Mandarins: Stories by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa

by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa

  It was, however, so subtle a sentiment that none was conscious of it. Not even Kikaku, the most realistic of them all, could help shuddering when he happened to catch the eyes of Mokusetsu and see in them a fleeting hint of that same thought. He hastily turned away and took up the plumed stick with an air of unconcern and said to Kyorai beside him: “Allow me to be the first.”

  He dipped the plume into the water, edged forward on his thick knees, and glanced surreptitiously at the face of the dying master. Previously he had, to be sure, imagined with what sadness he would one day bid farewell to him, but now that the moment had arrived and he was making the last offering of water,3 his actual emotions quite betrayed his somewhat theatrical expectations: they were of cold and cloudless indifference. Moreover, to his surprise, the eerie appearance of the moribund Bashō, who quite literally had wasted away until he was no more than skin-covered bones, filled him with such violent revulsion that he nearly turned his face away. Indeed, “violent” is hardly a sufficient expression. It was a most unbearable repugnance, quite invisible to the eye but so strong as to produce in him a physiological reaction, as though from a vile poison. Had this happenstance encounter with the sick body of the master caused him to give vent to his horror of all that is ugly? Or did this emblem of Death’s reality emanate as an ominous threat from Nature, upon which he, a hedonistic proponent of Life, was wont above all else to pronounce his curse? . . . Whichever it may have been, Kikaku, with no more than the slightest feeling of sadness, had no sooner moistened the thin, purplish lips with the brush, the face of the dying man filling him with inexpressible loathing, than he grimaced and drew away. In that instant, he felt a vague twinge of conscience, but so intense was his sense of disgust that it appeared to preclude any such moral considerations.

  Kikaku was followed by Kyorai, who since Mokusetsu’s signal appeared to have lost his composure. True to his reputation as a consistently modest man, he nodded slightly to all assembled as he slid his way to Bashō’s side, but as soon as he saw the disease-ravaged face of the old poet stretched out before him, he felt despite himself a strange mixture of satisfaction and remorse. These emotions, as inextricably linked as darkness and light, had indeed been troubling the mind of the timid man over the course of the last four or five days. Learning of Bashō’s serious illness, Kyorai had immediately set out by ship from Fushimi and, having rapped on Hanaya Nizaemon’s door in the dead of night, watched over his master day in and day out. Moreover, by prevailing upon Shidō to arrange for an assistant, sending someone to Sumiyoshi Shrine to pray for their ailing master, and consulting with Hanaya for the purchase of various personal effects, he had, more than anyone, endeavored zealously and relentlessly to provide whatever was required. Needless to say, he had done all of this quite on his own, never intending to impose a debt of gratitude on anyone.

  The intense awareness of having immersed himself in the care of his master had naturally planted within him the seeds of enormous satisfaction. Hardly knowing his own mind in this, he felt rather untroubled in allowing the emotion to warm his carefree heart as he went about his daily tasks.

  Had this been otherwise, he might well have conducted himself differently with Shikō, as one evening they kept their vigil under the light of an oil lamp. Rather than holding forth on the subject of filial piety and dwelling endlessly on his desire to serve Bashō as a son would a father, he would have conversed of mundane matters. Though basked in such complacency, he had caught in the spiteful face of Shikō the flicker of a sarcastic smile and now felt his tranquil state of mind disturbed. The cause was the dismal realization, as brought home to him by his own self-critical eye, of a hitherto unconscious sense of self-approval. Even as he nursed his master, so gravely ill that there was no knowing what the next day would bring, he was far from anxious or concerned for him; rather he was vainly and smugly observing the pains that he was taking on his behalf. For a man of such honesty, such a revelation would surely have aroused in him terrible pangs of conscience.

  Since then, in whatever he sought to undertake, he had naturally felt constricted, trapped between the conflicting emotions of pride and contrition. Of the former, he became all the more aware whenever he glimpsed, if only by chance, the hint of a smirk in Shikō’s eyes, a frequent and ever more painful reminder of his lowliness.

  Thus the days had passed, and now here he was at the master’s bedside, taking his turn to offer him these last drops of water. That this man, so morally upright and, at the same time, so strangely over-wrought, should have lost complete control in the face of such a contradiction was a cause for pity but hardly surprise. As he grasped the feathered stick and with its wetted white point caressed the lips of Bashō, his body oddly stiffened, and his hand trembled unceasingly with the abnormal agitation that had seized him. Fortunately, it was just then that his eyelashes were flooded with pearl-like tears, so that all of Bashō’s disciples gathered there, even including the caustic Shikō, could no doubt grasp that his outward appearance reflected a profound sadness.

  The shoulders of his kimono rising again, Kyorai now timidly resumed his place, and the plumed stick passed to the hand of Jōsō, who sat directly behind him. This ever-faithful disciple murmured a chant with respectfully lowered eyes as he dampened the lips of the master, his solemn demeanor doubtlessly noticed by all. But now amidst the solemnity there was heard from a corner of the room an eerie peel of laughter—or at least so it seemed. It could well have been taken to be the sound of a chortle coming from the intestinal depths and, though held back by the throat and lips, issuing in bursts from the nostrils under the irrepressible pressure of a droll event or comment. Needless to say, from that assembly came no such sound. It was merely that Seishū, his eyes already dim with tears, was at last unable, despite heroic efforts, to hold back a great cry of lament; it gushed forth as though his very heart had broken. It was, of course, the expression of sorrow at its most extreme. Among the disciples there must have been many who remembered their master’s celebrated verse:

  Shake, O grave mound, shake,

  For the sound of my wailing

  Is the autumn wind.4

  Though he too was choked with dark grief, Otsushū could not but feel unease at what seemed amidst it all to be an excessive display or, at the very least, to put it more cautiously, a certain lack of self-restraint. Yet such may well have been no more than a purely rational judgment, for now, whatever his reason might say, his heart was suddenly moved by Seishū’s lamentation, and his eyes were filled with tears. His discomfort at the other’s outburst—and, in turn, shame at his own—remained unchanged. But still he gave way to the full flood of emotion. His hands resting on his knees, he sobbed in spite of himself. In this, he was not alone: the very air of that hitherto cold and grimly silent room quivered, as in near unison even those disciples who had sat demurely at the foot of Bashō’s bed broke out in fitful sniffling.

  Amidst all these mournful voices, Jōsō, his bodhi prayer beads still dangling from his wrist, quietly resumed his place. Sitting directly across from Kikaku and Kyorai was Shikō, who now took his turn. But Tōkabō, known as a cynic, did not appear to suffer in the least from the sort of distraught nerves that would cause him, induced by the sentimentality all around him, to shed vain tears. As he unceremoniously moistened the lips of the master, there was on his swarthy face the same familiar expression: a mélange of mockery and a strange haughtiness. Yet it is, of course, indisputable that even he was filled with a measure of emotion.

  Cutting to the quick,

  (“Here I leave my bones to bleach . . .”)

  The harsh autumn wind.5

  Four or five days before, the master had said: “I had long thought that I would die stretched out on the grass, with earth for my headrest. I could not be happier than to see the hope for a peaceful end here fulfilled on this splendid bed.” This he had oft repeated as an expression of his gratitude, though whether he was now lying on a withered moor or in the rear annex of Hanay
a Nizaemon’s residence was of no significant difference.

  In fact, up until three or four days before, the very person now moistening the lips of the dying man had worried that his master had not yet composed his last verse; just the day before he had contemplated how he might compile a posthumous book of his hokku. Now today, just a few minutes before, he had been intently observing the old man as he rapidly slipped into the arms of death, seeking anything in that process that might be of poetic interest. Indeed, to advance one step further in cynicism, one might even suppose that behind his watchful gaze was the hope of finding inspiration for at least one line in an account he would later write of these last days and hours. Even as he was ministering to him in these final moments, his mind was obsessed with the renown he would win among other schools of poetry, the consequences for the disciples, favorable or otherwise, and all that he might reasonably expect to gain himself.

  None of this had the remotest bearing on the imminent death of his master, whose fate was now faithfully fulfilling what he had so often predicted in his verses, for truly he was now being left as a bleached corpse in a vast and desolate moor of humanity. His own disciples were not lamenting the death of their master but rather their own loss at his passing. They were not bewailing the piteous demise of their guide in the wilderness but rather their own abandonment here in the twilight.

  Yet, as we humans are by nature coldhearted, of what use is it to offer moral reprobation? Lost in such world-weary thoughts, even as he exalted in his capacity to indulge in them, Shikō wetted the lips of his master and returned the plumed stick to the water bowl. Then glancing about at the weeping faces of his fellow disciples in apparent derision, he slowly and calmly returned to his place. For the good-natured Kyorai, Shikō’s cold demeanor had from the beginning only renewed his anxieties; for his part, Kikaku returned the look with an oddly awkward expression, apparently irritated by the air of brazen disdain that was Tōkabō’s wont.

  Shikō was followed by Inenbō. As his diminutive figure crawled along the straw mats, trailing the hems of his black robe behind him, it was clear that the moment of Bashō’s passing was at hand. His face was all the more drained of blood, and, as though he had grown forgetful, there were long moments when no breath escaped his moistened lips. Then, as if he had suddenly remembered, his larynx would begin to move with renewed force, a feeble stream of air again emerging. Twice or thrice from deep within his throat came the rumbling sound of phlegm; his respiration meanwhile grew fainter.

  Applying the white end of the plumed stick to those same lips, Inenbō was suddenly seized by a fearful thought quite unrelated to the sadness of parting from his master: Was he not destined to follow his master into death? Though verging on the utterly irrational, the emotion, once felt, was therefore all the more impossible to subdue.

  Inenbō was by nature among those who respond to any mention of death with morbid panic. From long ago, he had only to think of his own mortality, even when on pleasurable sojourns, to find his entire body drenched in sweat from the dire terror of it all. Thus, hearing of the demise of anyone else provided him with the reassurance that it was indeed the passing of someone other than himself. Yet at the same time he had been assailed by the anxiety-inducing plausibility of the opposite proposition: what if, after all, he were to be the one so summoned?

  Bashō was for him no exception. At the beginning, before it became apparent that already he lay at death’s door, when in the late autumn sky the sun was shining brightly on the sliding paper doors and the pure scent of narcissus—brought by Sonojo—was wafting through the air, all of his disciples gathered there had composed verses to amuse him. And so Inenbō’s spirits had wandered from pole to pole, as though twixt day and night.

  Yet the end inexorably grew nearer. There was the unforgettable day of early winter showers, when Bashō appeared unable even to eat the pears of which he was so fond. Seeing this, Mokusetsu had worriedly tilted his head to one side. With this, Inenbō’s serenity steadily gave way to fear and then to the looming shadow of dark, cold terror, as he imagined that his own hour would soon be upon him.

  So firmly was he in the grip of that fear that even as he sat at Bashō’s side and painstakingly wetted his lips, he seemed unable to bring himself to look directly into his face. When for an instant he appeared to make the effort, a death rattle emanated from the master’s throat, blocked by phlegm, shattering what courage Inenbō had managed to muster. “You may be the one to follow . . . ,” came a nagging, prescient voice in his ear, and as the small figure went crouching back to his place, an ever-darker frown grew on his face. Seeking to avoid the eyes of others, he lowered his head, though sometimes raising his eyes for a surreptitious glance.6

  Next from among those around Bashō’s bed came Otsushū, Seishū, Shidō, and Mokusetsu, each in their turn. But now each breath was more constricted and less frequent than the last, his throat no longer moving. His entire appearance—the small, now waxlike, pock-marked face, his lusterless eyes gazing fixedly into distant space, and the sparse, silver-white beard that covered his chin—was now frozen by the ice that is the human heart; already he appeared to be lost in dreamlike contemplation of that Realm of Eternal Tranquillity and Light to which he would presently be journeying.

  Behind Kyorai sat Jōsō, the faithful student of Zen, his head bowed in silence; even as his boundless sorrow deepened with each sign of weakening in Bashō’s breathing, his heart was gently filled by a boundless sense of peace. His sorrow required no explanation, but this feeling of serenity was strangely like the feeling of cheer that comes when the cold light of dawn slowly penetrates the shadows of night. Moment by moment it was purging his mind of idle thoughts, so that in the end his sadness was one purified of all tears and heartache.

  Was he rejoicing in his master’s transcendence of the illusory distinction between life and death, his attainment of Nirvana in the Realm of Treasures? No, that was not the reason that he could affirm even to himself. Then . . . Ah, who could have been so foolish as to vacillate in vain, to dare to deceive himself as to the truth? Jōsō’s serenity sprang from the joy of liberation, of being freed from the shackles with which the sheer force of Bashō’s personality had long bound him, of feeling his drearily oppressed soul allowed at last to exercise its own inherent strength.

  As he rubbed his prayer beads, filled with joy both rapturous and sad, his eyes no longer seemed to see any of his companions, engulfed in tears. A faint smile on his lips, he reverently paid homage to the dying Bashō.

  Thus, it was that Matsuo Tōsei of the Banana Plant Hermitage, the great and incomparable master of haikai, then and now, suddenly expired, surrounded by disciples “lost to boundless grief.”

  THE GARDEN

  1

  The garden belonged to an ancient family, Nakamura by name, whose inn had once served traveling lords in a post-station town along the Central Mountain Road. For the first decade after the Meiji Restoration, it remained much as it had been. In the gourd-shaped pond lay limpid water, and atop a miniature hill drooped the branches of pine trees. The two pavilions, the House of the Resting Crane and the Bower of the Purified Heart, had also endured. Into the pond, from a cliff at the far end of the garden, cascaded swirling white water. Among the golden kerias—their expanse growing year by year—stood a stone lantern to which Princess Kazu is said to have given a name on her journey through the region.

  There was nonetheless the undeniable intimation of impending ruin. Particularly at the beginning of spring, when the upper branches of the trees within and beyond the garden suddenly sprouted new buds, one could sense all the more intensely that lurking behind this picturesque artifact was a menacing and savage power.

  The retired head of the family was a gruff old man who spent untroubled days in the main house, which looked out on the garden. With his elderly wife, who suffered from an ulcerated scalp, he would sit at the heated table, playing go or flower cards. Sometimes, however, after losing to her five or
six times in succession, he would fly into a rage.

  To his eldest he had relinquished his rights as householder. This son was married to a cousin and lived with her in a cramped annex connected by an elevated corridor. He had taken the nom de plume of Bunshitsu and was of so petulant a disposition that even his own father, to say nothing of his frail wife and younger brothers, was eager to avoid his displeasure.

  One visitor to the inn in those days was the mendicant poet Seigetsu, who in his wanderings would turn up from time to time. Strangely enough, he was the only guest welcomed by the elder son, who served him drink and encouraged him to compose. Among the linked verses they have left for posterity is:

  Lingering in the mountains

  The scent of flowers,

  The nightingale’s1 song; (Seigetsu)

  Here and there—here and there

  A waterfall’s glimmerings (Bunshitsu)

  Of the two younger brothers, the first had been adopted into the family of a relative, a grain merchant; the other worked for a large sake brewer in a village four or five leagues away. As though by tacit agreement, they rarely returned to their parental home. The youngest was inconvenienced by the distance but was also disinclined by long-standing ill feeling between himself and the current householder. The sibling between them was leading a dissolute life and was hardly seen even in the home of his adoptive parents.

  Within two or three years, the garden had gone further to seed. Duckweed had begun to appear on the surface of the pond, and withered trees mingled with the shrubbery. During a terribly dry summer, the old man suddenly died of a cerebral hemorrhage. Four or five days before, he had been drinking shōchū when he saw on the other side of the pond the form of a court noble, dressed in white, going in and out of the bower. At least it should be said that he had seen such a phantom in the daylight.