The Miner

by Sōseki Natsume

  When the malicious laughter died down, it was followed by a question: “Where you from?”

  I knew the exact source of the voice because the one who had asked the question was the one sitting closest to me. He had a pale blue towel sort of thing pulled tightly around his waist for a sash and, sitting cross-legged on the matted floor, he kept his back turned, his face twisted around toward me at an angle. The lower lid of his eye looked as if it were turned permanently inside-out, revealing the conjunctiva, which was gorged with blood.

  When I answered, “I’m from Tokyo,” the red-eyed one sucked in his fleshless cheek and, with a mocking smile, jerked his chin toward the miner sitting four places away from him. The recipient of this signal, a scruffy fellow looking like a beggar-monk who had stopped shaving his head, now took his turn:

  “Listen to the schoolboy! ‘I’m from Tokyo,’ he says. What happened, schoolboy? Whores take your money? You oughta be ashamed of yourself. Schoolboys got no morals any more. Kids like you can never stick it out here. Go home, boy. Skinny arms like those won’t do you any good in this place.”

  I kept quiet—for so long it maybe took some of the fun out of their jeering, which began to let up a little. Then one of the miners—this fellow had a normal face. His features worked together well enough that they could have passed as ordinary in society. Each time I had looked up at the black clump while they were jeering at me, I had taken in a new impression—the number of men, their clothing, the degree of their savagery—and at first the only things that had struck me about their faces as a whole were that they were made of bones and eyes and that a greasy film of animal lust clung to them all, no single face being distinguished from any other. By the third or fourth glance, however, as I began to tell them apart, this one miner’s face stood out from the rest. He was probably under thirty and he was powerfully built. Where his eyebrows and the bridge of his nose met, the flesh was sunken in somewhat, as if by the constant wearing of eyeglasses. The feature suggested a permanent fit of temper, but this perhaps had the converse effect of reducing the apparent degree of savagery in his face. Now this miner spoke for the first time:

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing here? You’ll never make any money in this place. We’re here because we can’t make a living anywhere else. Get out. Go home. Deliver newspapers. Anything. You wouldn’t know it to look at me, but I used to be in school. I’m here because of liquor and women. Once you get like me, you’ve had it. You can’t leave even if you want to. Go back to Tokyo now, before it’s too late. Get a paper route. No schoolboy’s going to last a month in this place. I’m telling you for your own good: go home now. You got the idea, right?”

  This advice was tendered with some sincerity. Even the savages had to listen to it without butting in. Its impact on all hearers caused a moment of silence after the advice itself had come to an end. I sensed that the cause of the silence might well be that this particular miner wielded a certain degree of influence here and that the others treated him with respect. An indefinable kind of happiness welled up inside me at the thought. There might be some small differences in physiognomy between this miner and the others, but finally they all went down into the same hole to scrape ore out of the mountain. This was not exactly an art in which there could be vast differences in skill. Which meant that the source of this man’s influence over the others must lie in his ability to read, his ability to understand and reason—in short, his education. They were making fun of me now. They were heaping insults on me as if I were a semi-human unfit to join the ranks of the lowliest laborers. But once I plunged into this society and became one of the savages myself, after living here a month or two, I might be able to rise to a position of influence on a par with this man. I should be able to. I would be able to! Yes, I would show them! No matter what anyone said, I would not go home. I would become a full-fledged member of this society—and more!

  What stupidity. Though, even now, I can see a certain degree of logic to my thoughts. I respectfully lent an ear to this miner’s advice, but I did not, as he would have wished, respond with a farewell. Soon the tongues of derision, which had fallen momentarily silent, began to wag again.

  “We’ll let you stay if you want,” one man said, “but we’ve got our ways of doing things here, and you’d better damn well learn them.”

  “What kind of ways?” I asked.

  “Stupid, you know what I mean!” he screamed. “We’ve got bosses and we’ve got brothers.”

  “You mean like boiler bosses?” I asked. I had thought at first of keeping quiet in the face of his ferocious attack, but I was afraid that if I didn’t know their rules, I might get in trouble later by breaking one. So I asked this question.

  Another miner replied without hesitation, “Don’t you know anything? How the hell can you be a miner if you don’t know about bosses and brothers? Get the hell outa here, boy, right now.”

  “Yeah, bosses and brothers. That’s why you’ll never make any money here. Get out!”

  “Make money? Shit! Get outa here!”

  “Get out!”

  “Get out!”

  Obviously, they weren’t telling me to get out for my own good. They were saying it because they wouldn’t let me be one of them. They wanted me to give up and get out because only they, not I, could make any money doing this work. That’s why they kept telling me to get out but said nothing about where I ought to go. As far as they were concerned, it could be the bottom of a river or the back of a cave. I said nothing.

  It’s easy to imagine the outcome if this state of affairs had continued for any length of time. The enemy was not ranged solely around the nearby sunken hearth. As I mentioned earlier, some were clumped together in another big black circle farther off. Had the far troops come to reinforce the near group when I was already fully occupied with them, there would have been hell to pay. While I was being ridiculed, I kept my future enemy (they held their ground, but, at this rate, anything human was going to look like an enemy to me) under observation, sending sidelong glances their way lest they suddenly rush me. My mind moved off simultaneously in all directions, and because it was unable to stand on its own, it kept chasing after things, and there’s nothing more painful than that. What is it they say? Meet the enemy and swallow him. If you can’t swallow, be swallowed. If you can’t do either, make a clean break and keep an eye on the enemy with an attitude of independence and self-respect. The position of greatest disadvantage—and, for that reason, of greatest inferiority—is to be unable either to merge with the enemy or to ignore him by focusing on something beyond the perimeter of the enemy’s power, making it necessary always to be sniffing at his haunches. Having encountered such situations from time to time, I have closely studied many different escape routes, but my mind never goes along with these studies. Which means that the three stratagems I have presented here may be as ingenious as a sermon by Lord Shakyamuni Buddha, but are just as impractical. The more I dwell on this theory so obviously bogus it requires no further elucidation, the more of a clod that makes me. Without a proper education, I’m really at a disadvantage in a situation like this, not knowing what to include and what to leave out.

  With my attention flying off in all directions at once, I sat there desperately trying to shrink my existence down as much as possible, when the voice of the old woman resounded nearby:

  “Enjoy your meal.”

  My soul at that point had shriveled to about the size of a pigeon’s egg. Until the moment her voice reached my ears, I had been totally unaware that the old woman had come upstairs again. Now I saw that she had set a small lacquered table in front of me. The lacquer had been chipped away in spots. The tray-like table held an inverted rice bowl ready for use, the edge of which had been chipped away, too. There was also a small tub of rice. The lacquered chopsticks were half red, half yellow, but most of the yellow was gone, leaving the bare wood exposed. To go with the rice, there was a dish of gelatinous noodles. When I lowered my eyes to survey thi
s spectacle, I felt an enormous urge to eat. Not even a drop of water had passed my lips since I had awakened that morning. My stomach was absolutely empty. Or, if not empty, it contained nothing more than the fried manjū and the sweet potatoes from the day before. Nearly two days and nights had gone by since I had been anywhere near a bowl of rice. However shriveled my soul might have been at that moment, the sight of the rice tub brought a huge wave of hunger surging up to my throat. Suddenly I wasn’t worried about their jeers and taunts—or how I looked to them—anymore. I scooped out the tub and filled my rice bowl to overflowing. Even this simple procedure seemed to take far longer than I was willing to wait. I grabbed up my chopsticks, plunged them into the rice—and couldn’t believe what happened next. The rice would not come with the chopsticks. I plunged the chopsticks in again, with added force this time, digging down to the bottom of the bowl, but the same thing happened. The grains of rice slipped from the ends of the chopsticks and refused to leave the bowl. Having lived nineteen years without the benefit of such an experience, I was simply amazed. After trying and failing two or three more times, I rested the hand holding the chopsticks and thought about what was happening to me. I must have looked absolutely mystified. The miners, watching me, burst out laughing. As soon as I heard that, I brought the bowl to my lips and scraped in a mouthful of the dingy-looking rice. The weird taste I experienced at that moment all but caused my soul to concentrate itself entirely in my tongue, such that the laughter, the miners, and even my hunger ceased to exist. I could not believe that what I had in my mouth was rice. It could only be wall mud. There is no way I can describe the sensation of having that wall mud melt in my saliva and spread itself throughout my mouth.

  “Good, huh?” one of them said with a sneer.

  “You think it’s a holiday or somethin’?” another said. “That’s the only time you’ll get the good stuff around here. Why do you think we’re tellin’ you to get out?”

  “Yeah,” a third man said. “You’re makin’ a big mistake, fella, if you wanna be a miner and don’t even know what cheap rice tastes like.”

  All I could do, while they were having fun at my expense, was gulp down the disgusting mouthful. I considered stopping at that point, but I knew they’d start in on me again if I didn’t eat what I had piled into the rice bowl. I forced myself to cram at least that much into my stomach, telling myself it was good for me—like taking bear’s gall.14 Hunger had nothing to do with it. How much tastier yesterday’s fried manjū and steamed potatoes had been! Never in my life had I tasted such low-grade rice.

  This was how I managed to finish off the first bowl of rice, but I couldn’t force myself to take a second. I ate the noodles and set my chopsticks down. That led to another round of jeers, despite my efforts to force down the foul-tasting rice. At the moment I found the ordeal excruciating, but after that it became necessary for me to eat this kind of rice three times a day. Not only did I become accustomed to the taste of wall mud, I came to perceive it as something that human beings could eat—indeed, as a delicacy they should eat, in no way different from the so-called good stuff. Once that change in outlook was accomplished, I felt ashamed of myself for having hesitated to eat what the woman served me that day on the chipped table. No wonder the miners made fun of me. If I were now to witness the spectacle of such an inexperienced, aristocratic miner suffering over a bowl of cheap rice, I myself might find it comical—or at least worth a good-natured laugh, if not a full-fledged jibe. People certainly do change.

  Sorry, I really ought to drop this subject of cheap rice. I don’t know how long the sarcastic remarks on my bungling would have continued if they had been allowed to run their course, but suddenly they were interrupted by a sound rather like the smashing together of metal wash basins. Not just one smash. The repeated metallic clashing set up a rhythm as it drew closer and closer, and soon it was joined by a lumber hauler’s chant. Not a real lumber hauler’s chant, of course. That was the closest thing I knew to what I was hearing. All at once the jeering stopped. As the clanging echoed through the hushed mountain air, something drew slowly nearer, raising a bizarre plaint.

  “It’s a jangle!” shouted one of the miners, all but slapping his knee in surprise.

  “It’s a jangle!” The others took up the cry. “It’s a jangle!”

  The black clump scattered, heading for the windows. I had no idea what a jangle was, but as soon as the others’ attention was diverted from me, the feeling of relief made me want to see the jangle, and with that came a new rush of energy. The human heart, it seems to me after careful consideration, is like water. Push it and it gives way; pull back, and it comes flowing in. You might say our life is like a continual shoving match without hands. So, after everyone else stood up, I stood up. And when they went to the window, I went over to the window. I stretched to see over the black heads that filled the bottom of the frame. Around the corner of the stone wall where the road curved away at an angle, two men in blue, narrow-sleeved kimono appeared. After them came two others. These were holding a round metal thing in each hand, something like a wash basin squashed and hammered thin. The moment it occurred to me that those were the things I was hearing, the two men brought them smashing together. The discordant sound struck the sheer stone wall, echoed against the rock-strewn mountain behind, and before it had died away, another pair of men appeared after the others, smashing the metal things together. And another pair, though these were not carrying the flattened wash basins. Instead, they were singing the lumber hauler’s chant—which is what I called their song before, but now their voices sounded more like the weird battle cries the chanter makes in Naniwabushi.15

  “Hey, where’s old Kin?” yelled one of the black heads in front of me. Since everyone was looking out the window, I couldn’t see the man’s face.

  “Yeah,” answered another miner without hesitation, “He oughta see this.”

  Almost before he had finished speaking, five or six of the black heads whirled around toward me. I stood there, resigned to hearing more comments of the kind I had endured earlier, but, amazingly enough, the eyes that had turned this way were not aimed at me. Their line of vision seemed to run toward something in the far corner of the large room. I twisted my head around, allowing my gaze to follow theirs, and found the “something” lying down. A thin quilt lay atop him.

  “Hey, Kin!” yelled one of the men, but there was no answer.

  “Hey, Kin, get up!” another one yelled, but still there was no reply. Three men left the window, headed for the far corner. They stripped away the quilt, revealing a man in a sleeping robe.

  “Get up, I said! I’ve got somethin’ for you to see.”

  Finally the man stood, leaning heavily on the shoulders of two who had gone to rouse him. He looked my way. The single glance I had of his face at that moment sent a shudder of horror through me. This was not a man who had been lying down merely for the sake of rest. He was very, very sick—too sick even to stand up by himself. He was close to fifty. His face had shaggy stubble that suggested he had not shaved for several days. Even a savage looks pitiful when he has wasted away to this extent. He was so pathetic, in fact, that he was frightening. At its height, the pity I felt the moment I saw him turned to fear.

  Held up by the men flanking him, the sick man approached the window, dragging his useless legs. The crowd at the window greeted this spectacle with gleeful shouts.

  “C’mon over, Kin. It’s a jangle! Hurry up and look!”

  “I don’t want to see any damned jangle,” the sick man replied feebly as he was being dragged along against his will. It made no difference what he wanted to see or not see. They rushed him to the window, pressing him against the corner where the shoji had been slid open.

  With a look of utter nonchalance, the jangle continued to appear around the corner of the stone wall. Was it never going to end? I stretched to look down at the road, which brought me another rush of horror. Between the bearers of the wash basins, dangling in space as
it made its way down the mountain road, was a slapped-together square coffin. The top had been covered in a white sheet, a bare cedar pole passed through the wooden loops at either end, and there was a man shouldering each end of the pole with all the matter of-factness he might have evidenced if entrusted with a load of water. From here it looked as if they, too, were cheerfully singing the chant. It was then that I realized the meaning of “jangle.” The moment of understanding came with a piercing clarity I’m sure I’ll never forget for the rest of my life, whatever else is left in store for me. A “jangle” was a funeral, a kind of funeral that can only be performed—indeed, must be performed—for miners of the four classes—miner, digger, setter, and chipper. It was a funeral in which phrases from the sutras are sung in the emotional Naniwa-bushi style, the music of shattering wash basins is played, the coffin is carried past the barracks, dangling like a barrel of water on a pole, and, finally, a half-dead miner is dragged from his bed and, despite his protests, forced to look on. It was the height of innocence, the height of cruelty.