Mandarins: Stories by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa

by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa

  “As you may readily suppose, it was the antiquarian who managed all the arrangements. Fortunately, someone was found to act as a pro forma matchmaker for this sudden fait accompli, and with that, all proceeded smoothly to their marriage in autumn of that year.

  “I hardly need to tell you that the newlyweds lived happily. What particularly amused me, even as I felt a twinge of envy, was the buoyancy and cheerfulness emanating, to judge from subsequent letters informing me of his latest news, from a man nearly entirely transformed from the dispassionate, deskbound scholar he had been.

  “I have kept all of those letters, and whenever I read them one by one, it is as though I see his smiling face before me. With a childlike joy, he persevered in his missives, telling in great detail of his daily life. The morning glories he had attempted to cultivate that year had died . . . He had been requested to make a donation to a Ueno orphanage . . . Most of his library had mildewed during the rainy season . . . His rickshaw puller had suffered an infection . . . He had gone to see a performance of Occidental jugglers and sleight-of-hand artists at the Miyakoza Theater . . . There had been a fire in Kuramae. One could go on endlessly . . . Yet, in all of this, he seemed to have found the greatest joy in commissioning the artist Gozeta Hōbai to paint a portrait of his wife. This he put on the wall to replace Napoleon, and I myself later saw it.

  “Madame Katsumi had been portrayed in profile, standing in front of a full-length mirror; with her hair swept back in a Western-style bun, she was wearing a black kimono embroidered in gold thread and holding a bouquet of roses in her hand. Yet though I did indeed see that portrait, I was never to see the buoyant and cheerful Miura . . .”

  Viscount Honda uttered a faint sigh and was silent for a moment. I had been listening intently but now involuntarily threw him an anxious look, as his words gave me reason to wonder whether by the time of his return from Keijō, his friend Miura was no longer living. He appeared immediately to perceive this and in response slowly shook his head.

  “I do not mean that during my absence Miura died, only that when I saw him again after a year’s absence, he was, though still self-composed, inclined toward pensiveness. I could see this already at Shinbashi Station, where he had come to meet me, as I cordially took his hand to signal the end of our long separation. No, perhaps I should say that what struck me instead was what seemed to be an excessive equanimity. In fact, such was my feeling that something was amiss that no sooner had I seen his face than I exclaimed: ‘What is it? Are you ill?’

  “For his part, he appeared quite taken aback by my concern and assured me that both he and his wife were in the best of health. I thought to myself that, after all, the mere space of a year, whatever the effects of a mariage d’amour, his fundamental character could not have changed so radically. With that, I put my worry aside by saying jocularly: ‘It must have been an odd refraction of the light that made me think that your facial coloring was not what it should be.’

  “It took two or three months more for me to discern little by little that here there was nothing to be dismissed with laughter, that behind the melancholic mask lay a terrible anguish. But now I am once again getting ahead of the story. To proceed properly, I must tell you something about his wife.

  “I first met her shortly after my return, when Miura invited me to dine with them at their home along the riverbank. Though I had heard that they were approximately the same age, she would have appeared to anyone, perhaps because she was so small and slender, to be several years younger than he.

  “She had rich eyebrows and a round face, with a fresh and rosy complexion. That evening she wore a classic kimono, decorated, as I remember, with traditional images of butterflies and birds and secured with a satin obi. To resort to the thinking of the time, I should say that there was something about her that suggested le haut niveau.2 And yet when I compared her with the person I had imagined as Miura’s bride, the very personification of his amour, I sensed a vague discrepancy. I say ‘vague’—for I could not explain even to myself the source of this intuition.

  “The shadows that fell on my expectations were no more than the flickering thoughts that had passed through my mind on various encounters, including that initial reunion with Miura and, of course, the evening spent together; they were certainly not such as to dampen the exuberance with which I congratulated the couple. On the contrary, I could only be filled with admiration at the sheer vivaciousness of his wife, as we lingered at the table, sitting around the light of the kerosene lamp.

  “Her repartee was as swift and sure as the proverbial reverberations of a tolling bell. ‘Okusan,’ I was even moved to exclaim in all seriousness, ‘you really should have been born in France rather than Japan!’

  “‘Well, you see now,’ interjected her husband, sipping at his cup, ‘isn’t this just what I’ve long been telling you?’ This he said to his wife, as though gently teasing her, but it cannot have been merely my imagination that even as I heard these words, I detected a disagreeable edge to them. Nor can it have been merely unjust suspicion on my part to have seen in her half-reproachful sideways glance at him a revelation of what lay beneath her brazen coquettishness.

  “Be that as it may, I could not help seeing their life together illuminated in that ever so brief exchange, as though by a bolt of lightning. In retrospect, I see myself as having been present as the curtain rose on the tragedy of Miura’s life. At the time, however, it was only a slight shadow of anxiety momentarily dimming my spirits; immediately thereafter all had been set aright, as he and I began a lively exchange of cups. Thus, having spent a truly delightful evening, I took my leave in a state of mild inebriation, and as I rode the rickshaw home over the river, exposing my flushed face to the wind, I repeatedly offered for his sake silent words of congratulation on having succeeded in finding amour.

  “About a month later, during which time I had, of course, paid frequent visits to the couple, I was invited to the Shintomi-za by a doctor friend of mine. As it happened, the play being performed was O-den no Kanabumi,3 and there, sitting in the middle tier of boxes directly across from us, was Miura’s wife. At the time, it was my habit to take opera glasses with me whenever I went to the theater, and it was she who first caught my eye as I looked through those round lenses. She was seated in front of a flamboyantly colorful tapestry. With her white double chin resting on a decorative collar of sedate hue, she had inserted in the knot of her hair what appeared to be a rose. At the very moment I recognized her, she nodded to me with those same provocative eyes. As I lowered my opera glasses and returned the greeting, I was surprised to see her looking back at me with a flustered expression. This time, however, her salutation was strikingly more formal and deferential. I now understood that her initial greeting had not been intended for me. Quite without thinking, I glanced about to discover who this other acquaintance of hers might be. I saw sitting in the box next to me a young man dressed in a loud striped suit. He too seemed to be looking for his counterpart. He stared in our direction, a strong-smelling cigarette in his mouth, until his eyes caught mine. There was something about his dark complexion that I found unpleasant, and I immediately averted my gaze, again picking up my opera glasses and idly looking across to the opposite side of the theater.

  “In the box with Miura’s wife sat another woman. When I tell you that it was a certain Narayama, an advocate for women’s rights, I think it unlikely that you will not have heard of her. She was at the time the wife of the rather well-known lawyer Narayama. An outspoken promoter of judicial equality between the sexes, she was also the perennial subject of unpleasant rumors. Seeing her sitting there, stiff-shouldered, in a black crested kimono and gold-rimmed spectacles, next to Miura’s wife as though she were her guardian, I was overwhelmed by an ominous sense of foreboding. As she adjusted and readjusted her collar, the feminist was pointing her angular, lightly powdered face in our direction—or rather, I think, throwing meaningful glances at the man in the striped suit.

  “It is
no exaggeration to say that all during the performance I gave far greater attention to him and the two wives than to the actors on stage, Kikugorō or Sadanji. Filled as it was with repugnant thoughts and images, my mind was utterly incapable of relating to the world before me: the lively musical accompanists to the left of the stage or the artificial cherry sprigs hanging from above.

  “Thus, when the two women went out immediately after the end of the middle piece, I experienced a genuine sense of relief. Of course, the man in the striped suit had remained. Constantly puffing on his cigarette, he would glance at me from time to time, but now that two of the three were gone, his swarthy face did not trouble me as much as before.

  “It will strike you as absurdly groundless suspicion, but his features did indeed inspire in me a strange aversion, so that between him and me—or rather between him and us—I felt an intractable hostility. Thus, when less than a month later I was introduced to him in Miura’s study, overlooking the Great River, I could not help feeling something close to perplexity, as though I had been confronted with a riddle.

  “It seemed he was the cousin of Miura’s wife and held a position of some responsibility, relative to his youth, in a certain textile company. He again puffed on a cigarette as we sat round the table at tea, engaged in desultory chatting. It soon became apparent to me that he was a man of some talent, though, needless to say, none of this changed in the least my opinion of him. Yet when I appealed to my own reason, I saw that inasmuch as he was the cousin of Miura’s wife, there was nothing the least extraordinary in their exchange of greetings at the theater. I therefore did my utmost to engage him. Yet whenever I appeared to be on the verge of success, he would invariably do something annoying—slurping his tea, casually dropping cigarette ashes on the table, laughing uproariously at his own jokes. And so my antipathy for him was only rekindled.

  “When after some thirty minutes he excused himself, saying that he had to attend some sort of company banquet, I found myself impulsively going to the French windows overlooking the water and opening them wide, as though to purge the room of vulgar air. Seated as was his custom under the portrait of his wife with her bouquet of roses, Miura said to me reproachfully: ‘My goodness, how you do dislike him!’

  “‘I cannot help finding him unpleasant. That he is your wife’s cousin is astounding.’

  “‘Astounding? Why?’

  “‘He is of an altogether different sort . . .’

  “Miura fell silent for some time, staring fixedly at the river, the light of the evening sun having already begun to play on its surface. When he spoke again, it was with an unexpected proposal:

  “‘What would you say to going off on a fishing expedition, the two of us?’

  “Being only too happy to have the subject of the cousin behind us, I responded with an immediate show of spirit: ‘A splendid idea! I have a bit more confidence in angling than in diplomacy.’ Miura smiled for the first time and said: ‘Than in diplomacy, you say. As for myself . . . Well, to begin with, I suppose I feel more competent in matters piscatorial than amatorial.’

  “‘Have you then a prize catch in mind to surpass your wife?’

  “‘Now wouldn’t that be good—something more with which to make you jealous!’

  “His words seemed to pierce my ears like a needle. Peering at him through the penumbra, I saw a cold expression on his face as he continued to gaze at the light on the water below.

  “‘When should we go?’ I asked.

  “‘Whenever it suits you.’

  “‘Then I shall inform you by post.’

  “I slowly rose from the red-leather chair in which I had been sitting, silently shook his hand, and quietly left his somber study, the whiff of secrets in the air, and stepped into the even darker corridor. Near the door, I quite unexpectedly met a black figure, quietly standing there as though having eavesdropped on our conversation. Seeing me, the person immediately approached me, exclaiming in a most charming tone: ‘Oh, are you leaving so soon?’

  “Madame Katsumi was again wearing a rose in her hair. For a moment I felt breathless but then gave her a glacial stare and a wordless salutation before moving with rapid strides to the entrance, where a rickshaw was awaiting me. My mind was in such a state of confusion that I myself was hardly aware of it. All that I remember is that as I was crossing Ryōgoku Bridge, I found myself repeating over and over the name of Delilah.

  “It was from that moment that glimmerings of the secret behind Miura’s melancholic demeanor began to make themselves clear to me. I need hardly say that this secret was seared into my mind in the form of those abhorrent characters that represent the word adultery.4 Yet if my assumption was correct, why did not Miura, of all people, idealist that he was, resolve to divorce her? Did he, for all his suspicions, lack sufficient evidence? Or, was he, despite it all, hesitating to act out of love?

  “As I relentlessly pondered these hypotheses, turning them over one by one, I soon forgot about the fishing trip, and though over the next fortnight I continued on occasion to write, my heretofore frequent visits to the Miuras’ house on the riverbank ceased altogether. It was then, however, that I had another unexpected chance encounter. It was this that gave me the resolve to use our talk of going fishing as a partial reason for a direct meeting and there to lay open to him my anxieties.

  “I had gone with my doctor friend to the Nakamura-za to see a play. We were on our way back when we happened to meet a familiar face, a journalist for the Akebono, writing under the name of Chinchikurin-shujin. It had started to rain on this late afternoon as we went for a drink at the Ikuine, located at the time in Yanagibashi.

  “We were seated on the second floor, enjoying moderate imbibing, as we listened to the faraway sound of a shamisen, evoking long-ago Edo. Now our journalist friend arose, caught up in the merriment, and, like a popular writer of fiction from that era, sprinkling his remarks with jeux de mots, began to entertain us with scandalous stories about Madame Narayama. It seems the woman had been a foreigner’s concubine in Kōbe. Then for a time she had had San’yūtei Engyō as her kept man.

  “She had been then in her heyday and wore six gold rings, but in the last two or three years had been up to her neck in debts of legally dubious provenance . . . Chinchikurin-shujin had much else to tell us concerning her dissolute conduct behind the scenes, but for me the most disturbing shadow that he cast with his account concerned the recent appearance in her company of a certain young lady, who, rumor had it, had become for the other an accessory as inseparable as her kimono pouch. Moreover, it was said that she sometimes stayed overnight with the women’s rights advocate in Suijin—and in the additional company of men.

  “When I heard this, I saw, amidst the jolly exchange of cups, the pensive figure of Miura flicker hauntingly before my eyes, and found it impossible to join, even out of a sense of duty, in all the boisterous laughter. Fortunately, the good doctor quickly became aware of my subdued spirits and adroitly steered the raconteur in another direction, completely away from the topic of Madame Narayama. Now I could breathe again and continue to converse without marring the conviviality.

  “Yet that evening had been made to bring me naught but bad luck. Disheartened by the gossip concerning the women’s rights advocate, I had stood up with my two companions to leave and was standing in front of the Ikuine, about to step into a rickshaw, when another, this one designed for two passengers, suddenly and forcefully swept by, its rain-covered canopy glistening. I had one foot on the running board when, almost exactly at that moment, I saw the oilcloth hood of the other rickshaw raised and someone bounding out in the direction of the entrance. Glimpsing the figure, I threw myself into the safety of the canopy. As the puller lifted the shafts, I felt strangely agitated and involuntarily muttered: “That one!” It could be no other than the dark-complexioned, stripe-suited cousin of Miura’s wife. Thus, as I sped along the illuminated boulevard of Hirokōji, the rain streaming from the canopy, I was pursued by dread anxiety at the th
ought of who might have been his fellow passenger. Might it have been Madame Narayama—or Madame Katsumi, a rose in her hair?

  “Even as I agonized over the irresolvable uncertainty of my suspicions, I was fearful of solution—and angered at my own cowardice in having hurriedly jumped into the rickshaw to conceal my identity. To this day, the question of which woman it had been remains for me an enigma.”

  Viscount Honda drew out a large handkerchief and, discreetly blowing his nose, looked round again at the contents of the display cases, now bathed in evening light, before quietly resuming his story.

  “Of course, I earnestly thought all these matters, particularly what I had heard from Chinchikurin-shujin, to be of extreme interest to Miura, and so the next day immediately sent a letter to him, offering him a date for our fishing jaunt. He immediately replied, saying that as the day would be the sixteenth day in the lunar calendar, we might instead go out in a boat on the river at twilight and view the moon. I had, needless to say, no particularly strong desire to go fishing and so readily consented to his proposal. On the appointed day, we met at the boathouse in Yanagibashi and, before the moon was up, rowed out toward the Great River in an open, flat-bottomed barque.

  “Even in those days, the view of the water in the evening may not have been worthy of comparison with the elegance of the more distant past, but something of the beauty that one sees in old woodblock prints remained. When on that evening too we rowed downstream past Manpachi and entered the Great River, we could see the parapet of Ryōgoku Bridge, arching above the waves that flickered in the faint mid-autumn twilight and against the sky, as though an immense black Chinese ink stroke had been brushed across it. The silhouettes of the traffic, horses and carriages soon faded into the vaporous mist, and now all that could be seen were the dots of reddish light from the passengers’ lanterns, rapidly passing to and fro in the darkness like small winter cherries.