The Miner

by Sōseki Natsume

  “Unsurpassed flavor,” offered the dotera. I couldn’t tell if he meant it or was just soft-soaping her. Anyway, to hell with the manjū. I wanted to hear more about this job he had for me.

  “Excuse me,” I began, “but that business we were discussing earlier … It so happens that, due to certain circumstances, it has become necessary for me to work in order to eat. I wonder if you could tell me what this job is that you were mentioning?”

  The dotera stared for a while at the table with the sweets, then suddenly turned his face to me and started in again. “You’ll make lots of money. I’m telling you the truth. Lots of money. You’ve got to take this job.” He was apparently still determined to make me rich. I took a moment to study this face, now turned full in my direction, as its owner proceeded to tempt me. Beneath prominent cheekbones, the flesh of the face seemed to melt away before it jutted out again at the jaw. The way the sunlight was shining in from the front of the shop, it brought out a deep wrinkle that ran beneath his nose and arched downward on either side of his mouth. The sight of this face made the prospect of making money seem frightening, somehow.

  “I don’t care about the money. But I will take the job. I’ll do anything, as long as it’s sacred labor.”

  Somewhere up around the cheekbones, a puzzled look flitted across the dotera’s face, but when it was gone, he stretched that arching wrinkle to either side again, revealing ihis tobacco-stained teeth in all their glory. Then he laughed in his own special way. Looking back on it now, I would guess that the dotera simply didn’t understand the phrase “sacred labor.” He was laughing out of pity for this sad creature who liked to say fancy things but who lacked the minimum qualification (in his eyes) of a human being: the desire for money. Until only moments before, I had been determined to die—or at least to go where there were no people—but, having failed at that, to work in order to stay alive. Money was simply not a factor at that point, not a factor at any point for me from the time I was living off my parents in Tokyo. The whole idea of profit was one I found despicable. And I more or less believed that anywhere in Japan I would find only people who thought pretty much as I did. Which is why my only reaction, whenever the dotera opened his mouth about money, was to find it all very strange. He wasn’t making me angry, of course. I was in no position to be angry. But it had never occurred to me that the promise of money could be the sweetest words of enticement one human being could offer another. And so the dotera laughed at me, but still the message didn’t make it through. What a fool I was!

  When his special laugh began to subside, the dotera said, a touch more earnestly, “Tell me something, kid, have you ever had a job?”

  A job?! I had run away from home just yesterday. The most “work” I had ever done was fencing and baseball. Not for one day of my life had I eaten food that I myself had paid for with money I had earned.

  “No, I’ve never worked. But I’ll have to from now on.”

  “That’s what I thought. Say … if you never had a job … I guess you never made any money.”

  Here was an observation that required no reply, and I offered none. From behind the table, the woman piped up, “If you’re going to work, you might as well make money.” As she spoke, she left her seat.

  “That’s right!” cried the dotera. “But where’s the good jobs nowadays? You don’t just go out and find them on the ground.”

  He was beginning to hint at what an exceptional favor he was doing me.

  “Right,” the woman muttered, as though not entirely convinced, and she went out the back. I think I expected her to add something to this strangely unnerving remark, and I half-consciously let my eyes follow her into the woods, where, still standing, she proceeded to urinate toward the base of a black pine tree. I quickly shifted my gaze toward the dotera, who went right on with the favors he was doing me.

  “You’re lucky you met me, kid. Look what a tip I’m giving you—and I don’t know you from a hole in the wall. Nobody else would let you in on such a terrific job for nothing.”

  This was hardly worth replying to. I gave him an extremely formal, “Thank you,” and left it at that.

  “Let me tell you about this job,” he went on. I had nothing to say.

  “Let me tell you about this job. It’s up at the copper mine. If I bring you there, you can get work right away. You can be a miner the same day. Pretty good, huh? What do you say? A miner!”

  I felt I was being pressed for a reply, but I was not exactly ready to be swept up in his enthusiasm. What was a miner, after all? A laborer who works in the tunnels of a mine. There are many different kinds of laborers in this world, but it seemed to me that the lowliest and most cruelly used was the miner. Far from finding it “pretty good” that I could become a miner so easily, I viewed the prospect with a good deal of alarm. If someone had told me that there are species still lower than the miner, I would have found the concept unimaginable, as if I had been told that there are many days left to the year after December 31. I suspected that the dotera was saying this to me only because he assumed he could put anything over on one so young. He remained surprisingly serious, however.

  “So, as soon as you get there, you’re a miner. And what an easy life! Before you know it, the money starts piling up, and you can do what you like. They’ve got a bank up there, too. If you want to save, you can save.” He turned to the woman. “What do you say? Isn’t that something? He can be a miner right off.”

  Still wearing the expression she had on while doing her business standing up out back, the woman replied, “You said it. If he starts working in the mines now, he’ll have so much money in four or five years he won’t know what to do with it … He’s nineteen … best working years … have to make your bundle now or never.” She spoke in little snatches, as if to herself.

  All but insisting that I become a miner, she seemed to be of the same opinion as the dotera. I had no objection, of course. Nor did the prospect of not becoming a miner pose any problem for me. I had never in my life been in such an oddly passive mood. I suspect I would have gone along with anything anyone said to me at the time, no matter how outlandish. But why? I had just spent a year so full of duty and desire and agony and my own wrongdoing that everything had suddenly burst and brought about an enormous collision, as a result of which I had come running blindly this far. Nothing in my life before that day should have rendered me so passive, and yet, undeniably, I could not have found in myself the least spark of resistance to anybody. Nor did I think of this as either strange or contradictory—I probably didn’t have it in me to think about it at all. The only consistent thing about people is their bodies. And because our bodies stay the same, most of us are content to assume that our minds do, too—that we go on being the selves we were, even when we do today the exact opposite of what we did yesterday. When the question of responsibility comes up and we are accused of breaking faith, why is it that none of us even thinks to reply, “Well, that’s because my personality is nothing but memory fragments”? Having experienced this contradiction any number of times, I know it’s too much to ask, but still I seem to feel a tinge of responsibility. Which leads me to the conclusion that people are put together in a tremendously convenient way so as to become victims of society.

  At the same time, having witnessed the reeling, irregular activity of my fragmented soul, I must conclude from a thoroughly objective, impartial view of the real me that there is nothing so unreliable as man. For anyone aware of his own soul, promises and solemn vows are an impossibility. Only the most uncivilized boor would try to hold another person to ia promise. Take a close look at anyone fulfilling a promise, and you’ll see he’s just doing it under pressure and trying not to let the pressure show. It’s not his own free will. If I had realized this earlier, I might not have had to go through all the agony—hating people, running away from home to escape the pain. Or, even supposing I had run away and come as far as this tea stand, if I had had the presence of mind to see that my behavior toward
the dotera and the woman was totally different from anything I had ever done until the day before, and to compare the two calmly and objectively, I’m sure I would have been able to handle the situation a little more intelligently.

  But unfortunately, back then I lacked any capacity for self-analysis. I knew only that I was sad, I was angry, I was in pain, I was disgusted with myself, I was sorry for what I’d done and sick of everything, but I couldn’t cut myself off from humanity and I couldn’t sit still, so I had started walking and been snagged by the dotera and eaten a bunch of manjū. Yesterday was yesterday and today was today, an hour ago was an hour ago, and half an hour from now was half an hour from now. I had no mind for anything but what was in my mind at the moment. And my soul, disconnected at the best of times, was floating looser than ever, till I could no longer be sure if it existed or not, in addition to which my recollection of the past eventful year had turned into a mass of phantom vapors that were filling the infinite spaces like the dream of a tragic play.

  As a result, where ordinarily I would have felt the need to assert myself to the limit, raising question after question—What’s so great about becoming a miner? Who says there’s anything lower than a miner? Do you think all I care about is money? Is money the only thing that matters?—I remained as passive as could be. Nor was this just a show of passivity. There was nothing inside me that wanted to resist.

  My only thought at the time, it seems, was that I’d be all right if I had a job to do. As long as I had work, as long as this floating soul of mine could remain inside my body, however aimlessly; as long, in other words, as I was not going to force the death of something that could not die on its own, these questions—What was above a miner or below a miner? Was there money to be made or wasn’t there?—were of no concern to me, it appears. All I needed was the job. As long as I had that, it probably didn’t matter to me that I was being fed a lot of hot air about its status or nature or results, or that these opinions ran counter to my own, or that the hot air was calculated to lure me into something, or that for me to swallow it could only raise serious doubts regarding my qualifications as an intelligent human being. At times like this, the most complex individual is reduced to utter simplicity.

  And besides, when I heard that I was to become a miner, I felt strangely elated. First, I had run away from home, set for the possibility of dying. That had changed in the second stage to a desire to go where there were no people. Then along had come the third stage: a determination to work. But if I was going to work, something close to stage two would be better than an ordinary job, and better yet would be something connected with stage one. I had seemed to go from stage one through two to three almost before I knew it, but in fact my changing mental state had been pushed along so that it moved with regret from one stage to the next, looking back fondly at each stage it had been forced to abandon. My third-stage determination to work had not been so reckless as to shake off stage two, nor had it moved so far from stage one as to sever all contact with it. If I could work in a place where there were no people and in a state close to death, then I could carry out my final resolution while still, to some extent, satisfying my original goals. What was a miner, after all, but a man in a mine—someone who worked where the sun never shone; who, while in the real world, yet burrowed beneath it; whose only companions in the dark were lumps of ore and earth; and who never had to listen to the voices of the world of men? It was a gloomy life, no doubt, and that’s what made it exactly right for me. There were lots of people in the world, but no one as perfectly suited to being a miner as I was. It would be my calling. Of course I didn’t have it worked out as clearly as this, but when I heard the word “miner,” the gloominess of it struck me, and that very gloominess made me glad. Recalling all this now, from my present vantage point, I can only believe they were the thoughts of someone else.

  So I said to the dotera, “I intend to work as hard as I can. Do you think they’ll let me become a miner?”

  With a magnanimous air, the dotera replied, “They’re pretty tough about letting anybody be a miner right off, but if I put in a good word for you, it’s a sure thing.”

  If he says so, it must be true, I figured, keeping silent for a while. Then the tea woman piped up again, “All you need is a word from Chōzō here. They’ll make you a miner for sure.”

  I now learned for the first time that the dotera’s name was Chōzō. I had a few occasions after that, when we were getting on and off trains, to call him by his name, but even now I am not certain how “Chōzō” ought to be spelled. This was the man who grabbed me by the nose the moment I ran away from home and turned me in a totally unexpected direction; the man, as it were, who contributed a great turning point to my life. How very odd that I should have learned his name by word of mouth but not know how to write it.

  So anyhow, since Chōzō and the tea woman both promised me I could become a miner, I figured it was true, and replied, “Well, then, I’ll leave it up to you.”

  Meanwhile, I had absolutely no idea where someone sitting in this tea stand would have to go or what steps he would have to take to become a miner.

  I didn’t see any need to ask, however, since Chōzō had pressed so hard and I had said I was leaving it up to him. I was sure he would take care of it.

  “All right, then,” Chōzō said, vigorously lifting the tail of his dotera from the bench, “let’s get going. Are you ready, kid? Don’t forget your stuff.”

  I had left home with nothing more than the clothes on my back. The only “stuff” I could conceivably forget was my body.

  “I’m not forgetting anything,” I said, standing, but then the tea lady and I looked at each other. Ah yes, the manjū. I had forgotten to pay. Chōzō was already halfway out through the reed blind, looking at the road with an unconcerned expression on his face. I pulled my wallet out and paid for three plates of manjū from my thirty-two sen. While I was at it, I left a five-sen tip.

  I can’t recall how much I paid for the manjū, but I remember the woman saying, “Stop by on your way back after you make all that money at the mine.” I did eventually quit the mine, but I never had occasion to stop by the tea stand again.

  I followed Chōzō out to the old band of pine trees I was so sick of, trudging down its single path in ankle-deep dust, and though it had seemed endless before, I was surprised how quickly we got through it this time. The pines gave way at some point, and we found ourselves at the edge of what appeared to be one of the shabby, old post towns on the Itabashi Highway.6 It seemed all the more like the Itabashi Highway when a rickety horse-drawn omnibus passed by.7

  Walking a step ahead of me, Chōzō turned and asked, “Want to take the omnibus, kid?”

  “I don’t mind,” I said.

  “Want to forget the omnibus?” he asked.

  “I don’t mind,” I said.

  “What do you want to do?” he asked.

  “I don’t care,” I said.

  By that time the omnibus was gone.

  “All right,” Chōzō said, “let’s walk.” And he started walking. So I started walking. Ahead, the dust raised by the omnibus filtered into the morning sun, giving the road a cloudy, yellow look. Soon the number of passersby began to increase, and the town itself became a little more presentable. We came to a spot almost as lively as Kagurazaka in the Ushigome district of Tokyo. In fact, the shops and the people and their clothing looked exactly the same as the ones in Tokyo. There was ihardly anybody like Chōzō here.

  I asked Chōzō, “What’s the name of this place?”

  “What? You don’t know?” he said with a surprised look, but he told me readily enough, without laughing at me. In this way I learned the name of the town, though I am not going to mention it here. Apparently quite puzzled that I didn’t know the name of this bustling place, Chōzō asked, “Where are you from, kid? Where were you born?”

  Now that I came to think of it, for someone who was supposed to be introducing me to an employer, it was a little
too negligent of Chōzō never to have asked me about my past or my background. Later, I came to realize that he had absolutely no interest in such things. When he asked me where I was born, it was strictly out of a momentary curiosity aroused in him by my ignorance. As evidence of this, when I answered, “Tokyo,” his only response was, “Oh,” and he turned into a side street, practically dragging me in after him.

  The fact is, I come from a rather prominent family. While it may appear that I had run away from home because things had become too complicated for me, I had not taken this rash step merely to spite my parents. I had come to hate being at home because of a sort of disgust I was feeling for people in general, and once I started feeling that way, I couldn’t stand the sight of my relatives, my parents, anybody. At one point I realized what I was doing and tried to fight it, but by then it was too late. The more I struggled, the worse it became, until finally the cork popped and all the reserves of patience I had tried so hard to build were lost. I left home that very night.

  If we look into the origins of the matter, the first thing we find is a girl. Next to her is another girl. Around the girls are their parents. Then relatives. And surrounding them all are the people of society. But girl number one looks at me and starts changing: now she’s round, now she’s square. And when she changes, I have to change: now I’m round, now I’m square. But vows I was born to with girl number two mean I shouldn’t be doing this with girl number one. As young as I am, I know what is happening. But the guiltier I feel, the more I go on turning round and then square. Finally, the change ceases to be merely one of form and becomes one of internal structure as well, and girl number two is watching this with eyes full of bitterness. The parents are watching, and the relatives, too. And all those people out there in society can see what is going on. My heart is stretching and shrinking, bending and twisting, and I try my best to cover it up, but girl number one won’t leave me alone. She keeps stretching and shrinking and letting me see, and there’s no way I can hide what I’m doing. The parents find out, and the relatives find out. They say I’m the villain. Of course, I’ve never considered myself a hero in all this, but the more I sound them out, the more I realize that what they mean by villain and what I mean by villain are two different things. I try to explain myself, but they won’t listen. I’m beginning to feel especially put out that my own parents won’t believe me when it occurs to me that if I stay by girl number one, there’s no telling what could happen. I may well become the villain they say I am and never be able to explain. But still I can’t tear myself away from her. Every day I feel increasingly guilty toward girl number two. Every day these conflicting emotions come rushing at me from all directions, and I’m the maypole in the middle. If I pull on this ribbon, it tangles that one; if I loosen that one, this one tightens up. There’s no way I can straighten out all the lines jumbled together in my head. I try twisting and twiddling with them so much I can’t stand my own cleverness, but the result is always the same. And then it hits me: since I’m the one who’s suffering, I’m the only one who can put a stop to it. Until now, I’ve been counting on somebody else to come up with a solution that will work for me. It’s as though I’ve met someone on the road and I’m trying to figure out a way to have him walk around me in the mud while I stand my ground. I’ve been presenting him with impossible reasons why I should stay where I am and he should be the one to move. There’s no point letting your reflection bother you as long as you’re standing in front of a mirror. If there’s no way you can move the “mirror” called the code of society, then the most sensible thing to do is step away from it.