and wrongs of these wanderings, separating myself further and further from the orbit of my life and dissipating my spirit in idleness is stupid and contemptible. This is particularly true of the sentimental way I justify to myself my aimless wanderings by convincing myself they are preparation for my reduced circumstances in the future or that they will help toughen me.

  But if I may say one more word . . . in spite of how it may seem, it’s the truth, and there’s nothing I can do about it.

  Toward the end of a certain year . . . no, it was at the end of December last year, I fell into a state of mind something like a fit. I had calculated precisely the number of days left until the end of the year and, with this in mind, had determined the amount of work to be done. I was working industriously. I felt I had to provide the many members of my family with a happy new year. I liked the feeling of carrying a lot of people on my back. If I could get by without such impedimenta, nothing could be better, but if this was my inescapable fate, there was a tragic grandeur in my resolve to take any number of people on my shoulders, and I derived a boost from the feelings of self-satisfaction.

  At the beginning of the job, the work went smoothly, and I was extremely pleased. But somewhere along the line, things got out of whack. I couldn’t get anything to go the way I wanted, and gradually I began to waver. Once that happens, even if I keep at the job, pain will be all that remains, and it will be accompanied by exaggerated despair. And what remains when the job is at last finished, after having wasted long disagreeable hours over it, is not merely feelings of dissatisfaction, the unpleasantness of simple failure; the result of a misshapen piece of work is that my whole mind and body get repulsively twisted. I stagger, unable to maintain a balance within myself, and aware of my failure, my footing becomes the more precarious. My chest seems to be clogged with innumerable pieces of trash that make a desolate noise as they tilt to one side, then the other. Everything is too disordered for me to start on the next piece of work.

  I receive a reasonable salary for the work I do, but under such circumstances I feel as if it’s ill-gotten money I’ve earned by doing something crooked. On the other hand, I am not without feelings of anger over being paid far too little to compensate for my agony. Whichever it is, a feeling of depression, as when a human being’s spirit has been made sport of, has raised its head.

  I look sadly at the banknote I have just received and feel as if I would like to fling it from me, the quicker the better. Then I realize that this would not be putting it to any meaningful use. It’s as if this money was somehow fated to be used for some stupid dissipation.

  My end-of-the-year job proved to be a disaster from beginning to end. Even though by this time I was extremely tired and even exhausted, I threw myself into the least healthy forms of spending money, and while so engaged, I took no notice of anything else. Later on, I marveled that my flesh had been up to the abuse, but it wasn’t for quite some time after finishing the unsuccessful piece of work that had so depressed me that one day I discovered myself, half asleep, in a flophouse—the one I usually go to—near Asakusa Park. In a fog, I racked my brains trying to recall the different places I had been and what I had been doing, but as usual, I was unable to summon back anything but shameful acts. I felt not so much anger as contempt at myself for having been excessively foolish.

  Moreover, the only thing that happened while I was indulging in fruitless remorse in such a place, was that more and more time went by. The deadlines expired, one after the other, on the jobs I had gone to the trouble of arranging, without my even touching them. Even when irritation urged me, I did nothing; I remained immobile. I told myself that although I had stumbled at the start, if I could recover my self-confidence as quickly as possible, I might somehow get by with a minimum of loss. I understood this in theory, but I kept telling myself in exaggerated terms, all but crooning it, that I was finished, that there was nothing I could do. It was obvious that each day delayed would make it doubly difficult to get back on my feet; but this reflection lasted only a limited time, and in the end, the moment came when I realized that no matter how much I felt like working, it was too late. I at last attained a lonely serenity, as if I had been waiting for that moment of truth, and I became dead tired. I could see before my eyes the expressions of anger on the faces of the men to whom I was supposed to deliver work and the bewildered faces of the members of my family, all rebuking me. I assumed an air of innocence, but spinelessly looked away.

  I didn’t want to meet anyone I knew, but all the same, if by accident I happened to meet an acquaintance, I was the picture of affability. Liberated from my long period of solitary silence, I would be carried away by the pleasure of cheerful conversation with friends, the first in a long time, and would chat about one thing and another, all at once. I would latch onto someone busy with end-of-the-year accounts and hold him, not letting him go, for what must have seemed an eternity. . . . At any rate, I would go walking around the seedy outskirts of the city—Senju, Mikawashima, the area from Ogu to Itabashi—places where I was unlikely to run across friends. I had no special business there, but I wore a look of urgency. The short winter’s day would grow dark, and this time, with an expression that suggested I was on my way back home, I would return to Tanaka-machi in Asakusa and its derelicts swarming in the dark. The cheap restaurants and the bars that served awamori millet brandy and shōchū gin would be jammed and noisy, and the smell of the pig and horse entrails they boiled and fried would mingle with the body odor of the people. At the street corners the women, some sallow, some brick colored, would be standing, hiding a bodyguard behind them.

  I ate and drank in such places with what little money was left after my squandering.

  In the flophouse the rooms were shared, two or three
men in a room six feet by nine. I often slept, pillow next to pillow, with complete strangers, men of every description. I shared a room with itinerant construction workers, runaways, country bumpkins who’d lost their money in the stock market, traveling performers, and even out-and-out thieves. It sometimes happened when I woke in the morning that although I had been alone the previous night when I got into bed, at some point I had been sandwiched in between two big, brutal-looking men. Sometimes I would sleep next to men who had found a place to sleep just for one night, our bedding almost touching, and we would separate, never to meet again, without ever have learned one thing about each other; but there were also numerous cases of men who stayed for a long time and with whom I became quite friendly. I would hear stories about their past, the majority lies or boastful concoctions. Invariably they wanted to let me know that although they were now living in the lower depths, they had not been born to live in such a place. They were able to describe clearly, exactly as if the events had happened yesterday, their memories of having grown up in a good family and led a life of luxury. Even if a little bit of what they told me was true, it had been embellished with details stolen from other people’s stories. In any case, they had fallen to their present state, and they had enough fond vanity to enable them to forget and to try to conceal their present misery. Some listeners, without concerning themselves whether the stories were true or false, would at times chime in with appropriate comments and try to act impressed even by the most nonsensical drivel; but other men were disagreeable, and tried ill-naturedly to change the subject, though the narrator was painstakingly relating a story that was truth itself. The impression produced by a story varied a good deal, depending on the teller.