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

by Неизвестный

  This Suzu looked very much like Ushinosuke.

  Not long before, at the Tokyo Theater, I’d seen a farce featuring Chobei of the Kakitsu (not the Hanzuin), Kanbei of the Karasu-yama, and somebody named Sarunosuke as the villains. Suzu looked just like the country maiden, I forget her name, played by Ushinosuke. It had been my first glimpse of the theater. Those days, when there was a farce performed by the kabuki, I wasn’t content until I had seen each play twice over. The actors had only recently graduated from child roles. Ushinosuke, whose voice was changing, was as beautiful as a girl. I liked him the best.

  From that association, I quickly came to like Suzu, too. Of course, it was merely a slight attraction. . . .

  Her naive dark face, as plump as if it would burst, and her sparkling eyes went straight to my heart. A country girl, she didn’t say much. You could tell at a glance that she was a good person who didn’t know the world. Hana, a Tokyoite, easily had the best of her when they talked together.

  When I went with my sister for a walk or to the playground for a ride on the swing, Suzu, even if Hana wasn’t around, would coax Minori to come along and follow us. It was that open. Even when, as Minori’s playmate, she was doing something else, as soon as I got ready to go out, she would put all the toys away and come after me. She must have been fifteen or so; I believe I was about eighteen. We didn’t have much to say to each other even when we walked together like this. More and more, though, I had a lonely feeling when Suzu didn’t come along. Even if I had an errand to do, I would wait a while for her.

  Back then there weren’t any picture postcards of actors. Buying directly from the Moriyama shop in Shintomi-cho, just about the only place that had them, I collected actors’ photographs. A friend of mine, Hayashi, who’d introduced me to the theater, had had one of the late Kikugoro as the young priest Benten reduced at the Kogawa shop in Hiyoshi-cho and wore it on his watch chain in a frame as small as the ball of his thumb. I, too, had Hayashi get me one of Ushinosuke and wore it on my chain. I’d brought many other photographs of Ushinosuke with me. But I thought it very inconvenient that I couldn’t gaze at them to my heart’s content in front of my grandparents. It’s strange what I did instead, but anyway, I started looking at Suzu’s face now and again. At some point, it became a habit.

  In everyday life, one does not ordinarily stare at a person’s face as when one studies a face in a photograph or a person on the stage. Even for those who are constantly exposed to the public, being looked at is something they feel particularly. All the more did Suzu, no matter how carefree, have to take notice when I looked at her so often and so hard.

  When I say this, it sounds indecent, as if I thought only I were a good boy. But the truth is that I liked Suzu because she resembled Ushinosuke. Because her face reminded me of Ushinosuke’s, I wanted to go on walks with her.

  It wasn’t long before something peculiar began to happen. As I gazed intently into Suzu’s face, she now and then looked back at me in the same way.

  As I sat reading at a little table of lacquered papier mâché loaned me by the inn, which I had placed near the veranda, I would suddenly get the feeling that Suzu was not far off, watching me. And in fact, this was so. I could not understand why she was looking at me so hard. No doubt she was very fond of me, but to glue her eyes on my face because of that seemed somewhat odd. Afterward, I had this thought: might it not be that Suzu, taking my rude scrutiny as a sign that I was in love with her, began to gaze earnestly into my face to show that she, too, was in love with me? It may have been something like that. An innocent country girl might well have thought that way. But when it came to that, even though I liked Suzu, I felt rather uncomfortable. I was unable to look at her face as before.

  Perhaps at this point I should say something more about the family next door. The wife was a very good person. I liked her very much. Her husband was a disagreeable person, and I disliked him. A pallid, effeminate fellow, he wore a bushy, reddish moustache. The mother, a sharp-nosed lady as lean as a rail, wore her abundant black hair cut and let down, with a flat chignon. An extremely quick-tempered person, she always had to have her own way. One night, this kind of thing happened: At eight-thirty or so, the lady had summoned a masseuse and was having a medical rubdown. My grandfather, calling the maid, said to her: “Please ask the masseuse to come here when she’s through next door.” This must have been heard next door, and we could hear the maid telling the masseuse. It was not likely the lady didn’t know about it. Toward ten, when her massage was nearly over at last, the lawyer came back from a game of go or the like. “When I lose, my shoulders feel stiffer than usual,” he remarked, allowing as how he might have a massage himself. The wife, having gone to the bath or privy, was not in the room. Positive that the lady, who knew we were waiting, would speak to him, we listened intently. But she said nothing. The man had himself massaged for upward of an hour. After he was all finished, the lady’s words were: “My own massage has been cut horribly short.”

  By the time the masseuse came to us, my grandfather was in bed and sound asleep. I sent her away. The mother, who was like this at all times, also found fault with everything in a shrill, carrying voice. When the menu was brought, she, and she alone, must choose the dishes. And so, although the children were the best of friends, the adults had almost nothing to do with each other.

  One night, I read in bed until about midnight. Then I turned off the light to go to sleep. Although ours was a ten-mat room, with three sets of bedding laid out, it was pretty close quarters. So as to leave a space on the far side where one could get by, I lay right alongside the sliding paper door that partitioned the rooms. Next to mine was my grandfather’s bedding, and next to his, my grandmother’s. My sister, putting down a quilt that overlapped the edges of theirs, slept in between them. By comparison, Hana, at my grandmother’s feet, had plenty of room.

  Suddenly, at a sound, I opened my eyes. The paper door, which reached across the room in four panels, was softly sliding open. Wonderingly, I raised my head from the pillow. The panel, about two-thirds of the way open, softly, quietly, slid shut again. As it was farther down the room than I was, and with only the dim light of a paper lantern in either room, I could not make out who had done such a thing, or why. But right away I thought of Suzu. How bold of her, I thought. And why had she done it? Thinking that perhaps Suzu really had begun to fall in love with me, I felt something a little bit like happiness. Not really caring, though, I soon fell asleep again.

  The next morning, until I was in the bath and happened to remember, I’d forgotten all about it. Even when I did remember, it somehow seemed like a dream.

  At breakfast, it was mealtime in the next room as well.

  “Last night, that panel over there opened,” we heard the mother say.

  “Yes, it opened all right,” the lawyer said, with a small laugh.

  We heard this quite distinctly. But both my grandfather and grandmother were silent.

  “Suzu. Did you notice anything?” asked the mother, her voice rising slightly. For a moment, Suzu seemed stuck for a reply. Then she said: “No. Nothing.”

  “You mean you don’t know about it? But the panel’s right by where you were sleeping.” The mother’s tone was scornful.

  “It doesn’t matter, does it?” As if reproaching the mother, the wife put strength into her low voice.

  At this point, I could not stay silent any longer.

  “Madam. I know about the door opening, too,” I called out in a deliberate, loud voice.

  “Keep quiet,” my grandfather said to me with his eyes, trying to restrain me.

  “The young man next door says he knows about it. Who opened it, then?” the mother demanded agitatedly. “The young man next door” had an unpleasant sound to it. I began to get angry, but my grandfather gave me a stern look. I forced myself to be silent.

  “Didn’t you open it, Suzu?” the indomitable mother continued.

  “No. I don’t like this.” Suzu’s slow country
speech was like a bucket of water thrown over the conversation. Although she hadn’t said anything to lay the blame on me, once Suzu had doused all further talk, it was just as if I had been blamed. It made me sulky.

  “Mother, haven’t you said enough?” The wife seemed to be thinking what a shame it all was. It sounded to me as if they had been through this sort of thing many times.

  “Of course, it’s possible that everyone was too sleepy to know what was going on,” said the lawyer, who until then had fallen silent.

  “You speak of it so lightly. This time it was just about being open, so no harm has been done, but Suzu is about to be a bride. I don’t know if any of you are aware of it, but the night before last, the door was also opened about a foot. Did you know that?”

  “I knew,” answered the lawyer. It sounded as if he were smiling.

  This startled me. I am a very light sleeper and felt sure that I would have awakened immediately at anything out of the ordinary. But of this I knew nothing.

  “In this heat, we cannot go back to the city. And there are people in the next room, so we’ve got to put up with this paper door. But I will not stand for this constant opening of it.”

  “Grandfather, it was not I who opened that door,” I appealed to him exasperatedly.

  My grandfather, smiling slightly, gave me a light nod.

  “When you’ve had your breakfast, we’ll go for a walk.”

  Intensely annoyed, I left the room right away. After a while, my grandfather, in a pair of slippers and a big gray hat like a helmet, a walking stick on his shoulder, came downstairs to the entryway where I was waiting.

  “Shall we walk toward Benten Mountain?” he asked.

  I replied: “The view from there is probably the best.” Back then, the new road hadn’t been put through yet. Walking along the mountain road that was more like a dry streambed, we talked.

  My grandfather told me a story about the Zen priest Hakuin. It is a famous story, and I’ve heard it since from many different people. It seems that a certain maiden, becoming pregnant, was asked by her father who the baby’s father was. In desperation, the girl said it was the high priest Hakuin. I forget the other circumstances, but anyway, her father was overjoyed and rushed off to the temple. When he told the priest, Hakuin is reported merely to have said: “Ah, so?” In due course of time, the real father’s identity became known. Absolutely flabbergasted, the girl’s father went back to make an abject apology. When he was done, Hakuin again said merely: “Ah, so?”

  It was a pertinent story, and it took me right out of my bad mood. When we got back, the family next door was busy packing its things. After they’d had lunch, three rickshaws arrived. Only the wife, looking as if she were sorry things had turned out this way, came by briefly to say good-bye. She said they were going down to the Tsutaya in Sokokura.

  As for Suzu, she of the carefree face that resembled Ushinosuke’s, she was just about heartbroken. The spirit had gone out of her. Suddenly feeling sorry for her, I wanted to say something but didn’t say anything. Only Hana saw them off as far as the entryway. The lawyer, in a Western suit, walked about supervising the rickshaw men. I watched them until they were out of sight around Benten Mountain.

  That was the last I saw of Suzu. In ten years, we haven’t met even once. But the year after that, at a charity performance of the kabuki, I saw the lawyer, his wife, and Minori in one of the boxes. Their new maid, a girl of fifteen or sixteen, had a more intelligent face than Suzu’s. In the corridor leading to the restrooms, the wife and I passed each other, but pretended not to recognize one another.

  That is the story. But if I may say a last word on behalf of Suzu who loved me, when she opened the door that time, it wasn’t with any lewd intention (open the door, and then what). No, we’re talking about a dumb country girl. When she did that, she must have been thinking that to stare into another person’s face was a way to reveal one’s love. She must have been trying to show her love for me.

  So my friend, neatly and easily tacking on the conclusion (perhaps because he had done so so many times), completed this story about when he was loved.

  TANIZAKI JUN’ICHIRŌ

  Like Kawabata Yasunari and Shiga Naoya, Tanizaki Jun’ichirō (1886–1965) had a long career as a writer, and his popularity has never waned. Artful, sometimes erotic, elegant, and always masterful, Tanizaki is often considered in Europe and the United States as the writer who best typifies the highest aesthetic accomplishment of twentieth-century Japanese literature. His unusual story “The Two Acolytes” (Futari no chigo, 1918) is a moving and somewhat unusual example of his ability, like that of Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, to recast themes from the Japanese past in order to serve his own artistic purposes.

  THE TWO ACOLYTES (FUTARI NO CHIGO)

  Translated by Paul McCarthy

  The two acolytes were only two years apart in age—thirteen and fifteen. The elder was called Senjumaru, the younger Rurikōmaru. Each had been entrusted by his parents at an early age to Mount Hiei, the great Buddhist monastery to the northeast of the capital, where no women were permitted access. There, an eminent monk took charge of the two boys’ upbringing. Senjumaru had been born into a prosperous family in the province of Omi, but circumstances arose that led to his being brought to the monastery when he was four. Rurikōmaru was actually the son of a lesser councillor at the imperial court; but he, too, for certain reasons, was taken to the holy mountain—the spiritual protector of the imperial capital—at the tender age of three, soon after being weaned from his wet nurse’s breast. Of course, neither of the boys had any clear memory of what had happened, nor any reliable evidence of their own families; there was merely talk and rumors from here and there. They had neither father nor mother, only the monk who had so carefully reared them. They relied on him as a parent and felt sure it was their destiny to enter the Way of the Buddha.

  “You should regard yourselves as very lucky boys. If ordinary people yearn for their parents and long for their hometowns, it’s all the result of worldly passions and karmic attachments. But you two have known nothing of the world beyond this holy mountain and have no parents, so you’re free of the suffering that comes from worldly passions.” The monk often told them this, and indeed they felt grateful for their situation. Why, even the good holy man himself, before retreating to Mount Hiei, had known the pangs of all kinds of desire in the world outside. He had engaged in meditation for a very long time before he was able finally to cut the bonds of attachment, it was said. And there were many among his present disciples who, though they listened to his lectures on the sutras each morning and evening, were still unable to conquer their passions and mourned the fact. But the two of them, not knowing anything of the world, had been immune to the dreadful sickness of desire. They had learned that once the passions were overcome, the fruit of enlightenment was one’s eventual reward. And here they were, free from those temptations from the very start! They eagerly looked forward to having their hair shaved off and taking the precepts of a monk and, in due course becoming true followers of the Way, just like their teacher. They were sure of it and spent their days in that hope.

  Nonetheless, they had a certain innocent curiosity about the perilous outside world of passion and pain. Neither ever wanted actually to try living in such a sinful place, but they did think about it and imagine it from time to time. Their teacher and other elders told them that of all the places in the defiled world, only the holy mountain where they now were gave some hint of the glories of the Pure Land to the West. The vast expanse of land stretching in all directions from the foothills of the holy mountain beneath the blue sky dappled with white clouds—that was the world of the five defilements so vividly described in the sutras. The two of them would stand on the top of Mount Shimei and look down toward where, as they’d been told, their old homes were; they couldn’t help fantasizing, indulging in childish dreams.

  One day Senjumaru, gazing toward the province of Ōmi, pointed at Lake Biwa shining beneath a f
aint purple haze and said to Rurikōmaru in the confident manner of an elder brother to a younger, “Well, that’s the ‘fleeting world’ everybody talks about, but what do you suppose it’s really like?”

  “They say it’s a horrible place, full of dust and dirt, but when you look at it from here, the surface of that lake looks as clear as a mirror. Doesn’t it seem that way to you, too?” said Rurikōmaru a bit timidly, as if afraid of being laughed at by his older friend for saying something stupid.

  “Oh, but under the surface of that beautiful lake lives a dragon god, and on Mount Mikami on the shore there’s a giant centipede that’s even bigger than that dragon! I’ll bet you didn’t know that. The world outside looks very pretty from up here, but if you once go down, you’d better be careful! That’s what our master says, and I’m sure he’s right.” A knowing smile played about Senjumaru’s lips.

  Another time Rurikōmaru was looking at the sky over the distant capital. He pointed at the ripples of gray roof tiles there in the lowlands, spread out before them like a landscape scroll. Wrinkling his brow in wonder, he said, “That’s part of the world outside, too, Senjumaru, but look at those wonderful halls and towers! They’re just as grand looking as the Hall of the Healing Buddha and the Great Lecture Hall here, don’t you think? What do you suppose those buildings are?”

  “There’s a palace there where the emperor of all Japan lives. It’s the grandest, noblest place in the whole outside world. But for someone to live there, to be born as a ruler with the Ten Virtues, he’d have to have piled up an awful lot of merit in his former lives. That’s why we have to practice so hard on the mountain here and let the roots of goodness grow deep down inside us.”