“How about it, Kin? Get a good look? Pretty good, huh?”
“Yeah, yeah, I saw it. Now, take me back and let me lie down,” Kin pleaded.
The two who had brought him over now took Kin between them and, with small, quick steps, led him to where the quilt lay on the floor.
Then, as if the entire overcast sky had suddenly turned to powder and come filtering down, it began to rain. Smashing its way through this rain, the jangle continued on down toward town.
“More rain,” the men grumbled, shutting the window, each then finding his way back to the hearth. At some point in the commotion, almost before I knew it, I had been admitted to the ranks of the savages and was now able to approach the fire. This occurred through both chance and design. By which I mean that, without fire, I would be very cold up there in the mountains—too cold to survive wearing my one thin kimono. And, in addition, it had begun to rain. This was the kind of fine-grained rain that might just as well be called mist. It hid the surrounding rocky peaks and blotted out the sky, drenching everything below. Even sitting indoors, you felt as if the microscopic drops were infiltrating through your pores and deep down into your guts. This was something you needed fire to endure.
Taking a seat at random, I felt what little warmth there was to be had at the sunken hearth bathing over my face. Much to my surprise, the others were ignoring me now and I escaped without further ridicule. Perhaps because I had taken the initiative to enter their ranks, the others had decided to tolerate me as just another savage. Possibly the sudden appearance of the jangle had distracted them enough to make them forget about me for a while. Or maybe they had simply run out of jibes or had their fill of cursing. Whatever the reason, once I found this new seat I felt somewhat more relaxed. Of course, the many voices around the hearth now concentrated on the jangle.
“I wonder where it came from?”
“What’s the difference? A jangle’s a jangle.”
“Maybe from Kuroichi’s. Somewhere up there.”
“I wonder where you go after a jangle.”
“To the temple, stupid. Everybody knows that.”
“Who you callin’ stupid? I’m talkin’ about after the temple.”
“He’s right. It sure doesn’t end at the temple. You gotta go somewhere.”
“That’s what I mean. The last place. I wonder what it’s like there. Think it’s the same as here?”
“Sure. Human souls go there. It must be pretty much the same.”
“I think so, too. If you go somewhere, it’s gotta be there.”
“They talk about ‘Heaven’ and ‘Hell,’ but ya hafta eat there, too, I guess.”
“I wonder if they’ve got women.”
“Of course they’ve got women. There’s no place in the world without women.”
This more or less sums up the kind of nonsensical talk that followed the jangle. At first, I thought I must be hearing a joke. Figuring it was probably all right to laugh, I took a quick survey, the corner of my mouth twitching, but obviously I was the only one who wanted to laugh. The other faces around the hearth were as hard as if carved in stone. These men were discussing the question of the afterlife in deadly earnest. There was an intensity to be seen on each furrowed brow that could only be described as unbelievable. One glance was enough to expunge my initial urge to laugh. It took me completely by surprise that such bold, reckless men—men who knew when they went down into the mine with their oil lamps that they might never again see the light of day, savages who were more machine than human, more animal than machine—should be so deeply concerned about what lay in store for them. No wonder men needed religion to guarantee an afterlife. I was not actually aware, of course, when I raised my eyes and surveyed the men sitting cross-legged around the hearth, that a combination of restraint and awe had wiped the nearly formed smile from my face. I merely felt a need to observe decorum, as if I had opened my eyes expecting to see a comedy, and found there instead a throng of fierce guardian deities in full armor. In other words, what happened, surely, was that I witnessed for the first time in my life the germ of all true religious feeling and, in the presence of these half-beast-half-humans, felt a genuine sense of awe. (Nonetheless, I myself still possess no religious feeling.)
Just then, the sick man in his corner began to moan. This had no special significance, of course. It was simply the usual moaning of a sick person. But, to these men now sunk in their worries about the life to come, it must have had an uncanny ring to it. They shot anxious looks at one another.
“Somethin’ hurtin’ you, Kin?” one man shouted.
The moan that came back in response might have been an answer or just a moan.
“Forget about your old lady,” another man shouted from his place by the hearth. “He took her. She’s gone. No use groanin’ about it now. You’re the one who pawned her. When you don’t pay up, somebody else gets her. That’s the way it works.”
I couldn’t tell if this was meant to comfort the sick man or torment him. From the miners’ point of view, the two were probably one and the same. All the sick man did was groan back—or, rather, just groan. The men gave up their attempts to comfort him, and the embryonic dialogue reverted to chatter around the fire. The focus of discussion, though, remained on Kin.
“You know why he lost her, don’t you? ’Cause he got sick. It’s his own damn fault,” one man said, as if Kin himself had done something wrong by falling ill.
“You said it!” another chimed in. “He gets sick, so he borrows money. He can’t pay it back, so they take his old lady for collateral. He can’t crab about that.”
“How much did he pledge her for?”
“Five big ones,” shot back someone on the far side.
“So old Ichi came down and took Kin’s place? Ha ha ha!”
It was painful for me to go on sitting by the fire. My back was shivering with the cold, but my armpits were streaming.
“Kin better get well fast and take his old lady out of hock.”
“And take Ichi’s place? No problem!”
“Yeah! Or the smart thing would be for him to make a bundle and get himself a piece of collateral that’s worth more.”
“That’s the ticket!”
This remark set off a burst of laughter. Enveloped in the mirthful sound, I was yet unable to laugh. I lowered my gaze. Then I realized that I was kneeling formally with my knees together. Stupid. I lowered my buttocks to the mat and crossed my legs. The way I felt inside, though, was nothing like this relaxed posture.
Not long afterward, the sun began to set. This wasn’t simply a function of the passage of time. The darkness came early here because of the weather and the surrounding mountains. I listened for the sound of rain falling, but I couldn’t hear any. Maybe it had let up. But that seemed unlikely, considering how dark it had become. The window was, of course, shut tight. There was no way I could tell what it was like outside. The dank night air filtered through the shoji paper, assaulting the broad open spaces around the hearths. The faces of the fourteen or fifteen men around the fire began to go out of focus. At the same time, the red glow of the coals piled high in the middle seemed to rise gradually to the surface of the mound, sending its warmth in all directions. I was beginning to feel somewhat as if I were sinking to the bottom of the mine while the fire was gradually rising up out of it. Suddenly the room grew bright. Someone had switched on the electric lights.
“Let’s eat,” one of the men said. The others responded as if recalling something left behind.
“Eat and then it’s our shift again, huh?”
“It’s kinda cold today.”
“Still rainin’?”
“I dunno. Go outside ’n’ look.”
Each man contributing his crude bit to the noise, they stood and climbed down the stairway. I was left alone in the huge room. The only one there besides me was the sick man, Kin. He still seemed to be moaning faintly. Sitting cross-legged by the hearth, holding my hands out over the fire, I turned my ga
ze in his direction. His head was under the covers. His feet, too, were pulled up. He lay there, small and flat, beneath his single quilt. Pitifully small and flat. Before long, his moaning seemed to stop. Again I turned my head, now to stare into the fire. I couldn’t get Kin off my mind, though, and once again I looked to the side. He lay there just as small and flat as before. Only, now he was silent. Was he alive or dead? It had been bad enough while he was moaning, but his silence had me even more worried. The worry rose in pitch to fear and I raised myself slightly from the floor, dropping to the mat again after more or less convincing myself that he must be all right: people don’t just pop off so suddenly.
At that point, I heard some men coming noisily up the stairs. Could they have finished eating already? It was much too soon for that, I told myself, shifting my gaze slightly in the direction of the stairway, where there appeared two men entirely different from the ones I had expected to see. They wore straight-sleeved jackets of some indefinable dark color—black or navy blue—and tight-fitting pants of the sort workmen usually wear, also that blue-black color. They carried oil lanterns, and both men were wet and muddy. Neither said a word. They stood stock still, glaring at me. Men like this could only be robbers. Eventually, they threw down their lanterns, loosened their buttons and took off their jackets. Then their pants. Taking down wide-sleeved robes from the wall, they put these on over their underwear, wrapped towel-like sashes around their waists, and, still without a word, clumped down the stairs. As soon as they were gone, more came. They, too, were wet. And muddy. They threw down their lanterns. Changed. Clumped downstairs. More came. They continued coming like this by turns—a good number. Each, without fail, darted a glance at me, eyes flashing. One asked me, “You new?”
I answered, “Yup,” and let it go at that. Fortunately, these newcomers left me pretty much alone. Each new arrival was in such a hurry to go back downstairs, I suppose, that he had no time for the kind of jeering the others had given me. On the other hand, not one of them failed to dart me a piercing glance. Eventually they stopped coming and I was finally able to relax, staring at the red-glowing coals and thinking. My “thoughts” were completely disconnected, of course, and each new one was more ridiculous than the last, but this was unavoidable, the way these crazy snatches came flaring up from the burning coals. In the end, I had the strange feeling that my soul had slipped out of me and into the red coals, where it was dancing like mad. Then suddenly someone said, “Go to bed. You must be exhausted.”
I looked up to find the old woman standing over me. She still had the cords holding her kimono sleeves up for work. I had been totally unaware of her coming upstairs. My soul had been galloping around in the fire, turning into girl number two, Tsuyako, then girl number one, Sumie. Then it had turned into my father, old Kin, pretty jackets, pompadours, the red blanket, moans, fried manjū, Kegon Falls. Countless images were whirling madly in the fire, and just as tumbling clouds of them flared up within the rising flames, like dust in a shaft of sunlight, I saw the old woman there with a start. She looked incredibly strange to me at that moment, but her words, “Go to bed,” must have registered clearly in my mind.
“All right,” I answered, nothing more.
Pointing to the closet behind me, she said, “The quilts are in there. You have to take your own. Three sen each. It’s cold, so you’ll need two.”
“All right,” I said again.
The old woman left without another word. Now that I had been given permission to sleep, I could stretch out properly without fear of being ridiculed. Following her instructions, I opened the closet, and there they were. Piles of quilts. And every one grimy. They were nothing like the quilts we had at home. I slipped out the top two and looked at them beneath the light. They were made of pale blue cloth with a white pattern. Both were largely smeared with grime that discolored them—especially the white places—to a degree that I would normally have found unbearable. And they were the hardest quilts I had ever seen. The cotton stuffing was squashed together into a leathery consistency and had nothing whatever to do with the cloth covers, as if someone had wrapped a freshly pounded rice cake in a piece of sheet.
I spread one of these flat quilts on the matted floor and lay the other on top of it. Stripping down to my undershirt, I crawled in between the two. When I stretched my legs out in the damp space into which I had fit my body, my heels ended up on the floor. I pulled them in just a bit. Neither in the stretching nor in the bending did my legs move with their accustomed smoothness. The knees were so stiff they practically creaked when I flexed them. Stretched out on the floor like this between the covers, my legs were not just stiff, they weighed a ton. I felt as if everything below the thighs had been cut off and replaced with artificial legs of wood and metal. They were two poles that just happened to possess the sense of touch. Out of concern for these cold, heavy legs of mine, I pulled my head in between the covers. This was a desperate move borne of the frail hope that if my head, at least, could be warmed up, my legs would compromise to some extent.
But the worst thing was the sheer tiredness—worse than the cold, the legs, the stink of the quilts, my anguish, my world-weariness. It almost seemed I’d be better off dead than to be that tired. Which is why as soon as I lay down—or, at least, as soon as I had managed to pull in my feet and head—I fell asleep. Fast asleep. Out cold. What happened to me after that, not even I can write …
Suddenly a needle stabbed me in the back. Whether this had happened to me in a dream or waking, the sensation was too indistinct to tell. Nor would I have cared if the matter had ended there, be the offending object a needle, a thorn, or anything else. All I had to do was drag the waking needle into my dream or bury the thorn of my dreams beneath the bed of unconsciousness. But things didn’t work out that way. By which I mean that I was beginning to drift off and forget about the needle, even as the awareness of having been stabbed was still in my mind, when I got stuck again.
This time I opened my eyes wide. Stuck again. And again, while the shock of the last one was still fresh. It finally began to dawn on me that something awful was happening when another one got me in the thigh so painfully it almost made me jump. Now, for the first time, I reverted to being a normal human being. And I discovered that the pinpricks were happening all over my body. I slid my hand in beneath my undershirt and rubbed. My whole back felt gritty. When I first touched myself, I was convinced I had contracted some terrible skin disease. But when I pulled my fingers a few inches along the skin, the gritty stuff fell off. Something serious was going on here. I jumped out of bed and went to the hearth, though dressed in nothing more presentable than an undershirt. Between my thumb and forefinger I was squeezing something the size of a rice grain, which, upon inspection, turned out to be a strange little bug. Never having seen a bedbug before, I would not have been able to declare that that’s what it was, but I sensed intuitively that it must be a bedbug. I know I shouldn’t be using such highfalutin language to describe a situation so vulgar, but there’s no other word for it. I “sensed intuitively” that it was a bedbug. In the course of my inspection, I came to hate the thing. I put it down on the rim of the hearth and crushed it with my thumbnail. The bug gave off a sharp, grassy, indescribable sort of smell that, in a way, made me feel good.
Look at me, writing down such unpleasant stuff in perfect seriousness. That’s how crazy I was. In fact, it was not until I smelled the grassy odor that I felt I had gotten back at the little devils. I kept catching them and crushing them, one after another, and each time I crushed one I’d bring my thumbnail to my nose and sniff it. My nose became clogged with the smell. I was on the verge of tears, feeling very sorry for myself. But each whiff of my thumbnail cheered me up. Just then a roar of laughter echoed from downstairs. I immediately gave up crushing bugs. Surveying the huge room, I found no one else there—just old Kin, lying flat and quiet. Neither his head nor his feet were visible. And there was one more person. Of course, I didn’t think at first that he was a person.
All I saw was this strange white thing, maybe made of canvas, stretched between a pillar and the window sill, with something wrapped inside it. More careful inspection revealed a black thing sticking out of the white thing at an angle: the fuzzy, round head of a human being. In the whole large room, there was no one besides me and these other two. And yet the electric lights were burning brightly. I was thinking to myself how very quiet it was when another burst of laughter echoed downstairs. Probably the bunch I had been with before, or men who had returned from their shift, were together down there enjoying themselves. Head still in a fog, I returned to where my quilts lay on the floor. Stripping off my undershirt, I shook it out and put on the kimono and sash I had left by my pillow. Then I folded my two quilts very nicely and put them back in the closet. Then I didn’t know what to do. I wondered what time it was. The night showed no sign of ending. I stood there, thinking, with my arms folded. My insteps started itching again until I couldn’t stand still.
“Damn!” I muttered, doing a few little dance steps. I rubbed my right instep with my left foot and my left instep with my right foot, grinding my teeth in anger: “Take that, you little bastards!” Were they going to keep coming at me after all this? I couldn’t run outside, I didn’t have the courage to go back to bed, and I certainly didn’t have the energy to wedge myself into the circle downstairs. Recalling the abuse I had suffered earlier, the thought of joining those men was even worse than the bedbugs. Wishing that the morning would come, I walked to the window that faced the road. A pillar stood near the window. I stayed on my feet, leaning my back and buttocks against it. Soon the soles of my feet began to slide along the woven straw surface of the floor mats, moving farther and farther away from the pillar. I straightened myself up again. Again my feet began to slide. Again I stood. This kind of thing went on for a while, but at least I had no bedbugs. Every now and then, a burst of laughter would resound from downstairs.
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