by Неизвестный
THE OLD MAN (RŌJIN)
Translated by P. G. O’Neill
It was already a year since a fresh war had begun in Korea, but the neighborhood where the old man lived showed no sign that even the previous war had come to an end. In the first place, there were his clothes: an old patched army jacket and a pair of American G.I. trousers which he had obtained from a prostitute living at the same place. The background against which the old man searched for cigarette ends with the tottering step of a battered clockwork doll was the city of Tokyo; but he would hardly have looked out of place if he had been set down instead in a dense forest in Upper Burma where the luxuriant growth of vegetation had suddenly sucked in the smell of death. He carried a haversack slung across from each shoulder. One, which contained prepared food as seldom as the haversacks of those miserable soldiers in Burma, had in it only an old tin can he used as a cup, a box of matches and a tattered towel he had picked up somewhere, chopsticks, a newspaper to wrap any special find such as a bit of discarded food that looked as if it might keep, and a pencil stolen from a cycle-racing tipster at the same lodging-house. At this welfare hostel, stealing was as unremarkable as it was in the army. The place where the old man slept was in a row of perhaps more than a hundred so-called welfare hostels, but such a description could lead to their being confused with establishments in countries with thorough-going social security systems. To be exact, his had the long name of “The Heavenly Curtain Hotel’s House of Hope, The Fortieth Welfare Hostel in trust to, and under the management of, the Greater Tokyo Federation of Non-luxury Hotel Associations,” but in case this leads anyone to take it yet again for one of the fine establishments just mentioned, it should be pointed out that the Heavenly Curtain Hotel’s House of Hope was the sort of place that really did rely on curtains to shut out the heavens. That is to say, it was like a rectangular box with sides made from boards only a fraction the thickness of those formerly used for barracks, from the top of which hastily tarred army tenting looked skyward. One could think of it as a big apple box dragged up from a drain where it had lain until sodden. This “house” had only one room, and virtually all those who lodged there, from the old man down, had somewhere on them khaki clothing or equipment from the last war. The gate pillars—by which is meant two slender poles supporting a board with the long-winded name of the place—were topped by two rusty and crumbling steel helmets as if they marked the graves of unknown war dead. Six years after the end of the war the upper levels of society had led the way in gradually casting off wartime clothing. Already, along such streets as the Ginza, the only people with anything military about them were the soldiers and police of the Occupation, and beggars, scavengers and the like. It was as if all signs of the previous war had been ironed away until the solitary crumpled spot that remained was the welfare hostel of the Heavenly Curtain Hotel. Standing side by side with all the other buildings in the street, the misshapen rectangle of this wooden lodging-house sheltered men and women with dull, deeply puffy faces. The old man thought the whole quarter probably held about ten thousand people. All who came there were under some great pressure. People whose lifelong work had been torn from them by such great pressure gathered there from all parts of the country. More and more of them seem to be coming again, thought the old man.
Standing between the helmeted gateposts, he looked up at the sky. It would be about seven o’clock in the morning. It was already terribly hot. As the drops of light snatched up the moisture, the boarding began to buckle, and from time to time, even the metal sheeting creaked free from its nails. The open drain had completely dried up; but the smell from it remained unchanged, no matter what. With it came, as ever, the stink of rotting leather and fish-based vitamin foods to fill the air all around.
The old man suddenly tried to think what he had had to eat the night before but, as always, his memory was far from clear. With shoulders bent and head down, he began to walk. For thirteen yen he bought a pound of steamed potatoes from the cheerful woman who did them as a sideline to a book-lending business, and walked on chewing them with his front teeth into pieces small enough to be washed down with drinks of water. The old man might resign himself to the loss of almost all his back teeth, but one of the things which troubled him was what he would do if his front teeth fell out too. If he were now to lose his front teeth as well, he would no longer be able to carry on his trade. That is, he would no longer be able to sell his rubber brushes.
Even though the war had been left behind in his particular quarter of Asakusa, there was certainly no reason for even this old man to have to eat steamed potatoes all day at a time of such great recovery from the devastation of war and such abundance that it was already possible to start a new war. The twenty-five yen which a set meal would have cost him was there in his haversack. But today he had something special in mind, and this required him to take care of all the one hundred and twelve yen which the bag contained.
On the afternoon of the previous day, the old man had been chewing bread as he sheltered from the heat beneath some shady trees in the Rokku district of Asakusa that had somehow escaped the fires. He had been reading a newspaper that a young man had thrown away. The name or date of the paper did not matter to him. For so long now, since days that had all but faded from his memory, a newspaper had been something with war on the first page, money-making on the second, death on the third, and gardening and women’s affairs on the fourth. Medically speaking, he might be suffering from amnesic senility or some such thing, thought the old man, but what good would it do him even if he did know the exact name of his illness? He had also decided for himself that he was probably about sixty-five years old, but it was not likely to matter very much even if he was not.
It would certainly be wrong, however, to assume from this that the old man had lost interest in things generally. In all probability, he read newspapers more avidly than anyone else in the hostel. His small steel-rimmed glasses were seldom anything but bright. In the newspapers the old man was searching for himself, for his past. If he saw an article about a fire in Hachiōji, off he would go all the way to Hachiōji. If it said that there had been a raid on a gang running an illicit still in Fukagawa, he would go to Fukagawa. If there was a murder in Kawasaki, he would set off for Kawasaki. The old man was searching for himself and, above all, for his birthplace. If he found it, he intended to leave the stinking welfare hostel and settle in his native town or village; and after setting up a house of his own, to make a living and then to die there.
Now in the newspaper he had read the previous day was an article telling how, at the bathing beach of the town of Y in the Shōnan region, two young women had killed themselves in a love suicide. Reading it made him suddenly feel, in his usual way, that perhaps he had been born in a seaside town. In any case, it had been a long time since he had seen the blue of the sea, and his trade invariably prospered in towns where there had been some such misfortune as a love suicide, murder, or fire. His trade, as mentioned before, consisted of making a speech and then selling rubber brushes, but in places that were still heavily veiled in the shadow of death, his speeches brought him enough to pay for his bed and a meal even if he sold no brushes at all. It was certainly very pleasant to get money just for making a speech. When he did so, he felt like a priest or a member of the Diet. Then he would wonder whether he had not perhaps been a politician. The old man was well aware that the people in the welfare hostel and everyone else treated him as if he were mad; and it did not upset him in the least. If he were allowed a touch of madness which brought him money just to make a speech, was it not more profitable to be mad? He sometimes thought so.
The old man’s plan for this particular day was to go to the beach in the town of Y where the love suicides had taken place. If he took a tram direct from the stop in the quarter where his lodgings were, it would take him as far as Tokyo Station in about an hour. But he had never yet boarded at the local stop, for he liked to walk. He liked to wander leisurely along, particularly when he fir
st left the lodging-house; he would think then about who and what he had been, and who and what he was. Even though his memory was imperfect, it was not as if his mind was completely shut off by a curtain of unbroken whiteness. The curtain had any number of holes through which he could sometimes peep into dimly lit places that seemed to belong to his past. Only the previous day he had come to a sudden stop when, having finished with the newspaper, he had stood up and, keeping to the shade of the trees, had come out in front of the Rokku fairground with its roundabouts. Although not a child was riding on them, the wooden horses were going round and round to the tune of a forty-or fifty-year-old song called “The Beauty of Nature,” and then to the music of a children’s song, “The Sunset Glow.” As he gazed at them blankly, another small hole suddenly appeared in the white curtain of his mind, and through it two fragments came back to him: “18th April” and “the bombing.” It was unusual for a number to emerge, but he was at a loss to know how the two things linked up together or what their connection was with the roundabout and the old songs. He still had other things which seemed to be bits of his memory, but none of them tied up with any of the others. The small holes in the curtain remained quite separate. Into them went parallel rays of dark light to fall on the past for which the old man was searching, and from them, at times, came sounds like mad laughter.
Nothing had any connection with anything else, but the old man felt no pain when this fact confronted him. Were not wars almost the only things that followed on one after the other? The outside world in general was running on smoothly and, thanks to this, his own inner inconsequences did not trouble him at all. The old man felt that, strangely enough, life had probably become a little easier since war began in Korea a year ago this summer. It seemed, too, that more people now listened to his speeches. When he left the welfare hostel in the mornings, therefore, the old man took great pains over his dress. This involved no more than putting on the things he needed to appear in public, but what required most care was his nose. The old man’s nose had no side to the right nostril. On that side there was no flesh covering the bone. His nostrils were thus uneven, the one with the other. The forty-year-old prostitute who always slept on the mat next to the old man’s at the welfare hostel had prattled on about it sometimes, talking knowingly of how she was sure it must have been syphilis that had made his nose like that, and of how she had heard that they could cure anything by bringing on a high fever and supposed it was that that had made him funny in the head, when the high fever damaged his mind so that he could not remember anything. At night his nose sometimes itched unbearably when a white powder was breathed out around his imperfect nostril; and it was this alone, his very own nose, which caused him endless trouble. That morning, for example, he had carefully wiped away the white powder, cut off with a penknife a prong from one of his stock of brushes, and fitted this exquisitely hand-wrought nosepiece into the part that he lacked. Then, securing it top and bottom by means of elastic bands round the back of his head and neck, he had set out.
He walked down to the River Sumida and there waited for the tram. As he waited, he repeated softly to himself the name which he had decided on was his own and the words of his speech, putting himself into the right frame of mind for his lecture tour. Today was, after all, a special occasion, for he was off to the beach where there were sure to be tens of thousands of people. It was the sea for him today. Foreigners would no doubt be there too. In short, there would probably be any number of people who would understand what was written on the sandwich-boards he carried. Since the boards hung down front and back, the old man disliked riding in very crowded trams, and it was because of this that he let them go by one after the other.
The scavengers who had left the welfare hostel while it was still dark to clear up the streets of Asakusa came back one after the other. All of them greeted the old man as they passed. In reply he would give a quick lift of his bony chin and raise his right hand. The reason why he offered only such a cursory greeting was partly because the boards front and back and his home-made nose prevented him from moving very suddenly, but the truth of it was that the old man had no liking for these people. They made it impossible to enjoy a good night’s sleep in the hostel, however much one earned. What he disliked most about them was the incessant noise they made all night long with a sustained clatter of clogs or shoes as they discarded them at the entrance, for all the world like a centipede back from a journey.
A crowd of them came along. Adjusting the glasses that had slipped down his nose, the old man nodded and, gripping his bamboo stick in his left hand like a soldier with a sword, threw out his chest. When acquaintances happened to pass him at times like this, his right hand went naturally toward his army cap, and he would think that perhaps he had once been a soldier. A high-ranking one, of course—a general or something like that. Even his name would tell him that he belonged to a military family. . . .
With a clatter of boards, the old man climbed into the tram and heard a voice say,
“Hey, look at old grandpa here!”
It was a rasping voice, so peculiarly rasping that it carried no mirth. Indeed, it would only be a slight extravagance to say that there was a strange sadness about it. The old man always felt sorry for people who laughed at him, especially if they were young. Turning round he saw two young toughs in striped shirts. As the old man glared at the one who had spoken, he suddenly hunched his shoulders like a foreigner and said to his companion, “What does it say? Hey, look! ‘The only speech-making beggar in Japan,’ it says. ‘The product of a defeated country. King of the gutter,’ it says. Heh!”
Perhaps the rest of the wording given on the boards should be added for reference. There followed an English version of the phrases the tough had just read. It went: LOOK AT THE ONLY ONE BEGGAR, WHO IS THE GREATEST PRODUCT OF THE DEFEATED JAPAN. This part was written in big block capitals; the remainder was written in thin letters which filled every inch of the two-foot-square boards: “Listen!—to the tragic story of man’s existence told by the Japanese Jean Valjean, in a Japan that is struggling along a hard and stormy path. Listen to his own songs and monologues, to his tales of popular morality, religion, and philosophy . . .”
IBUSE MASUJI
Ibuse Masuji (1898–1993) had a long and successful career as a writer. Born in a small village near Hiroshima, he often drew on his memories of life in the countryside to create some of his most memorable characters. During the war, when Ibuse was in his middle years, he wrote a number of stories about life in wartime, culminating in his novel Black Rain (Kuroi ame, 1966), which, for many readers around the world, remains the supreme literary description of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. His story “Old Ushitora” (Ushitora jiisan, 1950) deals with life in the countryside, marked by Ibuse’s special brand of humor and compassion.
OLD USHITORA (USHITORA JIISAN)
Translated by John Bester
The Kasumigamori district of our village is divided into eastern and western sections by a winding road that passes through the village’s very center. A river, also winding, tangles with the road as it runs down the valley. The people in the next village of Yaburodani, farther up the stream, must pass along the main road through Kasumigamori whenever they visit any other village, for Yaburodani is surrounded on three sides by steep hills, the only side lying open being that facing Kasumigamori. Yaburodani, in short, is the village at the farthest end of the valley. When Kasumigamori children spot a child from Yaburodani passing through, they often cry out teasingly, “Old back of beyond!”
In Yaburodani, there lives an old man called Grandpa Ushitora. His real name is Torakichi, but since the first half of his given name means “tiger,” and since he is a past master of the art of rearing bulls, someone once dubbed him Ushitora, “Ox-tiger”—two animals that stand adjacent in the Japanese zodiac— and the name stuck. His main occupation is providing bulls for breeding purposes. He also has a sharp eye, of course, for distinguishing between a good animal and a bad one. H
e can buy what seems an exceedingly ordinary calf and rear it into a fine, well-built bull. Cattle dealers from other parts often ask Grandpa the best way to raise cattle, but he invariably denies any special knowledge of such things.
A while ago, at a grand cattle show held jointly by two prefectures, Grandpa Ushitora’s three bulls won awards. First, second, and third prizes all went to bulls entered by the old man. For the prizegiving ceremony, a representative came from the regional branch of a leading Osaka newspaper and took two photographs of the old man for publication, he said, in the regional edition. First he told Grandpa to smile and took a photo of him with his mouth open, thus revealing the gaps in his teeth; then he took another showing the old man stroking the head of the bull that had won first prize.
The same newspaperman also asked Grandpa some questions. “I wonder, now,” he said, “if you’d list your essential conditions for raising cattle? Of course, there’s love for the animal, which I imagine is an indispensable item. And then, I suppose, one needs to be thoroughly versed in the habits of cattle. But isn’t there some secret formula or other? This is a very important matter where stockbreeding is concerned, so I’d be grateful if you’d let us hear some of your ideas.”
At a loss for a reply and with a large number of people looking on, Grandpa stood in some embarrassment.
“Now, Grandpa,” spoke up an official from the stockbreeding section of the prefectural office, “surely there’s some formula, some trick of the trade, isn’t there?”
Grandpa thought for a long time and finally turned to the newspaperman.