The Miner

by Sōseki Natsume

  When I fled across the aisle from the peril of the pus-eyed man, Chōzō glanced at me and at the man, but he stayed in his seat. I was enormously impressed at how much more robust Chōzō’s sensibilities were than my own. My admiration for him faded somewhat when he actually began talking with the man, as calm and cool as could be.

  “Back to the mine?” the pus-eyed man asked.

  “Yup. Got another one.”

  “That him?” asked the pus-eyed man, glancing in my direction.

  Chōzō looked as if he were about to say something, but his eyes met mine and he closed his thick lips, turning away. The pus-eyed man turned away with him and said, “Gonna make another bundle, huh?”

  As soon as I heard this, I stuck my head out the window. I let go with a gob of spit, but it flew back and hit me in the face. I was feeling pretty rotten.

  There were two men in the seat opposite me. They had a conversation going.

  “Suppose a robber comes in.”

  “Sneaks in?”

  “No no, he breaks down the door. And he starts threatening them with a sword or something.”

  “All right. Then what?”

  “Now suppose the owner gives him counterfeit money to get rid of him.”

  “All right. And then?”

  “Then afterwards the robber notices it’s counterfeit and starts telling everybody the owner passes counterfeit money. Tell me, Tsune, what do you think—which one is more to blame?”

  “Which what?”

  “Which man—the owner or the robber?”

  “Hmm. That’s a tough one …”

  The second man was struggling with this conundrum when I found myself growing sleepy. I lay my head on the windowsill and drifted off.

  The minute you go to sleep, time ceases to exist. Sleep is the best medicine for anyone to whom the passage of time is a source of pain. Death is probably just as good. But dying is a lot more difficult than it seems. The ordinary person uses sleep as a handy substitute for death. People who practice judo often have their companions choke them. They spend five minutes or more of some lazy summer day lying dead in the dojo until their friends breathe life back into them and they wake up feeling so good it’s as if they’ve been reborn—or so they tell me. I was always too worried that I might actually die to risk this heroic cure. Sleep may not be as effective, but it avoids the danger that you might not return to life. For anyone with worries, for anyone deep in anguish or unbearable pain, for anyone about to become a miner as a step on the road to self-destruction, sleep is the greatest gift of nature. By sheer chance, this gift of nature now settled itself on my head. Before I could express my thanks for it, I drifted off, utterly obliterating time, whose passage one has no choice but to be aware of as long as one lives. But then I woke up. I suppose what happened was that, since I had fallen asleep while the train was moving, the sleep lost its rhythm and flew off somewhere when the train came to a stop. Apparently, while sleeping I’m able to forget the passage of time, but I go on reacting to movement through space. Which means that if I really want to forget my anguish, I’m really going to have to die. No doubt, though, the minute the anguish disappears, I’ll want to come to life again. The ideal thing for me, to be quite honest, would be to live and die over and over.

  This looks like some kind of stupid joke when I set it down on paper, but I’m not trying to be facetious. I mean it in all seriousness. This “ideal” of mine is not something I struck on just now for fun, as an afterthought while recalling the past. It actually came to me like this when the train stopped and I woke up. It may seem comical because the feeling itself was ridiculous, but all I can do is set down what I honestly felt. The closer this feeling comes to comedy, the sorrier I feel for myself back then, because I realize all the more vividly what a sad state I was in if I could seriously cherish a hope so divorced from common sense.

  When I woke up, I found the train had stopped. Before I thought to myself, “The train’s stopped,” the thought occurred to me, “I’m on a train.” No sooner had that first thought crossed my mind than I said to myself, “I’m with Chōzō,” “I’m going to become a miner,” “I didn’t have the fare,” “I ran away from home,” and so on and so forth, maybe twelve or thirteen such thoughts clumping together and popping out of the depths of my mind all at once. How can I describe the speed with which this happened? Should I say that it was beyond description? Like a flash of lightning? In any case, it happened with terrifying swiftness. I later heard that some drowning people have seen their whole lives flash before their eyes, complete in every detail, and judging from my own experience at that moment, I would have to conclude that such stories are true. This is how swiftly I became conscious of my position and condition in the real world. Simultaneous with the return of consciousness came a feeling of disgust. Actually, “disgust” can’t fully describe what I was feeling, but I’ll settle for it since there’s no other word that will do the job. Those who have experienced the feeling will know immediately what I’m talking about, and those who haven’t should count themselves lucky. It’s nothing you’d ever want to learn.

  Before long, two or three people in the car stood up. Two or three other people entered the car from the outside. What with those who were looking for seats and those who were checking for things they might have left behind, plus the others with no particular business who were shifting in their seats, sticking their heads out of windows or yawning, the entire world seemed to be crumbling into a state of unrest, and I became aware that everything in my immediate vicinity had begun to move. With that awareness came the realization that I was different from ordinary people. I was an outsider whose mood did not become swept up in movement even when everyone around me was moving. I felt like some ghost who had strayed in from the world beyond. My sleeves might brush theirs or my knees touch those of the person opposite me, but our souls remained utterly separate. Until this moment, I had managed one way or another to keep in tune with the normal run of men, but the second the train stopped, the world became bright and ascending, while I became dark and descending, and all hope was lost for contact between the two. At the thought, I felt myself shriveling like a pricked balloon, my chest and back pressing my innards together until they were as thin as a piece of paper. Alone, my soul suddenly plunged down through the surface of the earth. I was defeated, overwhelmed with a dizzying feeling of shame and remorse.

  At that point, Chōzō stood and approached me. “Hey, kid,” he said, “still asleep? We get off here.”

  “Oh,” I thought, “so that’s what’s happening,” and I stood up. Funny, your soul can be halfway through the earth, and as long as the blood is still coursing through your veins, when you call it, it comes back. If things go a little too far, though, the soul won’t return to the body as ordered. When I was in a shipwreck off Taiwan some years later, for example, my soul pretty nearly gave up on me, which was quite an ordeal. No matter how bad the situation, there’s always worse. You should never relax because you think you’ve come to the end of the line. This was a brand new feeling for me at the time, though—and a bitter experience.

  Sniffing after the tail of Chōzō’s dotera, I passed through the wicket and out to the main street of a large town. It was the usual long, straight road you find in the old post towns, but it was surprisingly broad, and it was so straight that it seemed to clear the mind. Standing in the middle of this wide street, I saw all the way down to the far end of the town. As I did so, I was struck with an odd kind of feeling. Since this was another of those feelings that I was experiencing for the first time in my life, I will take a moment to set it down here. I had just come out to the street, restored to a more or less human view of the world after having barely succeeded in calling back my soul, which had nearly escaped when the bottoms of my lungs fell out. The soul had finally found its way back into my lungs with my most recent inhalation, but it was still noticeably wobbly, and far from settled in. So while I was here, in the world (I was the one who h
ad just left the train, come out of the station, and was standing in the middle of the street), my soul possessed only the most bleary sort of consciousness, as if it were reluctantly performing at minimum capacity and could not fully grasp the fact that these functions were its professional responsibilities, accepted in all solemnity. Dizzy and half-conscious, I opened my sunken, staring eyes, bereft as they were now of interest in anything. Then my field of vision, which until that moment had been crammed into the boxy train car, suddenly leaped a thousand yards ahead down the length of the far-stretching road. And although my eyes came to rest at its end on a mountain fairly dripping with lush greenery, the mountain was too far away to feel like an obstruction; instead, it absorbed my leaden gaze into its green depths. Which is how I came to have this odd feeling I mentioned.

  First of all, the flat, perfectly straight road has a bracing simplicity about it, as though it’s been built to fit the phrase from the Book of Songs, “The Great Road was like a whetstone.”8 Or, more simply stated, it doesn’t confuse the eye. “Here, come with me, don’t worry,” it seems to beckon; “there’s no need for hesitation or reserve.” And because it does say, “Come with me,” if you stick with it, you can go forever. The eyes don’t even want to turn down side streets, for some strange reason. The farther the road continues on straight ahead, the more the eyes have to move straight ahead if they are to avoid constraint and discomfort. I firmly believe that the great ribbon of highway has taken its form parallel to the free movement of the eyes. And in looking at the row of houses on either side (some of which are tile-roofed, others thatched, but I make no distinction between the two), the farther off I look, the lower and lower the roofs drop, and the hundreds of houses stretch on forever, moving away at an angle and all in perfect alignment, as though a wire has been passed through them from the far end to the near in order to regularize the slope. The farther away they stretch, the nearer they come to the ground. The two-story buildings to either side of where I stand—I recall them as inns—are tall enough so that I have to look up at them, but peering through to the end of the town, the eaves there look low enough to fit between two fingers. The houses are not entirely uniform, to be sure—a few have shop curtains fluttering in the breeze, one a large clam drawn on the front shoji door—but when you follow the line of the eaves into the distance, a couple of miles come leaping into the eye in half a second, so brilliantly clear is the scene.

  As I’ve already said, my soul was completely hung over. And in that state, with no warning, the second I came out of the station it ran smack up against this brilliantly clear scene, one that would have been clear to a blind man. Of course there was no way it could avoid a shock, and that’s just what it got. But a little time had to go by before it could overcome the inertia of its shaky, wobbling, hang-back condition. Now, this odd sort of feeling I’ve described was something that occurred in the critical interval between the moment I sensed the brilliant clarity of the scene and, shortly afterward, the moment my soul flopped over in its sleep. This clear, expansive scene so totally unsuited to my emotional state was a wonderfully lively thing, but no amount of brightness or expansiveness could prevent it from becoming a mere fact of reality once my startled soul began to involve itself seriously with the outer world. Even the holiest of lights must lose some of its glory when it is reduced to a function of the real world. Because my soul had been in an unusual state—because it had been able to perceive the bright outer world in all its brightness but had not been functioning acutely enough to attain the consciousness that this was actually happening—I had had the good fortune to see this straight road and these straight eaves as a brilliant dream with the impact of reality. As a result, I felt exactly as I would have in encountering a phantasm from the world beyond with a degree of clarity visible only in this world and with an accompanying sense of exhilaration. True, I was standing in the road; the road was tremendously long and straight; if I wanted to, I could walk its entire length and pass through the town; if I wanted to touch the houses on either side, I could reach out and touch them; if I wanted to climb to a second story, I could climb to a second story. I knew full well that all these things were possible, but I had lost track of the concept of their being possible as I stood there simply receiving an acute sense impression through the eyes.

  I’m no scholar and have no idea what you call this kind of feeling. Not knowing what to name it, I have ended up describing it at such lamentable length. I suppose I’ll be laughed at by people with an academic background who see this and think, “Is that all?” but it can’t be helped. Since then, I have experienced feelings similar to this on several occasions, but never again with such intensity. I have gone to the trouble of writing this down in the hope that the information might possibly be of use to someone. As soon as it came to me, though, the feeling was gone.

  I noticed that the sun was on its way down. Judging from the angle of the light (this was early summer, when the days are longer), the hour was probably some time after four o’clock, probably not yet five. The weather was not as good as I had thought, possibly because this place was near the mountains, but I couldn’t exactly have called it bad, since the sun was shining. Noting the sun, which was striking the long street at an angle, I concluded that that must be the west. I knew that I had kept myself running straight north from Tokyo, but I had lost all sense of direction by the time I left the train. If we follow the road north through the town, we’ll come to the mountain, I thought, and if I’m right about the directions here, the mountain, too, is north, so Chōzō and I are still going to be headed north.

  The mountain seemed to be pretty far away, and it was by no means small. Its color was blue, but the brightness of the side where the sun was shining gave the shaded side a blackish hue within the blue. Of course this might have been owing to an abundance of cedars or cypress rather than to the angle of the sun. In any case, it was obviously dense and deep. When I shifted my gaze from the setting sun to this blue mountain, I wondered whether it was standing there alone or was part of a chain of mountains lying beyond. As Chōzō and I began moving gradually northward, walking side by side, I could not escape the feeling that the mountains stretched out and out endlessly beyond this one mountain I could see before me, and that all these mountains continued on to the north in an unbroken chain. I suppose you could say that this was because the mountain appeared to be retreating before us step by step, since walking toward the mountain resulted only in our walking toward the mountain and didn’t bring our feet any closer to its base. You could also explain it this way: As the sun sank lower and lower, the upper edge of the shaded side of the blue mountain and the lower edge of the blue sky forgot their proper places and began to invade each other’s territory; soon I could no longer distinguish between the two, and when I shifted my eyes from the mountain to the sky, I lost any conscious sense of their having left the mountain and saw the sky as a continuation of the mountain. And the sky was huge.

  And it stretched northward without limit. And Chōzō and I were walking north.

  Ever since I had tucked up the skirts of my kimono at the Senju Bridge on the edge of the city the night before, after leaving Tokyo, I had forged onward with bare shanks, whether plunging into the band of pines, sitting at the tea stand, or taking the train, and still I had felt almost hot. Since entering this town, however, I had begun to feel somewhat cold with my legs bare. More than cold, I had probably begun to feel lonely. Silent, and moving nothing but our legs, it seemed as if Chōzō and I were making our way straight through the middle of autumn. Then I got hungry again. I know it doesn’t look good for me to keep writing about my empty stomach, and it’s particularly unpoetic in this context, but that can’t be helped. I really got hungry. All I had been doing since leaving the house was walk, never eating any normal human food, as a result of which my stomach would become empty all of a sudden. However bad you may feel, however great your anguish, however convinced you may be that your soul is trying to escape, you
r stomach empties itself out just fine. Or rather, it might be more appropriate to say that, in order to keep your soul in place, you have to eat. You have to provide it with food. Undignified as this may sound, I traversed the length of that long, narrow town, walking in the middle of the street with Chōzō, swinging my head back and forth, back and forth, looking into all the eating places on either side. And there were lots of them. Forget about the high-class inns and restaurants. Everywhere, I could see these plain old eateries that would be fine for Chōzō and me. But he didn’t look ready to go into any of them. He didn’t ask me, “Want to eat?” the way he had asked me if I wanted to take the omnibus before. Still, he was obviously looking back and forth from side to side just like me, as if he were trying to find something. Firm in my belief that at any moment Chōzō was going to find a good place and take me inside for supper, I patiently endured my hunger, walking ever northward through the long, long town.