The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature (Modern Asian Literature Series)

by Неизвестный

  “The passage ‘If I learn the proper way in the morning, I will gladly die in the evening,’2 is different in substance from my wish, but the feeling is the same. If my wish cannot be granted, I could live to be a hundred, and it would be to no avail—I would find no happiness. In fact, I would be living in pain. I don’t care if I am the only person in the world who has this wish. I’ll go alone in search of it, and if in my quest I have to commit burglary, murder, arson, or whatever, I wouldn’t regret it in the least. I’d do anything to have my wish granted. If there were a devil, and he would say to me, ‘Give me thy wife that I may rape her, give me thy child that I may eat him, and then to thee shall I grant thy wish,’ I would gladly give him my wife, if I had one; and if I had a child, I’d give it to him.”

  Matsuki shouted, “It’s getting more and more interesting. Hurry up! I want to hear what your wish is.” He was pulling on his beard with all his might.

  “I’m getting to it—I’m sure all of you are sick and tired of our rickety, unstable government. That’s why you want to combine the talents of people like Bismarck, Gladstone, and Hideyoshi and build a government of solid steel. You certainly have the desire to try to build such a government, and I really have that sort of wish, too, but my unusual wish has nothing to do with that.

  “I’d like to be a sage, a princely man, or the very embodiment of compassion. I’d like to be someone like Christ, Buddha, or Confucius. Yes, I want to be like them, but if my unusual wish can’t be granted, to hell with the sages and saviors.

  “Life in the forests and mountains—just saying the words makes my blood grow hot. This is what makes me think about Hokkaido. Often I take walks in the suburbs; and on these clear, winter mornings; whenever I look out over the horizon at the snowcapped peaks which surround the landscape, my blood surges in waves till I can’t stand it. Yet once my thoughts start dwelling on my wish, the scenery becomes meaningless. If only my wish were granted, I could even be content being a rickshaw man in a dusty, teeming city.

  “There have been all sorts of quibbling arguments about the mysteries of the universe, the mysteries of human life, about the origin of heaven and earth. Science, philosophy, and religion investigate these phenomena, explain them, and then worry about fitting them into a ready-made pattern. I would like to be a great philosopher, too; I’d like to be a greater scientist than Darwin; if I could, I’d like to be a great religious figure. But this is not my wish. If my wish isn’t granted and I should become a great philosopher, I would scoff at myself, and I would brand my face with the word ‘deceiver’!”

  “Hurry up and get to the point! What is your wish?” asked Matsuki peevishly.

  “All right, but don’t be surprised.”

  “Out with it, hurry up!”

  Okamoto said quietly, “My wish is that I want to be surprised.”

  “What’s that? That’s ridiculous!”

  “What did you say?”

  “Is that all you were driving at?”

  They all spoke as though they were disgusted; only Kondō seemed to be waiting silently for Okamoto’s explanation.

  “There’s a line of poetry which goes ‘Awake, poor troubled sleeper; / shake off thy torpid nightmare dream.’ My wish is that I want to shake off my dream demon!”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about!” Watanuki muttered.

  “I don’t want to know the mysteries of the universe; I want to be surprised at the mysteries of the universe.”

  Iyama stroked his cheek, “It sounds more and more like a riddle.”

  “I don’t want to know the secrets of death; I want to be surprised at the fact of death!”

  Watanuki scoffed, “Go right ahead and be surprised as much as you like. That’s simple enough.”

  “Faith in and of itself isn’t what I want, necessarily. But I do want to be plagued by the mysteries of man and his universe, plagued, in fact, to a point where without faith there can be no peace for me, even for a moment.”

  “Hmm, this is getting more and more puzzling,” murmured Matsuki, looking intently at Okamoto.

  Okamoto pounded the table without realizing it. “If anything, my wish is to gouge out my worn-out, grape-like eyes.”

  “Hurray!” Kondō called out unintentionally.

  “I don’t care to have the guts of Luther, who, at the Diet of Worms, refused to capitulate before the powers of the princes. But at the age of nineteen Luther had a surprise encounter with the mysteries of death. Alexis, his classmate, was struck dead by lightning before his very eyes. It is this part of Luther that I desire.

  “Watanuki said, ‘Go right ahead and be surprised as much as you like’—those are extremely interesting words, but one can never go right ahead and be surprised.

  “The woman I loved died; she has vanished from the earth. Because I had been a slave of love, I was terribly upset over her death. But the anguish I experienced was due to the loss of the object of my love, and I was unable to face up to the brutal fact of death. Nothing can dominate a man’s heart so completely as love. Yet there is one thing which presses down on man’s heart with a power many times greater.

  “What I mean is the power of custom: ‘Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting.’

  “This line states it perfectly. We are born into the world; from early childhood we come upon all sorts of things: every day we see the sun, every night we look up at the stars. Gradually even the inscrutable mystery of the universe becomes commonplace, and those who call attention to philosophy and science look at the universe as though they were standing outside it.

  Full soon thy soul shall have her earthly freight,

  And custom lie upon thee with a weight

  Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life.

  “These lines are only too true. That’s why my wish is to somehow shake off this frost. Somehow or other I want to be freed from the pressure of old, worn-out customs. I want to stand on my own feet and live in this universe with a capacity to be surprised. I don’t care one bit if it means that I’ll be a meat eater or a potato eater or even that I’ll become a misanthrope and curse life.

  “I don’t care about effects. I don’t want to set up false causes. I don’t want to set up premises on the basis of playful studies based on custom.

  “Take the phrases like ‘moonlight is beauty,’ ‘the evenings when the flowers are in bloom are this and that,’ or ‘the starry nights are this and that.’ These effusive words of the poets are just a form of dilettantism. The last thing in the world they see is what’s genuine; they are only looking at phantoms through the eyes which are blinded by custom. They are making sport of the emotions. As for philosophy and religion, I don’t know what they were like in the beginning, but at least in the forms they have come to assume through the centuries, one finds the same thing.

  “I have an acquaintance that scoffs at people who make themselves miserable by raising such stupid questions like, ‘What am I?’ His point is that you cannot possibly know that which is ultimately unknowable. On the surface, at least, this is true. But this question isn’t raised necessarily in order to have it answered. It is a cry of the soul that is raised spontaneously when one becomes deeply aware of the real mystery of one’s existence in this universe. The question is itself a solemn expression of one’s soul. To scoff at people who raise this question is to confess to the paralysis of the spirit. My wish is to raise this question straight from the heart. Unfortunately, even when the question is uttered through one’s lips, it seldom comes from the heart.

  “ ‘From whence do I come?’ ‘Whither do I go?’ People often ask these questions. But in my opinion, the spring of religion flows in the heart of the man who cannot help raising these questions no matter how much he may try not to raise them. It’s the same with poetry, and that’s why anything not related to these questions is just wanton and false.

  “I’d better stop now. It’s no use! It’s no use going on! Oh, I’m exhausted! But I’ll say just one more thi
ng, though. I want to divide people into two groups: people who are capable of being surprised and those who are indifferent.”

  Matsuki laughed while he asked, “I wonder which I belong to?”

  “You belong to the indifferent group, naturally. All seven of us belong to the most indifferent of the indifferent group. Of the billion or so people in the world, I wonder how many there are who are not indifferent. Take the poets, philosophers, scientists, clergymen, scholars, statesmen. They are a pretty indifferent lot, too. They bandy about their theories, wear an expression of enlightenment on their faces, or go about tearfully. Last night I had a dream.

  “I dreamed I was dead. I was dead and trudging down a dark road alone, groping for the way, and without thinking about it, I cried out, ‘How could it have happened to me?’ Yes . . . yes, it was I who had cried out.

  “Now, this is what I think. Let’s say that every one of a hundred people today attends funerals or experiences the death of his parents or his children. Yet when these very same people die and stand at the gates of hell, they will no doubt cry out, ‘How could it have happened to me?’ and be mocked by the devil.” Okamoto laughed long and loud.

  “They say that one can be cured of hiccups if someone takes him by surprise. But you have to be quite an eccentric to want to be surprised when you can live an indifferent life and eat meat.” Watanuki laughed so hard that he had to hold his fat belly.

  “No; I say that I want to be surprised, but I guess I really don’t mean it . . .”

  “Oh, you are just saying it, then. Hee, hee.”

  “I get it. In other words, you go as far as making a wish, and no further.”

  “Yes, I guess it’s just a hobby with me.”

  Everybody was laughing, and now Okamoto joined in the laughter. But Kondō caught an expression of deep anguish on Okamoto’s face.

  MASAMUNE HAKUCHŌ

  Masamune Hakuchō (1879–1962) was, like Kunikida Doppo, deeply affected by his encounter with Christianity. A noted literary critic and story writer, he and other novelists of this time, dubbed “naturalists,” tried to reveal the emotional truth about themselves, however painful. His story “The Clay Doll” (Doro ningyō, 1911), a lightly fictionalized account of the unhappy start to his own marriage, also reveals some of the social and intellectual disparity between men and women in the Meiji period.

  THE CLAY DOLL (DORO NINGYŌ)

  Translated by Richard Torrance

  I

  Moriya Jūkichi spent the morning quietly in his rented house in one of the poorer neighborhoods in Koishikawa Ward. In the early evening, he went out, as was his custom, for a walk. It was the first week of March, but the springlike warmth made him wish he had not worn his now sweaty undershirt. His route that evening brought him to Ginza, the lively entertainment district. There he stopped to eat a light meal at a restaurant he frequented; then he continued his walk in the direction of the Yūrakuza Theater. Jūkichi could not resist the temptation to enter, and he was guided to his seat, where he began to thumb through the program. The prospect of hearing the master narrator Fujimatsu Kaga Tayū perform the musical narrative “Ranchō” and Toyotake Roshō’s performance of the “Willow” act from the puppet theater made Jūkichi’s heart beat a little faster in anticipation. Soon the curtain opened. Jūkichi’s eyes were drawn to the reader’s stand on which the chanter had placed his score. The program stated that the dark man with the dull eyes was the master Matsuo Tayū. He was narrating, with shamisen accompaniment, the ballad “Fishing for a Wife.” The notes of the shamisen, which Jūkichi had not heard in a long time, filled him with nostalgia. The music brought back memories. Eight years earlier, he had attended a performance of this same “Fishing for a Wife” by the artist Rinchū for an amateur music society. He still remembered the narrator’s red face and his high, clear voice. Jūkichi felt himself drifting into a pleasant reverie. His anxieties and frustrations seemed to dissolve. The glow of the electric lights illuminating the stage and the ethereal music made the people in the audience, most dressed in their finest clothing, seem all the more beautiful. As they listened, entranced by the music, the cares, suspicions, and avarice faded from their faces.

  With a final resonating note from the shamisen, the performance ended and the curtain closed. Jūkichi viewed his surroundings with fresh eyes. He looked with appreciation at the figures of the women who stood up—smiling women, women in profile, all sorts of women. His attention was drawn to a young lady sitting close to him. He could not be certain, but he thought he recognized her. She was turned away from him. Her full black hair, freshly done in the manner of a young wife, and the sensual curve of the nape of her neck awakened something in him. She had allowed her overcoat to slip off to reveal a silk gauze half-coat. The family crest on the half-coat signified a distinguished family lineage. She was engaged in conversation with a person who appeared to be her mother. When she turned back to the stage, he saw that her features were fine and remarkably beautiful. Her eyebrows formed a long arc over her large eyes, and her complexion was white. The longer he studied her, the more convinced he became that she was the same woman. There was no doubt. It was Kaneko, the young woman he had met a year ago, in the spring, at the Yazawas’ house. He was amazed by the ability of a woman to transform herself.

  A man, apparently her husband, arrived and took the seat next to her mother. He had a broad forehead and gentle eyes. Jūkichi imagined the wedded life of the young couple. Then he had to grin in despair at his own lack of discernment. A year ago, he had sat across a table from this young woman in a meeting to arrange a marriage between her and himself. She had been dressed in a simple maroon school uniform, with no decorations in her modestly done hair. He had been unimpressed and had brusquely refused the match. Yazawa’s wife had taken him aside and urged him to reconsider, “She has a lovely figure and well-balanced features. You won’t find much better than her.” But Jūkichi had remained unmoved. It had never occurred to him that the modest young girl might become the beautiful woman he saw before him. Now he regretted his decision. He did not see another woman in the theater who could compare with her.

  Jūkichi went out to the lobby, bought a picture postcard with a photograph of Roshō on the front, and wrote a note to Yazawa’s wife. “By chance I encountered Kaneko on the first anniversary of our marriage meeting. Among the beautiful women at the Yūrakuza, Kaneko was more radiant than any of them. I could gouge out my eyes for my stupidity!” He addressed and dropped the card in the post. He wandered around the lobby and had a cup of English tea in the Café Tōyōken. Then he entered the theater to hear the end of the ballad “Utazawa.”

  Roshō began her performance, but by the time the first ballad sequence had ended, Jūkichi was growing tired of the sound of the shamisen and Roshō’s masterful, earthy voice. He longed to feel cool air against his skin. Still, a certain inertia kept him in his seat. He leaned back and observed the performer’s cool eyes and slightly coquettish mouth. Roshō appeared to tire as the long narrative continued. Rather than the story line, Jūkichi became interested in the fatigue and even the pain that appeared on her face. Recently, he had found himself incapable of concentrating on music for any length of time. When he was walking on the street and heard a melody from a bamboo flute or shamisen drifting from the window of a second-floor room where someone was practicing, he would be transported into an innocent dream, like an infant hearing its mother’s lullaby. But in a theater hall, conscious that he was listening to a great performance by a master, he was overwhelmed by associations, and his emotions rose to a point that left him exhausted.

  Jūkichi was one of the last people to emerge from the theater. He breathed in deeply the cool air. The skill of the chanters and musicians had not remained in his memory. He remembered only the sad emptiness the music inspired in him. For the past several years, Jūkichi had been unable to escape a sense of bitter nihilism that often seemed to overwhelm him. Song and poetry, even notes of such classical Japanese inst
ruments as the Satsuma biwa or gekkin, and the ballad narratives “Chikumagawa” and “Kuramayama” only reminded him of the lack of purpose in his own existence.

  He arrived in the Hibiya district and walked along the moat of the Imperial Palace. He reached the hill at Kyūdanzaka and suddenly realized that he could have taken a streetcar. The shutters of the houses on either side of him were closed. Only a few more streetcars would run after the one that had just clattered off into the night. He let several more cars pass without boarding. He did not wish to return home.

  II

  In part because he wished to tell someone about his meeting with Kaneko, Jūkichi visited the Yazawas’ home in a middle-class neighborhood in Ushigome Ward. The Yazawas were old friends. He had grown particularly close to the couple during the summer of last year. It was the only family with whom he was on close terms in all of Tokyo, or at least the only cosmopolitan home where he felt comfortable joking and relaxing. Still, he was careful to present a sincere demeanor and not to offend his friends. He could speak frankly with them about his current circumstances, plans for the future, and the situation of his family back in the provinces. After days of dissipation and disturbing fantasies, Jūkichi longed to speak with someone who would take him seriously. He also was grateful to have friends who cared enough to urge him to marry and lead an ordinary, respectable life. Jūkichi sometimes daydreamed about his marriage to an innocent young girl and their happy life together in a home all their own. “I hear you saw Kaneko,” Mrs. Yazawa said with a smile as she welcomed Jūkichi.

  “That’s right. I don’t know whether she recognized me, but she gave no indication she did. Whom did she marry?”

  “He’s the son of a printing factory owner. They’re quite wealthy. Kaneko has her own personal rickshaw and rickshaw boy.”