by Неизвестный
But I had not forgotten Elise. How could I? She sent me letters every day. On the day I left, she had wanted to avoid the unaccustomed sadness of sitting alone by lamplight and so had talked late into the night at a friend’s house. Then, feeling tired, she returned home and immediately went to bed. Next morning, she wondered if she had not just dreamed she was alone. But when she got up, her depression and sense of loneliness were worse than the time when she had been scratching a living and had not known where the next meal was coming from. This was what she told me in her first letter.
Later letters seemed to be written in great distress, and each of them began in the same way.
“Ah! Only now do I realize the depth of my love for you. As you say, you have no close relatives at home, you will stay here if you find you can make a good living, won’t you? My love must tie you here to me. Even if that proves impossible and you have to return home, I could easily come with my mother. But where would we get the money for the fare? I had always intended to stay here and wait for the day you became famous, whatever I had to do. But the pain of separation grows stronger every day, even though you are only on a short trip and have only been away about twenty days. It was a mistake to have thought that parting was just a passing sorrow. My pregnancy is at last beginning to be obvious, so you cannot reject me now, whatever happens. I quarrel a lot with Mother. But she has given in, now she sees how much more determined I am than I used to be. When I travel home with you, she’s talking of going to stay with some distant relatives who live on a farm near Stettin. If, as you say in your last letter, you are doing important work for the minister, we can somehow manage the fare. How I long for the day you return to Berlin.”
It was only after reading this letter that I really understood my predicament. How could I have been so insensitive! I had been proud to have made a decision about my own course of action and that of others unrelated to me. But it had been made in entirely favorable, rather than adverse, conditions. When I tried to clarify my relationship with others, the emotions that I had formerly trusted became confused.
I was already on very good terms with the count. But in my shortsightedness I only took into consideration the duties that I was then undertaking. The gods might have known how this was connected to my hopes for the future, but I never gave it a thought. Was my passion cooling? When Aizawa had first recommended me, I had felt that the count’s confidence would be hard to gain, but now I had to some extent won his trust. When Aizawa had said things like “If we continue to work together after you return to Japan,” I wondered whether he had really been hinting that this was what the count was saying. It was true that Aizawa was my friend, but he would not have been able to tell me openly, since it was an official matter. Now that I thought about it, I wondered whether he had perhaps told the count what I had rashly promised him—that I was going to sever my connections with Elise.
When I first came to Germany, I thought that I had discovered my true nature, and I swore never to be used as a machine again. But perhaps it was merely the pride of a bird that had been given momentary freedom to flap its wings and yet still had its legs bound. There was no way I could loose the bonds. The rope had first been in the hands of my department head, and now, alas, it was in the hands of the count.
It happened to be New Year’s Day when I returned to Berlin with the count’s party. I left them at the station and took a cab home. In Berlin no one sleeps on New Year’s Eve, and it is the custom to lie in late the next morning. Every single house was quiet. The snow on the road had frozen hard into ruts in the bitter cold and shone brightly in the sunlight. The cab turned into Klosterstrasse and pulled up at the entrance to the house. I heard a window open but saw nothing from inside the cab. I got the driver to take my bag and was just about to climb the steps when Elise came flying down to meet me. She cried out and flung her arms around my neck. At this the driver was a little startled and mumbled something in his beard that I could not hear.
“Oh! Welcome home! I would have died if you had not returned!” she cried.
Up to now I had prevaricated. At times the thought of Japan and the desire to seek fame seemed to overcome my love, but at this precise moment all my hesitation left me and I hugged her. She laid her head on my shoulder and wept tears of happiness.
“Which floor do I take it to?” growled the driver as he hurried up the stairs with the luggage.
I gave a few silver coins to her mother, who had come to the door to meet me, and asked her to pay the driver. Elise held me by the hand and hurried into the room. I was surprised to see a pile of white cotton and lace lying on the table. She laughed and pointed to the pile.
“What do you think of all the preparations?” she said.
She picked up a piece of material and I saw it was a baby’s diaper.
“You cannot imagine how happy I am!” she said. “I wonder if our child will have your dark eyes. Ah, your eyes that I have only been able to dream about. When it’s born, you will do the right thing, won’t you? You’ll give it your name and no one else’s, won’t you?”
She hung her head.
“You may laugh at me for being silly, but I will be so happy the day we go to church.”
Her uplifted eyes were full of tears.
I did not call on the count for two or three days because I thought he might be tired from the journey, and so I stayed home. Then one evening, a messenger came bearing an invitation. When I arrived, the count greeted me warmly and thanked me for my work in Russia. He then asked me whether I felt like returning to Japan with him. I knew so much and my knowledge of languages alone was of great value, he said. He had thought that seeing I had been so long in Germany, I might have some ties here, but he had asked Aizawa and had been relieved to hear that this was not the case.
I could not possibly deny what appeared to be the situation. I was shaken but of course found it impossible to contradict what Aizawa had told him. If I did not take this chance, I might lose not only my homeland but also the very means by which I might retrieve my good name. I was suddenly struck by the thought that I might die in this sea of humanity, in this vast European capital. I showed my lack of moral fiber and agreed to go.
It was shameless. What could I say to Elise when I returned? As I left the hotel my mind was in indescribable turmoil. I wandered, deep in thought, not caring where I was going. Time and time again I was cursed at by the drivers of carriages that I bumped into, and I jumped back startled. After a while I looked around and found I was in the Tiergarten. I half collapsed onto a bench by the side of the path. My head was on fire and felt as if someone were pounding it with a hammer as I leaned back. How long did I lie there like a corpse? The terrible cold creeping into the marrow of my bones woke me up. It was nighttime, and the thickly falling snow had piled up an inch high on my shoulders and the peak of my cap.
It must have been past eleven. Even the tracks of the horse-drawn trams along Mohabit and Karlstrasse were buried under the snow, and the gas lamps around the Brandenburg Gate gave out a bleak light. My feet were frozen stiff when I tried to get up, and I had to rub them with my hands before I could move.
I walked slowly and it must have been past midnight when I got to Klosterstrasse. I don’t know how I got there. It was early January, and the bars and tea shops on Unter den Linden must have been full, but I remember nothing of that. I was completely obsessed by the thought that I had committed an unforgivable crime.
In the fourth-floor attic Elise was evidently not yet asleep, for a bright gleam of light shone out into the night sky. The falling snowflakes were like a flock of small white birds, and the light kept on disappearing and reappearing as if the plaything of the wind. As I went in through the door I realized how weary I was. The pain in my joints was so unbearable that I half crawled up the stairs. I went through the kitchen, opened the door of the room, and stumbled inside. Elise was sewing diapers by the table and turned around.
“What have you been doing?” she gasped.
“Just look at you!”
She had good reason to be shocked. My face was as pale as a corpse. I had lost my cap somewhere on the way, and my hair was in a frightful mess. My clothes were torn and dirty from the muddy snow as I had stumbled many times along the road.
I remember trying to reply, but I could say nothing. Unable to stand because my knees were shaking so violently, I tried to grab a chair, but then I fell to the floor.
It was some weeks later that I regained consciousness. I had just babbled in a high fever while Elise tended me. Then one day Aizawa had come to visit me, saw for himself what I had hidden from him, and arranged matters by telling the count only that I was ill. When I first set eyes on Elise again, tending me at the bedside, I was shocked at her altered appearance. She had become terribly thin and her bloodshot eyes were sunk into her gray cheeks. With Aizawa’s help she had not wanted for daily necessities, it was true, but this same benefactor had spiritually killed her.
As he told me later, she heard from Aizawa about the promise I had given him and how I had agreed to the count’s proposal that evening. She had jumped up from her chair, her face ashen pale, and crying out “Toyotarō! How could you deceive me!” she had suddenly collapsed. Aizawa had called her mother, and together they had put her in bed. When she awoke some time later, her eyes were fixed in a stare, and she could not recognize those around her. She cried out my name, abused me, tore her hair, and bit the coverlet. Then she suddenly seemed to remember something and started to look for it. Everything her mother gave her she threw away except the diapers that were on the table. These she stared at for a moment, then pressed them to her face and burst into tears.
From that time on, she was never violent, but her mind was almost completely unhinged and she became as simpleminded as a child. The doctor said there was no hope of recovery, for it was an illness called paranoia that had been brought on by sudden excessive emotion. They tried to remove her to the Dalldorf Asylum, but she cried out and refused to go. She would continually clasp a diaper to her breast and bring it out to look at, and this seemed to make her content. Although she did not leave my sickbed, she did not seem really aware of what was going on. Just occasionally she would repeat the word “medicine” as if remembering it.
I recovered from my illness completely. How often did I hold her living corpse in my arms and shed bitter tears? When I left with the count for the journey back to Japan, I discussed the matter with Aizawa and gave her mother enough to eke out a bare existence; I also left some money to pay for the birth of the child that I had left in the womb of the poor mad girl.
Friends like Aizawa Kenkichi are rare indeed, and yet to this very day there remains a part of me that curses him.
POETRY
“New-style” poems began to be written under the influence of Western poetry in the early Meiji period. The famous Selection of Poetry in the New Style (Shintaishishō, 1882) in fact consists mostly of translations of Western poems. The poets featured in this section experimented with new forms and topics. All the introductions and translations are by Leith Morton.
OCHIAI NAOBUMI
Ochiai Naobumi (1861–1903) was born in Matsuiwa in the north of Japan. The Ochiai family adopted him in 1878 while he was studying at their Shintō shrine school. Ochiai went to Tokyo in 1881 to study and eventually became a lecturer at Tokyo University. His first published poem was “Song of the Faithful Daughter Shiragiku” (Kōjo Shiragiku no uta, 1888), which established his popularity as a “new-style” poet. This poem was originally written in Chinese by Inoue Tetsujirō (1855–1944), one of the editors and translators of the Selection of Poetry in the New Style, and was translated into Japanese by Ochiai. The poem-tale, an excerpt of which is presented here, is 553 lines long and is one of the landmarks of Ochiai’s short but distinguished career.
SONG OF THE FAITHFUL DAUGHTER SHIRAGIKU
(KŌJO SHIRAGIKU NO UTA)
In the deepening autumn of a mountain fastness in Aso
Dusk falls in desolate surrounds
Somewhere the bell of a temple tolls
Telling of the impermanence of all things.
At that moment a maiden is waiting
At a gate for her father
Wiping her tears with her sleeves
She is sunk in melancholy
As if she were a pale aronia flower
Wearied by the rain.
They say that her father went hunting recently
No tidings yet have come
The sound of falling leaves striking the eaves
The sound of water striking the bamboo pipe
Thinking her father may have returned
Night after night not a moment does she sleep
The rains have come tonight
Beating against the banana tree in the garden
Amid the myriad voices of the insects
Adding sadness to sadness. So lonely in the late night
Unable perhaps to bear her thoughts alone
Donning a traveling hat and grasping a walking stick
About to leave on a journey, how sad her figure!
SHIMAZAKI TŌSON
Shimazaki Tōson (1872–1943) was born in Magome in Nagano Prefecture but was sent to Tokyo for school at the age of nine. He graduated in English from Meiji gakuin, a Christian mission school, where he later became a teacher. Tōson’s first book of poetry was Young Herbs (Wakanashū, 1897), which is commonly regarded as the finest example of “new-style” poetry published up to that time. The following two poems are from Young Herbs.
THE FOX’S TRICK (KITSUNE NO WAZA)
Little fox hiding in the garden
In the evening when all are away sneaks
Into the autumn shadows of the grape arbor
Secretly stealing a cluster of dew-tipped grapes
But my love is not a fox
Nor you the grapes yet
In secret, with no one knowing,
My heart has stolen you
FIRST LOVE (HATSUKOI)
When I saw you under the apple tree
With your hair swept up for the first time
I thought you were the flower
In the flower comb you wore in front
When you gently extended your soft white hand
And gave me an apple
It was the very first time I loved someone
With the pale red of the autumn fruit
When my sigh unknowingly
Passed through the threads of your hair
I drank of your passion
From the cup of my tender love
The narrow, natural path
Under the trees in the apple grove
Who first trod this path?
Whose steps left the first traces?
You asked, how lovely, I thought
TAKESHIMA HAGOROMO
Takeshima Hagoromo (1872–1967) was born in Tokyo. He studied Japanese literature at Tokyo Imperial University, where, with a number of like-minded poets, he started a school of poetry that produced elegant, archaic verse. Takeshima achieved fame as a scholar of Japanese literature and published a number of collections of poetry and poetic prose. The following “new-style” poem was first published in the Sun (Taiyō) magazine in 1901.
THE MAIDEN CALLED LOVE (KOI NO OTOME)
Spring breezes blow, grasses bud,
In the forest glade, beside a bubbling spring,
Tossing her black locks,
The maiden called “Love” was standing.
By the by, there passed beside her,
A comely knight on horseback,
In a gallant voice he called,
“Come hither, oh maiden, to me.”
The maiden silently shook her head,
Displeased, the knight took his leave.
Ah unstained love,
No brave warrior would she have.
Next to come by was
A minstrel delicate of frame.
His cool, black eyes,
Shining like la
cquer.
The birds blushed in their nests,
At his sweet-throated
Singing, his voice eloquently calling,
“Come hither, oh maiden, to me.”
The maiden silently shook her head,
Displeased, he took his leave.
Ah sacred love,
No rare music would she have.
Next to be seen with flowing side locks was,
A Confucian scholar, hair whiter than snow,
His brow so lofty,
Countless talents must he possess.
With bright, piercing eye,
No soft words had he.
Solemn of mien, stern of voice
“Come hither, oh maiden, to me.”
The maiden silently shook her head,
Displeased, he took his leave.
Ah piteous love,
No deep learning would she have.
The next to be seen was
A courier exalted in the world,
A crown bedecked with jewel,
So his nobility did glitter.
His horse-drawn carriage,
Guarded by brave samurai,
Beckoning to her, he called,
“Come hither, oh maiden, to me.”