The Miner

by Sōseki Natsume

  And so I decided to blow myself out of these convoluted relationships like a puff of smoke. The only way to turn myself into smoke, however, was to commit suicide. I tried it once or twice. But every time I was on the verge of killing myself, I’d be too frightened to go through with it. Finally I realized that suicide is not something you become better at with practice. If I couldn’t kill myself all at once, then I could let myself die a natural death. But, living the comfortable life of one who, as I said earlier, comes from a fairly prosperous background, there was not much hope of my dying if I simply stayed at home. I would have to run away.

  Sometimes it seemed to me that I could never forget these relationships even if I ran away. Sometimes it seemed to me that I could forget them. Finally, I concluded that I would never know unless I tried. Even if the agony came running with me, that was something that concerned me alone. Those I left behind could only be helped by my disappearance. Another thing to keep in mind was that I could not go on running forever. I would run because I couldn’t simply die right away, but running would be a step in the right direction. The thing to do was to give it a try and if it looked as though I was going to be pursued and tortured by the past, then it was still not too late to begin making plans to let myself die naturally. And if, after that, it became clear that nothing was going to work, then at last the time would have come for me to perform my act of suicide.

  I know what a bore this makes me when I write it out like this, but it can’t be helped because these are the bare facts. And it’s precisely because I am writing it out that I’m so boring. I’m sure that if I were to set down my foggy-brained determination in all its fogginess, then even I would be fully qualified to become the protagonist of a novel.

  Or even if not, if I wrote a sensational account of everything that actually happened then—the two girls, the situation that changed daily, my worries, my agony, my parents’ opinions, my relatives’ advice—I’m sure I could make a very entertaining newspaper novel. But I have neither the pen nor the time for such things, so I’ll forget about that and just tell about the most important thing: my experience as a miner.

  Well, anyhow, I had run away with all of this business behind me, and I was ready to be buried alive or to bury myself alive, but when it came to something like my parents’ names or my own past history, as desperate as I was, I still didn’t want to talk about these to Chōzō. And it wasn’t only Chōzō. I didn’t want to talk about them to any human being—including myself, if possible. That’s how miserable and beaten down I was feeling. And so, although I found it strange that, as a job referee, Chōzō didn’t quiz me on my background, I was inwardly very pleased. I might also point out that, at that time of my life, I had not had much practice in the art of lying, and I still thought it a great evil to conceal the truth. Which means that if he had quizzed me, I’m not sure what I would have done.

  I followed Chōzō down the side street, but before we had passed a block or two of houses, the buildings suddenly became less densely packed, and I caught glimpses of rice paddies between them. I was just thinking that all the town’s bustle was stretched thinly along either side of the main street, when Chōzō whipped me around another corner and led me to yet another lively spot. The street dead-ended at a railroad station. I now saw that the procedure for becoming a miner required me to take a train. I had been imagining that the mine had a branch office or some such thing in this town and that after being taken there I would be escorted to the mine by an official.

  A few yards from the station, I called out to Chōzō, who was still ahead of me, “Chōzō, do I take a train?”

  This was the first time I had called him by name. He turned somewhat in my direction but gave no sign that he found it unusual to have a complete stranger calling him by his first name. “Right,” he said, and entered the station.

  I stood in the station entrance, thinking. Did this fellow plan to board the train with me and bring me to the place? If so, he was being a little too kind. There was something fishy about the way he was taking such good care of me. He’d never seen me before in his life. Maybe he was some kind of con man. It had taken long enough for these suspicions to hit me, but once they did I started to have second thoughts about boarding the train. It occurred to me that I probably ought to get out of there fast, and I turned my feet, which until then had been pointing toward the platform, back out toward the street. For a while I just stood there, staring at the red curtain of the tea stand in front of the station, seemingly unable to work up the resolve to start walking, when suddenly a great bellow came from a distance to put a stop to any such plans. When I heard this voice, I realized that it belonged to Chōzō; it was the voice I had been hearing since the pine grove. I turned to find Chōzō’s head poking up at an angle in the distance and bobbing up and down, his eyes looking hard at me. The rest of him seemed to be hidden behind the wall of the public urinal. I walked toward that face, thinking iI might as well respond to his call.

  “You ought to take care of business before we get on the train, kid,” Chōzō said.

  I really didn’t have to, but he kept insisting, so I stood next to him and (if I may broach an unwholesome subject) urinated. At that moment, my thoughts changed again: I don’t own anything but my body. With neither property nor honor to be robbed or cheated of, I’m obviously an unpromising commodity. To be frightened of Chōzō means I’m confusing what I am today with what I was till yesterday, which is like worrying about having your pay attached after you’ve lost your job. Chōzō surely has no education, but you don’t need an education to look at someone like me and know right off there’s nothing here to be swindled. Maybe he really is planning to take me to the mine and collect some kind of commission. That’s OK. I’ll just have to give him a certain percentage of my pay—and so forth. That’s what I was thinking as I stood at the urinal. While the time involved was brief enough, it took me all that weighing and cogitating to reach this puny conclusion. That I was still unable, in spite of these efforts, to grasp the simple fact that Chōzō was, in the purest sense of the word, a procurer—a procurer of laborers for the mine—was due entirely to my being nineteen years old.

  Being young is a real disadvantage. I had come this close to realizing that Chōzō was a procurer, and still I was treating him with an absurd level of deference I thought I owed him for the kindness he might be granting me purely out of the goodness of his heart. What a laugh.

  But in fact, when we had wandered from the urinal to the entrance of the third-class waiting room, I turned to Chōzō with some degree of formality and said, in all seriousness, “It was very kind of you to bring me this far, but I really can’t ask you to do any more.” Instead of replying, Chōzō looked at me with an odd expression, which made me wonder if I had chosen my words poorly in thanking him, so I tried again.

  “You’ve been tremendously helpful and I want to thank you,” I said, nodding repeatedly, “but I can take care of myself from here on out. Please don’t bother about me.”

  “Take care of yourself?” Chōzō said. “You’re kidding.”

  “No, really,” I said.

  “What makes you think so?” I didn’t know how to respond to this, but I said, with some hesitation, “Well, you can give me the directions, and I can go there, and, if I mention your name, they’ll take care of me …”

  “Look, kid, you don’t know what you’re talking about. They’re not going to make you a miner just ’cause you know my name. It’s not that easy.”

  “But I really hate to bother you …”

  “Oh, don’t worry about me,” Chōzō said with a laugh. “I don’t mind taking you there. You know what they say. If you even rub sleeves with somebody, karma did it. Ha ha ha ha.”

  Finally, I said, “I can’t thank you enough,” and left it at that.

  We were sitting together on a bench in the waiting room, and the station gradually began to fill with people. Most of them were country types. One man not only was wearin
g the kind of hanten-cum-dotera that Chōzō had on, he was even carrying a shoulder pole. On the other hand, there was a very Tokyo-looking merchant wearing a glossy apron and an oddly dented felt hat. After a while, the bench was surrounded by the noise of footsteps and voices, and suddenly the ticket window clattered open. The more impatient people jumped to their feet and crowded in front of the iron mesh, but Chōzō was as cool as ever. With one of his bent Asahis dangling from his thick lips, he turned about two-thirds of the way toward me and asked, “Hey, kid. Do you have the ticket money?”

  Again, this will sound as if I am advertising my own immaturity, but until that moment, the thought of the fare had never crossed my mind. It was the height of stupidity for me to be thinking, on the one hand, “Well, I guess I’ll be getting on the train,” and never to have wondered, on the other, “How much will it cost?” or even, “Do I have to pay anything?” I freely admit to the stupidity, but the fact is that, until I heard Chōzō’s question, I had been feeling as unconcerned as if I thought I could ride for free. I’m not sure why this was so, but I suppose that, deep down, I had begun to feel strangely dependent on Chōzō, as though, if I stuck with him, he would take care of everything. Of course, I myself was unaware of any such thoughts. Even now, I’m not anxious to admit this about myself. But unless I was feeling some such sense of security, I could never, for all my youth and stupidity, have come to a railroad station and failed to have the slightest inkling that there was a fare to be paid. In spite of which I had said to Chōzō that I no longer needed his help and that I could go on from here alone. What could I have been thinking? Having encountered situations like this on several occasions since then, I have formulated a theory. Just as illnesses have an incubation period, there is an incubation period for our thoughts and feelings. Although we possess these thoughts and are controlled by these feelings during the incubation period, we remain unaware of them. And if nothing happens in the outer world to bring them to the surface of consciousness, we go on being controlled by these thoughts and feelings for the rest of our lives, insisting all the while that we have never been influenced by them. Wie try to prove our point through actions and words that negate the thoughts and feelings, but an outsider’s view of our actions reveals the contradiction. Sometimes we are amazed to see the contradiction ourselves. Sometimes, without seeing it, we experience tremendous pain. My own suffering at the hands of the girl I mentioned earlier was caused, ultimately, by my inability to perceive what was incubating inside of me. If only we could inject some powerful medicine that would kill off these unknowable creatures before they could violate our hearts—then what contradictions, what misfortunes mankind would be spared! But things do not work out as we would wish them to, and that’s too bad for all of us.

  And so, when Chōzō asked me if I had the ticket money, I was shocked and flustered. After the manjū and the tip, there was nothing left of my thirty-two sen. I didn’t even have the train fare, and yet I had promised to become a miner as if I knew what I was doing. When I realized what a phony that made me, I felt my cheeks flush. Looking back, I’m touched by my own innocence. These days, somebody could press me to repay my debts in a crowded streetcar, and while I might be annoyed, I certainly wouldn’t blush. To think I could have wasted the sacred scarlet of shame on a lowly procurer like Chōzō! Today, it would be out of the question.

  For some reason, I wanted to tell Chōzō that I did have the fare. Of course, I didn’t actually have it, so I couldn’t lie and say I did. If I could have lied and gotten away with it, I suppose I would have, but if I had lied at that point, only moments before buying the ticket, the truth would have emerged almost immediately. Still, the thought of saying I didn’t have it was too painful. I was a child, or, if not exactly a child, I was a slightly grown-up child with adult passions and agonies, and perhaps the tiniest smattering of common sense, which made things all the more complicated. I found myself unable to reply either that I had it or that I didn’t have it.

  “I’ve got a little,” I said.

  It wouldn’t have been so bad if my answer had bounced back at him like an echo without delay, but my cheeks had just reddened for this undeserving recipient, and I spoke with extreme hesitancy. What a fool.

  “What do you mean, ‘a little’? How much have you got, kid?”

  Chōzō was moved neither by my red cheeks nor by my hesitancy. He obviously just wanted to know how much I had. Unfortunately, not even I knew the answer to that. But one thing was sure: after having paid for three plates of manjū and leaving a five-sen tip from a total of thirty-two sen, there was not a whole lot left. Or if there was something, it was the same as nothing.

  “Very little. I doubt if I have enough,” I answered honestly.

  He took this more calmly than I had expected. “That’s OK. I’ll make up the difference. Just show me what you’ve got.”

  I would have been embarrassed to be seen counting coppers, and I didn’t want to be suspected of trying to hide what I had. I took my wallet out and handed it to Chōzō, money and all. Now, this was an extremely fine alligator wallet, the high price of which had become the subject of a serious lecture by my father when he had made such an extravagant purchase for me. Chōzō looked at it a moment after it had passed from my hand to his, said only, “Hmm, this wasn’t cheap,” and stuck it into the pocket of his haragake without checking the contents. I was relieved that he didn’t count the money, but then he left the bench and hurried over to the ticket window after pointedly cautioning me, “Now, I want you to stay right here while I buy the tickets. Don’t get lost or you won’t be able to become a miner.” As I watched, he plunged into the crowd, waiting his turn without giving me a second glance. From the time we left the pine grove until now, Chōzō had been close by my side, or, the one time he did leave me for a moment, he had actually stuck his head out of the public toilet and called me over. Once he had my wallet and was buying tickets, though, it seemed as if he had forgotten all about me. Probably he had no chance to look my way because there were so many people about. I, meanwhile, never took my eyes off his back, and I could feel a strange sort of nervousness mount as, from my distant vantage point, I watched him moving closer and closer to the ticket window each time a person ahead of him in line bought tickets. The wallet was impressive enough on the outside, but inside there was only copper. Chōzō was going to be shocked when he opened it and found how little I had. I felt bad about that and I was still worrying needlessly about how much he was going to have to add to my money, when Chōzō came back wearing his usual expression.

  “Here, this is yours,” he said, handing me a red third-class ticket but offering not a word as to what he had had to pay for it out of his own pocket.

  Feeling awkward about all this, I said only, “Thank you,” and did not bother to mention the money—or the wallet. Chōzō never said anything about the wallet, either. In effect, I had given it to him.

  Finally, the two of us boarded the train. Nothing much happened on the train, except that I felt sick and changed my seat once when a pus-eyed man covered with boils and pockmarks sat next to me. In retrospect, this seems pretty ridiculous. You wouldn’t expect someone who had run away from home and resolved to descend to the rank of the miners to be put off by most things, but still I didn’t want to sit close to anything so repulsive. At that rate, I suppose I would have fled from a man with pus in his eyes right down to the day before I committed suicide. But did I handle everything so fastidiously? No, of course not, which is what bothers me. When I met Chōzō and the tea lady, for example, I took in everything they said without a peep—not a hint of my usual argumentative, self-assertive behavior. Of course, it would be reasonable to try to account for this by reference to the fact that I was starving at the time, but hunger was surely not the whole explanation. Any way you look at it, it’s a contradiction. Here I go with the contradictions again. Never mind.

  I have a habit of recalling the adventures I experienced back then whenever I ha
ve a few spare moments. It was the most colorful period of my life. Each time I bring back those images to savor, I wield my scalpel mercilessly (you can do this with old memories) in an attempt to chop up my own mental processes and examine every little piece. The results, however, are always the same: I don’t understand them. Now, don’t tell me I’ve just forgotten because it happened so long ago. I’ll never have such an intense experience again in my lifetime. And especially don’t tell me that the lines are tangled because those were the frantic acts of a confused adolescent. The acts themselves were confused and misguided, but the only way to understand the processes leading to those misguided acts is to examine them calmly with the brain I have today. It’s precisely because I can now look at my trip to the mine as an old dream that I am able to describe it for other people with even this degree of clarity. I’m not just saying that I have the courage to write down everything that happened because the passions have faded; I could never have managed to put down even this much on paper if I didn’t have the detachment to drag the old me out to where the present me can see it and study every wart and pimple. Most people imagine that the most accurate account of an experience would be the one written at the time and place, but this is a mistake. Driven by the passions of the moment, a description of the immediate situation tends to convey preposterous misconceptions. Take, for example, my trip to the mine. If I had kept a diary, say, of my feelings just as they were at the moment, I’m sure the result would have been an infantile, affected thing full of lies—certainly nothing that I could have presented to people like this and asked them to read.