The Miner

by Sōseki Natsume

  I hate to think that this world of clouds is going to be out there, blocking the path ahead, for the rest of my allotted span. Because what that means is that every time anxiety makes me take a step, I walk one step deeper into anxiety. Pursued by anxiety from behind, drawn on by anxiety ahead, I have to keep moving, but I can walk and walk and walk, and nothing is going to be solved. I’ll go on walking through an anxiety that will stay unsettled as long as I live.

  I’d be better off if the clouds would grow darker every step of the way. Then I could keep going from darkness to deeper darkness. Before long the world would be pitch black and I wouldn’t be able to see myself. Then everything would be fine.

  The road I’m traveling refuses to be of any help. It won’t turn bright, but then, it won’t turn dark either. Always somewhere halfway between light and shadow, it remains enveloped in a fog of unsettled anxiety. A life like this is not worth living, I know, but still I cling to it. I want to go somewhere without people and live by myself, and if I can’t do that, I might as well …

  Strange, the thought of the ultimate “might as well” didn’t frighten me. In Tokyo I had often been on the verge of committing something rash, but never without a throb of fear. Afterward there would always be a rush of horror at what I’d almost done and I’d be glad I hadn’t done it. But this time there was no throb, no rush, no nothing, probably because I was so full of anxiety that the throbs and rushes could have gone to hell for all I cared. And probably, too, I knew in the back of my mind that the “might as well” was not about to happen at any moment. Maybe I figured there was nothing imuch to worry about. It could have been tomorrow, the next day, a week later. And, if need be, I could have put it off indefinitely. No doubt I was half-conscious of the fact that, whether I was going to throw myself over Kegon Falls or into the crater of Mt. Asama, I still had a long way to go. Who’s going to start throbbing before he actually comes to the place where he plans to end it all? That’s why I could let myself think about doing it. This out-of-focus world was agony, but as long as there was hope of escaping from it before that throb happened, there was still some point in dragging my heavy legs along. I had decided at least this much for myself, apparently. But I know this now only from having dissected my psychological state after the fact. At the time, I was walking with only one thought in mind: Go into the dark, you’ve got to go into the dark. Now it seems ridiculous, but there are times in life when we come to feel that the only comfort left us is to move ahead toward death. Of course, the death we’re aiming for probably has to be pretty far away for us to feel this. At least, I believe it would have to be. When it’s too close, it can never be a comfort. That’s just how death works.

  So here I was, walking along, my head filled with fog—into the dark, got to go into the dark—when someone called me from behind. It’s strange: your soul can be ready to drift off into space, but another person calls you and you find it’s still anchored down somewhere. I turned around, not quite knowing why. One thing is certain, though: I was not even conscious that this was in response to something. Only when I had turned did I realize that I hadn’t gone forty yards from the tea stand. And there in the road in front of it was that cross between a hanten and a dotera, calling me and flashing his huge, tobacco-stained grin.

  I hadn’t talked to anyone since leaving Tokyo the night before, never dreamed that a person would try speaking to me. I felt absolutely certain that I was unfit to be spoken to. Then it happened so suddenly—he was waving to me frantically and showing me this big, snaggletoothed grin—that the foggy feeling I turned around with cleared itself out, and my feet started moving in his direction almost before I was aware of it.

  Now, let me tell you, I didn’t like anything about this man—his face, his clothes, his movements. Especially when he gave me the once-over with those white eyes of his, I could almost feel myself beginning to hate him. Less than forty yards later the feeling had disappeared and I turned back to him with a sense of warmth instead, but don’t ask me why. My only thought had been to go into the dark. Which means that when I started walking back toward the tea stand, I was moving away from my destination, away from the dark. Still, I was almost glad. I’ve had plenty of experiences since then, and I’ve run across contradictions like this everywhere. It’s not just me. These days, I don’t believe any more in the existence of “character.” Novelists congratulate themselves on their creation of this kind of character or that kind of character, and readers pretend to talk knowingly about character, but all it amounts to is that the writers are enjoying themselves writing lies and the readers are enjoying themselves reading lies. In fact, there is no such thing as character, something fixed and final. The real thing is something that novelists don’t know how to write about. Or, if they tried, the end result would never be a novel. Real people are strangely difficult to make sense out of. Even a god would have his hands full trying. But maybe I’m jumping to conclusions, presuming that other people are a mess just because I’m put together in such a disorderly way. If so, I should apologize.

  Well, anyhow, I walked up to this dark blue dotera and he said to me, “Hello there, youngster,” as if he’d known me for years. He had his chin pulled in a little behind his collar, and he was staring at me, somewhere up around my forehead.

  I planted my two brown legs a good distance from him and asked politely, “Yes, sir?”

  Ordinarily, I was not the sort who would favor someone like this dotera with a cordial reply, especially if I’d been called “youngster.” A grunt or a “What?” was about as far as I would go. But at that moment I had the feeling that I and this dotera, with his horrid physiognomy, were human beings on an entirely equal footing. Nor, certainly, was I lowering myself to him in hopes of gaining some advantage. In return, he spoke to me as if he also saw us as equals.

  “Hey, kid. Want a job?”

  Until that moment, I had been resigning myself to having no other business in life than to go into the dark, so when asked out of nowhere if I wanted a job, I didn’t know what to say. I just stood there with my bare shanks planted in the earth, staring at this fellow with my mouth hanging open.

  “Hey, kid, want a job? How about it? Everybody’s got to work.”

  By the time he repeated his question, I had grasped enough of the situation to be able to reply.

  “I don’t mind.”

  This was my answer. But the fact that my head had managed—in a makeshift way, perhaps—to clear itself out enough for these three words to reach my mouth, meant that it had passed through a certain—albeit simple—process, one that went something like this:

  I didn’t know where I was going, but I was sure I wanted to go where there were no people. In spite of that, I had turned and started walking toward the dotera. So, while I was walking, I couldn’t help feeling a little disappointed in myself. Even the dotera was a human being, after all. Here, someone supposedly heading away from human beings had been drawn back in the direction of a human being, which not only proved how great was the gravitational pull of human beings, it also proved that I myself was so weak that I had already abandoned my own resolution. In short, I wanted to go into the dark, but I was actually doing it against my will, and if some entanglement came up to hold me back, I was probably ready to jump at the chance to stay in the real world. Fortunately, the dotera had provided me with the entanglement I needed, and so my feet simply turned around and went toward him. Let’s say I Shamefully Betrayed My Ultimate Goal—a little. If the first words out of the dotera’s mouth had not been “Want a job?” but instead, “Where you going to do it, kid, the mountains or the fields?” that goal I had been forgetting about would have come back to me with a start, and the thought of the dark place, the place without people, would have filled me with horror. Which only goes to show how my ties with the world had begun to reassert themselves the instant I began to retrace my steps. And the more he called to me, and the more I moved in his direction, step by step, the more these ties seem to h
ave grown in strength, the moment I planted my bare shanks in the earth in front of him being the point at which they reached their highest intensity. It was at that moment he asked, “Want a job?”—an invitation by means of which this scruffy dotera exploited my psychological state with great finesse. My initial response to this unexpected question seems to have been a blank stare, but by the time I snapped out of it, I had become a human being in the real world. As a human being in the real world, I had to eat. And to eat, I would have to work.

  “I don’t mind.”

  The answer slipped from my mouth without the slightest difficulty. “No, of course you don’t! How could you?” the expression on his face seemed to say. Strangely enough, I found this expression perfectly natural.

  “I don’t mind, but what kind of job?” I added.

  “You’ll make plenty of money. I guarantee it. What do you say?”

  He watched me expectantly, a gleeful grin on his face. A smile from the dotera was not about to charm any hearts, though. His was not a face made for smiling. The more he tried, the worse it looked. Still, I found that smile strangely moving.

  “OK,” I said, “I’ll give it a try.”

  “You will? Great! There’s plenty of money in it for you.”

  “I don’t care about the money.”

  “Huh?” His voice sounded strange when he said this.

  “What kind of job is it?”

  “I’ll tell you if you promise me you’ll take it. You’ll take it, kid, right? I don’t want you backing down, now, after I tell you what it is. You’ll take it for sure, right?”

  “I’m planning to.”

  This reply didn’t come as easily as the first one. I more or less had to force it out. Apparently, I was willing to do anything within reason but still wanted to leave myself an escape, which is probably why I said I was planning to take it. (I know it’s a little strange for me to be writing about myself in this tentative way, as though I were someone not myself, but humans are such inconsistent beings that we can’t say anything for certain about them—even when they’re us. And when it comes to past events, it’s even worse: there’s no distinguishing between ourselves and other people. The best we can say is “probably” or “apparently.” I may be accused of irresponsibility for this, but there’s no getting around it, because it’s true. Which is why I intend to continue with this approach whenever anything doubtful comes up.)

  The dotera understood my answer to mean that I had accepted his offer.

  “Come in,” he said. “Relax. We’ll have some tea and I’ll tell you all about it.”

  That seemed fine with me. I stepped in and sat down on the bench next to the dotera. A woman in her forties with a twisted mouth set a cup of odd-smelling tea in front of me. The first sip made me hungry. Or maybe I just suddenly realized I was hungry. I was thinking about using the thirty-two sen in my wallet to buy something to eat, when the dotera said, “Have a smoke?” and shoved a pack of Asahis sideways in my direction. Quite the gentleman. I didn’t mind that he was offering me such cheap smokes, and I could live with the fact that the corner of the pack was torn. But it was grimy, too, and squashed so badly that the cigarettes inside must have been squeezed together into a single lump. The dotera had no sleeve pockets on his dotera, and probably had to stuff his smokes into the pocket of his haragake.4

  “No, thanks,” I said.

  With no show of disappointment, the dotera extricated a cigarette from the lump using his dirt-blackened fingernails. Just as I had thought, the cigarette was wrinkled and bent. Still, it didn’t look torn, and when he puffed away at it, smoke came from his nostrils. Strange to see it just barely managing to function as a cigarette.

  “How old are you, kid?” he asked. I had begun to feel that his tone became a touch more respectful when he was making promises about money, while at other times I was just “kid.” He obviously had money on the brain.

  “Nineteen,” I answered, which was true at the time.

  “Still young,” said the woman with the twisted mouth. She was wiping a tray and had her back turned to us, so I couldn’t see her expression at that moment. I had no idea whether she was talking to herself or to the dotera or to me, but her words seemed to spark something in the dotera.

  “Sure!” he exclaimed. “Nineteen is young. It’s the best time of life for work.” He sounded as though he was determined to have me working. I said nothing and stepped away from the bench.

  There was a table for sweets out front. On it, a large platter stood beside a pastry box from which the edge had been broken off. A blue cloth lay atop the platter, not quite covering some round, deep-fried manjū.5 I had approached the table with the thought of eating some of these, but on close inspection I found that the manjū plate was swarming with iflies. The sound of my footstep as I came to a stop by the plate sent them scattering in all directions, but no sooner had I begun to recover from my initial shock and try examining the manjū than the flies, as if signaling to each other that the storm had passed and it was safe now, zipped back down to the manjū. The greasy, yellow crusts received a scattering of black spots. I was on the verge of reaching for a pastry when the spots suddenly arranged themselves into a network of lines, like the constellations on a starry night, and I held back, staring down at the plate.

  “Would you like a manjū?” the woman asked. “They’re fresh. Fried ’em myself the day before yesterday.”

  She had apparently finished wiping the tray and was standing now on the other side of the table. I looked up at her in surprise, and she, for some reason that was unclear to me, suddenly held out a thick hand over the plate.

  “Will you look at these flies!”’ she cried, moving her outstretched hand up and down once, then two or three times from side to side. “Here, I’ll get you some manjū if you want.”

  Before I could say anything, she took a wooden dish down from a shelf and, using long bamboo chopsticks, plopped seven manjū onto it. “I’d better put them over here,” she said, carrying the dish to the bench I had been sharing with the dotera and setting it down.

  All I could do was return to my place and sit down beside the wooden dish. The flies had already found it. Staring at the flies and the manjū and the wooden dish, I said to the dotera, “Have one.”

  This was not entirely in return for his earlier offer of a cigarette. I probably wanted to see, too, whether the dotera would eat these fly-covered manjū that had been fried the day before yesterday.

  “Thanks,” he said, and popped the topmost one into his mouth without the slightest hesitation. He seemed to find it pretty tasty, judging from the way his fat lips were working, so I decided to take a chance. I picked out one of the cleaner-looking manjū from the bottom of my side of the pile and sank my teeth into it. Immediately the flavor of the oil spread over my tongue, and the rancid filling assaulted my taste buds. I took it calmly, though, given the situation. And when the filling and the crust and the oil had slipped smoothly into my stomach, oddly enough, my hand moved out toward the wooden dish again. By this time, the dotera had polished off a second one and was reaching for a third. His movements were much faster than mine, and he didn’t talk when he ate. He seemed to have forgotten about the job he was offering me and the big money. As a result, all seven manjū disappeared in the space of two or three breaths—and I had eaten only two of them. The dotera had finished off the other five in the wink of an eye.

  A thing may be so dirty as to make us flinch, but once we take that first bite, we can go on eating it without too much strain on our sensibilities. This “truth” was something I would come to experience firsthand at the mine, and now it sounds absurdly obvious, but at the time, while I was chewing on those manjū, I was a little shocked to find myself wanting more. I was hungry. And besides, my companion was the dotera. Watching him gobble down these sand-flecked manjū, I began to feel a certain competitive urge and an awareness that “sensibilities” were not only useless, they could put you at a tremendous di
sadvantage. I ordered another serving from the woman.

  This time, as soon as the dish hit the bench, I popped one into my mouth, no “Have one” or anything else for the dotera. And he did the same, without a word, least of all “Thanks.” Next I took one, then he took one, and the game went on like this until the sixth manjū was gone, leaving only one. Fortunately, it was my turn now, and I grabbed it before he could put his hand out. Then I ordered another serving.

  “You really pack it away,” the dotera said. I hadn’t thought of myself as “packing it away,” but now that he said so, I had to admit he was right. Of course, the dotera himself probably had a lot to do with it, the way he stimulated my appetite by tearing into food that I myself didn’t want to eat. To hear him say it, though, I was “packing it away” entirely on my own. I felt a little like defending myself to him, but the appropriate words didn’t come to mind. I just had this foggy notion that the dotera bore some of the responsibility, though I had no very clear idea of where the responsibility lay, so I kept quiet.

  “You’re big on fried manjū, huh?” he added.

  Sure, I liked fried manjū, some fried manjū, but there was no way I could like sandy, fly-covered manjū that had been fried the day before yesterday. On the other hand, I couldn’t exactly claim to hate something that I had just eaten three plates of. So I kept quiet this time, too. Suddenly, the tea stand woman piped up:

  “Our manjū are famous. Everybody likes them.”

  I could hardly believe my ears—unless she was trying to make a fool of me. So I kept quieter than ever.