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

by Неизвестный

  The daughter remains silent, hanging her head. She has come to visit her father because the young man found out about her mother.

  • The handyman sees the engagement ring on his daughter’s finger.

  The daughter weeps, saying, “I can’t get married anymore.”

  The handyman says, “You’d better give it up.”

  Hearing the words “give up,” suddenly the daughter rebels. She leaves the room.

  The handyman watches her leave.

  • The broken rice bowl.

  • The handyman quietly sits down. He suffers, thinking of his daughter’s misfortune.

  A light goes on.

  • The hall at midnight. The handyman, casting fearful glances, approaches his wife’s cell.

  The wife, hearing a noise, opens her eyes wide.

  The handyman opens the door of the cell with a key he has stolen and goes inside.

  He hurries his wife into the hallway.

  • A mad person’s shrill laughter.

  • The handyman is taken aback.

  • A couple of mad people’s shrill laughter.

  • Down the long hall the handyman flees like a demon, carrying his wife in his arms.

  • The exit from the hall. The handyman opens the door and tries to lead his wife out.

  The wife looks at the darkness outside, turns fearful, and steps back.

  The handyman tries forcibly to take her outside.

  The wife, afraid of the dark, resists violently.

  • The image of the pond in the dark forest comes floating out of the darkness.

  • As if trying to push it aside, the wife flails about.

  • A dog howls in the distance.

  • The wife collapses.

  Startled, the handyman puts his hand to her chest.

  Her heart is beating furiously. He touches her forehead. She has a fever.

  The handyman runs to fetch water.

  Left alone, the wife gets to her feet and quietly walks back toward her cell.

  The handyman returns with water. His wife is no longer there. He looks for her.

  He runs toward her cell.

  • The wife is sitting in her cell, looking blankly at the wall.

  The handyman comes and urges her to run away for the sake of their daughter.

  • In the hall. A guard’s footsteps.

  • The handyman flees, in a great hurry, down the hall. He drops a set of keys.

  • The keys on the floor of the hall.

  • Passing by the cell, the guard picks up the keys and studies them with a puzzled look.

  There is no one in sight.

  • The handyman rushes to his room.

  He sits down, as if collapsing, and heaves a sigh of relief.

  He is oddly excited and confused.

  He feels as if someone is whispering to him, “Take your mad wife away to a distant place and let your daughter be happily married.” He also imagines that, starting the next day, he will no longer be able to get near his wife because he dropped the keys.

  His face looks profoundly disturbed, as though he has been stricken with an illness.

  • The metal door to the cell opens quietly, noiselessly.

  • The handyman leads his wife out of her cell.

  Turning back, he sees Madwomen A, B, and C standing at the entrance of the room.

  He flees down the long hallway.

  The mad people come chasing after him.

  Countless madwomen are standing in front of him.

  There is a sharp call. “Handyman!” The handyman, startled, turns to look.

  The director of the asylum is standing there.

  The handyman tries to run away.

  A great many nurses block his way.

  The handyman grapples with the director. He kills him.

  Then he beats to death a number of doctors, assistants, guards, and mad people.

  Three beautiful automobiles enter the hall and drive over the bodies lying on the floor.

  In each of the three cars is the daughter dressed in her wedding kimono. Next to her sits a madman whom the handyman supposedly killed moments before. Like the daughter, the madman is dressed in a formal wedding kimono.

  The wife stands in front of the cars to block them.

  The daughter puts her hand over her husband’s face lest he see her mother.

  The mother starts to climb on top of the car.

  The driver tries to push her off.

  The handyman, trying to pull his wife off, pummels her with his fists.

  The daughter, forgetting to keep her husband’s eyes covered, gets out of the car to protect her mother.

  The madman, holding onto the car door, shouts, “Fight! Fight!”

  A hearse arrives and stops in front of everyone.

  Led by the nurses, all of those who had been killed by the handyman—the assistants, the mad people—climb into the hearse. Likewise the director of the asylum. He has a terrifying scowl on his face. He glares at the handyman.

  The wedding cars drive away.

  The hearse drives away. Once they are inside the hearse, the hospital director and his assistants begin to laugh and talk with great delight.

  A hush has fallen over the hallway. The handyman stands there, holding his wife.

  Day breaks.

  • The handyman sits in his room. He holds his head in his hands. He is in agony. Suddenly he awakes from his dream.

  • Object 1 catches the dawning light of day.

  Likewise with objects 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, etc.

  • (The handyman’s dream continues.)

  In the hall three mad people are behaving madly.

  The handyman approaches them with a basket, smiling.

  In the basket are many masks made with gentle smiles. [They are masks used in folk dances: the face of a plump and happy okame—a woman from the countryside—the face of a silly hyottoko—a man who is a country bumpkin. . . . ]

  The handyman puts the smiling masks on mad people A, B, and C by turns.

  The mad people’s violent behavior stops, and their faces turn into gentle smiles.

  Many madwomen are seated in the hall.

  The handyman puts a mask on each and every one. At once all of the faces in the room turn into gentle smiles.

  The handyman puts a mask on his wife too.

  The wife’s gentle smile shows love for the handyman.

  The handyman also puts a mask on his own face. A smiling face. He hugs his smiling wife.

  • (Superimposed on the dream, the scene switches to the handyman doing the morning mopping of the hall.)

  The handyman continues to mop. Methodically, silently.

  The director and a nurse pass him and respond with pleasure to the handyman’s greeting.

  The handyman remembers his dream. He laughs.

  • The director and the nurse stand in front of the wife’s cell.

  The wife is sleeping peacefully.

  • The dancer’s room. The dancer is madly dancing again today.

  • The director visits one cell after another, accompanied by the nurse.

  • The handyman is mopping the long hall—methodically, silently.

  • The young man’s bright, Western-style room. No one is there.

  A beautiful bunch of flowers in the room speaks of the wedding of the daughter and the young man that is to be held the next day.

  KUROSHIMA DENJI

  Kuroshima Denji (1898–1943) created some of the most socially conscious writing of this period. Born on a small island in the Inland Sea and later drafted and sent to Siberia with Japanese forces in 1921 to assist the White Russians, Kuroshima vividly captured his personal experiences in his antiwar stories. A poignant example is “A Flock of Circling Crows” (Uzumakeru karasu no mure, 1927).

  A FLOCK OF CIRCLING CROWS (UZUMAKERU KARASU NO MURE)

  Translated by Zeljko Cipris

  1

  “Sir! Leftovers—please!”

&n
bsp; The children had blue eyes. They were bundled in threadbare, torn overcoats; heads buried in the collars. Girls and boys. Needle-like ice stuck in the gaps of their cracked shoes.

  In his arctic boots, Matsuki stood in the mess hall entranceway, hands thrust into trouser pockets.

  Windblown snow piled high, pressing against the windowpanes hard enough to break them. Water that gushed from a valley spring had here frozen into great slabs of ice. They rose in tiers from below, yesterday higher than the day before, today topping yesterday. This is Siberia all right, Matsuki thought. Ice rising layer on layer from ground level was something one never saw back home.

  In their clumsy Japanese, the children pleaded for Matsuki’s sympathy. The faces of all five expressed a determined effort to be endearing. There was open fawning in the way they said “sir.”

  “No leftovers?” repeated the children. “Please, sir, please!”

  “Here, take it.”

  Matsuki took the pail of scraps by the rim and rolled it to the door. In it were the remains of rice boiled with barley that the company had left unfinished.

  Lumps of bread had been tossed in. On top of everything someone had slopped the remnants of miso soup.

  The children, grunting happily, scratched one another’s hands shoveling the leftovers into the enameled basins they had brought along.

  The mess hall smelled of ancient rotten pickles with a mingled stench of rancid butter and jute sacking.

  Yoshinaga, who had been chopping cocklebur roots at the kitchen table, strolled over to the entranceway still wearing his jute-sack apron.

  Takeishi was tossing white birch logs into a pot-bellied stove. Inside it, birch bark crackled in the flames. He too walked to the doorway. “Kolya,” said Matsuki.

  “What?”

  Kolya was a boy with eyes round as marbles that continually rolled in circles in a rather pointed face.

  “Is Galya at home?” “Yes.”

  “What is she doing?”

  “Working.”

  Kolya stood there cramming his mouth with fragments of soup-soaked bread, and munching.

  The other children, too, clutched and gulped bread or boiled rice streaked with soybean paste.

  “Is it good?”

  “Um.”

  “Must be cold by now.”

  When they had transferred the very last grains from the bucket into their own basins, they hoisted these under their arms and ran up the snowy hill leading to their homes.

  “Thank you.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Thank you!”

  The children’s overcoats and trouser hems flapped and twisted in the wind. The three men stood in the mess hall entrance watching them go. Thin, long legs vigorously stamping the snow like powerful springs, the children climbed the hill.

  “Nasha!”

  “Liza!” Takeishi and Yoshinaga called out.

  “Whaat?” The girls called back from the hilltop.

  The children all stopped for a moment and looked down at the mess hall in the valley.

  “You’ll spill your rice,” said Yoshinaga in Japanese.

  “Whaat?”

  Yoshinaga beckoned the girls with his hand.

  Yells and shrieks of laughter resounded from the summit. After a while the children scattered, each to his or her home.

  2

  The mountain’s low easy slope parted into two hills running gradually into a steppe that unfolded into the distance.

  The barracks lay in the ravine of the two hills. Here and there on the hills, and at their foot where the steppe starts to spread, the landscape was dotted with the houses of Russians who had fled their native regions, terrified by the revolution. There also were some indigenous inhabitants of Siberia.

  Their fields had been devastated and the livestock plundered. There was no way for them to work unmolested, to make a living. They lived in wooden houses whose siding walls were held together by rusted, dangling nails. The roofs were low. Straw and trash lay strewn around the buildings.

  In places, haystacks had been piled high. Carts stood parked under the eaves. Inside the rooms were old tables, samovars, embroidered curtains. From within, however, as if from a stable, exuded the odor of strange furs and animal fat.

  To the Japanese soldiers, that was unmistakably the smell of the white man.

  This is where the children came from daily, hugging their enameled washbasins. At times it was the old men or women who came. And sometimes young, nearly adult, women.

  Yoshinaga was from the first company. Matsuki and Takeishi were privates in the second. The three no longer threw away white sugar that had gotten mixed in with bread crumbs but put it aside on plates. They made sure the leftover soup was not dumped on top of the half-eaten bread. Then, when the Russians came, they gave it out.

  “Would it be all right to come to your house?”

  “Of course!”

  “Will there be some kind of a treat?”

  “Absolutely nothing. But you’re free to come any time.”

  The words, vivaciously spoken, brought the soldiers a sense of heartfelt welcome. Their knowledge of Russian was almost nil. But they instantly recognized the notes of hospitality.

  That evening, mess hall duty done, they left one by one to avoid the officers’ attention and breathlessly clambered up the snowy hill. The air they exhaled turned to ice and stuck frost-like to the heavy fur of their winter hats.

  They hungered for the warmth and magic of a home. How many years had it been since they’d arrived in Siberia? A mere two. But they felt as if ten years separated them from their families and country. As sailors yearn for a harbor and its solid footing; they yearned for homes and missed parents and wives.

  Their present surroundings consisted of nothing but a snowy wilderness, angular brick barracks, and sporadic exchanges of gunfire.

  For whose sake, they wondered, must they be buried in the snow in such a place? It was not for their own benefit, nor that of their parents. It was for the sake of men who did nothing. Nothing except exploit them. Those were their enemies.

  The soldiers were simply rendering free service to their own enemies.

  Yoshinaga felt as if his lungs were going to burst. He was gasping for oxygen. Had it been possible to flee the barracks forever without being shot for it, he would not have wanted to stay a minute longer. Even a brief respite was fine with him—he wished to get out for a bit and taste the flavor of home. With that desire, he hurried up the sloping, snow-covered path.

  Liza’s house was on top of the hill. He stopped in the entryway. Weather stripping had been applied to the door to keep out the draft. He took his hand out of his pocket and knocked on the door.

  “Zdravstvuyte.” It was a greeting.

  A stove was blazing away in the middle of the room, filling it with warmth. He sensed its presence even outside the door.

  “Good evening. Come in.”

  A woman’s voice, clear and full of life, floated to the door.

  “Ah, Mr. Yoshinaga! Do come in.”

  The young woman, happily smiling, put out her hand.

  At first he hadn’t known about shaking hands. He had never done it. It had made him feel nervous, as if he were about to do something illicit.

  But he soon got used to it. Not only that, he became able to understand a woman’s emotions through her handshake. What did a firm squeeze mean, what did the way she used her eyes while shaking hands say? If she proffered her hand limply, there was no prospect of anything. And so on.

  While Yoshinaga was being shown into a room that contained a table, chairs, and samovar, Takeishi, emitting steam from his nose, was banging at another door. And Inagaki, Ono, Kawamoto, Sakata—each two or three minutes after the other—were pounding on still more doors.

  “Zdravstvuyte.”

  And as the women took their hands, they gauged the response levels and watched the eyes. The eyes told some of them they would be granted a certain something they desired. Th
eir hearts thumped in anticipation.

  “Right. Today I’ll kiss her hand and see how it goes.”

  It happened that two, or even three, men would hit on the same woman. Even three. In such a case, on their way back down the hill, the men would halt in their tracks, spin around to face one another, and burst into happy laughter.

  “Sopernik, aren’t you?”

  “What’s a sopernik?”

  “Sopernik—rival! Competitor in love! Ha, ha, ha.”

  3

  Matsuki, too, was one of the men struggling up the hill. He had no competitor to laugh with. Nor had he encountered a bright voice of feminine welcome. His love, if love it be, was riddled with frustration. Before climbing the hill, he made sure to wrap up and take along some bread, dried noodles, or sugar. Although the goods were meant to be distributed to the soldiers, he had quietly hidden away a portion. Holding it close, he now climbed the hill and skidded down the other side.

  Barely thirty minutes later, empty-handed and dejected, he emerged from the opposite direction, tramping up the identical slope he had just gone down. The other men’s hearts were still throbbing in rooms made hot by burning stoves.

  “I’ve had it. No more.” He trudged the snow exhausted. “This is ridiculous.”

  At the foot of the hill ran a broad thoroughfare thickly covered with snow. The snow, compressed by sled runners and boots, was frozen hard. On the way, there stretched the barbed-wire entanglements enclosing the company. Each night Matsuki ducked under this wire, cut across the treacherously icy road, and came to stand under a certain window.

  “Galya!”

  He tapped on the glass with his fingertip. Freezing wind blew through him as if to coat his lungs with ice. He waited under the eaves.

  “Galya!”

  Once more he tapped on the windowpane.

  “What?”

  A woman’s face appeared on the opposite side of the glass. White teeth peeked out from between her lips—terribly attractive.

  “Can I come in?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Bread. I’ll give it to you.”