Mandarins: Stories by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa

by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa

  She lit a cigarette and watched them. Despite his despondency, he went on drawing trains and airplanes. Fortunately, the child was not his, though it pained him terribly to be addressed as Ojisan.

  When the boy had momentarily left them, she continued to smoke her cigarette, asking him coquettishly:

  “Don’t you think he resembles you?”

  “Not at all. In the first place . . .”

  “Well, there is such a thing as ‘prenatal influence,’ is there not?”

  He turned his eyes without replying. Yet in the depths of his heart he could not help feeling a cruel urge to strangle the woman.

  39. Mirrors

  In the corner of a café he was conversing with a friend. The friend was talking about the recent cold, while munching on a baked apple. He suddenly sensed a contradiction in what was being said.

  “You’re still single, aren’t you?”

  “Well, actually, I’m to be married next month.”

  He fell silent despite himself. Coldly, somehow menacingly, the mirrors attached to the walls reflected multiple images of his face.

  40. Dialogue

  Why do you attack the present social system?

  Because I see the evils born of capitalism.

  The evils? I thought you did not distinguish between Good and Evil? Then what about your life?

  He was engaged in dialogue with an angel—an angel who, incidentally, was wearing a silk hat and would have blushed before no one.

  41. Illness

  He began to suffer from insomnia and from a loss of stamina as well. Each of various physicians offered multiple diagnoses, all of these including: gastric hyperacidity, gastric atony, dry pleurisy, neurasthenia, chronic conjunctivitis, brain fatigue . . .

  But he knew the source of the malady: his shame of himself and his fear of them—the society he despised.

  One afternoon, the sky darkened with snow clouds, he sat in the corner of a café, a lighted cigar in his mouth, his ear inclined to music coming from a gramophone on the other side of the room. It worked an uncanny effect on his spirits. When the record had come to a stop, he walked over and looked at the label: The Magic Flute—Mozart.

  Suddenly he understood. Mozart, who had violated the Ten Commandments, had surely suffered—yet perhaps not as he had . . . Bowing his head, he quietly returned to his table.

  42. The Laughter of the Gods

  He was thirty-five years old. Walking through a pine forest, spring sunlight falling on the trees, he recalled the words he had written two or three years before: much to their misfortune, the gods, unlike us mortals, cannot kill themselves . . .

  43. Night

  Once more dusk was falling. The storming sea relentlessly threw its spray against the twilight shore. Under such a sky he celebrated with his wife a second marriage. In this they felt both joy and sorrow. Together with their three children, they gazed at the lightning flashes in the offing. His wife was holding one of them in her arms, apparently holding back her tears.

  “I think I see a ship out there.”

  “Yes.”

  “A ship whose mast is split in two.”

  44. Death

  Taking advantage of being alone in his room, he set about to hang himself with a sash tied to the bars of the window. Yet when he put his head in the noose, he was suddenly struck by the fear of death, though he was not afraid of the momentary pain that such would entail. He took out his pocket watch the second time and by way of experiment measured how long it might take for him to be strangled. After a few uncomfortable moments, all became quite muddled. Once beyond that stage, he would surely enter the realm of death. He consulted his watch and saw that his distress had lasted one minute and some twenty seconds. Beyond the window all was pitch-black, but in that darkness could be heard the raucous crowing of a rooster.

  45. Divan

  A rereading of the Divan was giving his spirits a new vitality. This “Oriental Goethe” had previously been unknown to him. Seeing Goethe standing serenely in the realm of enlightenment, beyond all good and evil, he felt an envy bordering on despair. In his eyes, the poet Goethe was greater than the poet Christ; in his heart bloomed the roses not only of the Acropolis and of Golgotha but also of Arabia. If only he had possessed the strength to follow in his footsteps . . . Even when he had completed his reading of the Divan and stilled his terrifying emotion, he could not help feeling all the more keenly his self-loathing at having allowed his life to become that of a Chinese imperial eunuch.

  46. Lies

  He was suddenly felled face downward by the suicide of his elder sister’s husband. He was now further obliged to take care of her and her family. At least to him, his own future seemed as dark as impending nightfall. He viewed his mental ruin with a feeling close to derision, being thoroughly aware of all his vices and weaknesses, even as he continued to read volume after volume. Yet even Rousseau’s Confessions were filled with heroic falsehoods. And as for Shinsei, he had never encountered as wily an old hypocrite as the protagonist of that particular work. Only François Villon was able to touch the depths of his soul. In some of his poems, he discovered “a beautiful male.”

  The figure of Villon awaiting the gallows haunted him even in his dreams. Numerous times he had attempted to fall to the utter depths of human life, as had Villon, but neither his social circumstances nor his limited physical energy would permit it. He steadily grew weaker, much like the tree that Swift saw long ago—withering at the top.4

  47. Playing with Fire

  She had a radiant face. It was quite as though one were seeing the light of dawn reflected in a thin sheet of ice. He felt affection for her but not love; not one finger of his had ever touched her body.

  “You have said that you wish to die, have you not?” she asked.

  “Hmm . . . It is not so much that I wish to die as that I am weary of living.”

  After this exchange, they joined in a suicide pact.

  “A platonic suicide, I suppose,” she remarked.

  “Yes, a double platonic suicide.”

  He himself could not help being surprised at how calm he was.

  48. Death

  He did not carry through with the pact. For some reason he felt satisfaction at not having touched her. She sometimes talked with him, acting as if nothing had happened. She also handed over to him her small bottle of cyanide, saying:

  “This should make us both feel stronger.”

  In doing so, she did, in fact, bolster his spirits. Sitting alone in his rattan chair, he gazed at the young leaves of the chinquapins and found that despite himself he would often think of what peace death would bring him.

  49. A Stuffed Swan

  Mustering his last strength, he set about to write his autobiography, only to find that his amour propre, his skepticism, and his keen awareness of his own self-interest made the task surprisingly difficult. He could not help despising himself, even as he was equally compelled to think that when we peel back the skin we are indeed all the same. The title of Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit seemed to suggest the essence of autobiography. He also knew perfectly well that not everyone is moved by a literary work. His own writings could only appeal to likeminded individuals who lived lives similar to his own. It was with and for this feeling moving within him that he attempted to write his own brief blend of reverie and reality.

  On completing “The Life of a Fool,” he happened to pass by a secondhand shop, in which he saw a stuffed swan. It stood with its neck stretched upward, but its yellowed feathers had been eaten away by vermin. Smiling wryly through his tears, he thought about his life. Before him lay only madness or suicide. He walked alone through the streets in the twilight, resolved to await the slow but steady approach of a destiny bent on his obliteration.

  50. Prisoner

  A friend of his became mentally ill. He had always felt very close to him. He knew better than anyone his loneliness, the loneliness that lay beneath the cheery mask. He visited him several times
after his breakdown.

  “We are both haunted by demons,” his friend remarked, lowering his voice, “the so-called fin-de-siècle demons.”

  He heard that two or three days later, while on his way to a hot-springs resort, the friend had even been eating roses. After his friend’s hospitalization he remembered the terra-cotta bust that he had given him. It was of the author of a work that he had loved: The Inspector General. He remembered that Gogol too had gone mad and was thus reminded of the power that ruled them all.

  He was at the point of exhaustion when once again he heard the laughter of the gods. He had just read the last words of Raymond Radiguet: “The soldiers of God are coming for me.”5 He tried to resist his own superstition and sentimentality, but he was physically incapable of any sort of struggle.

  There could be no doubt: he was being tormented by the fin-desiècle demons. He envied the people of medieval times, who could entrust themselves to the power of God. But belief in God . . . Belief in the love of God was for him utterly impossible—a belief that even Cocteau possessed.

  51. Defeat

  Even the hand holding his pen began to tremble; he also started to drool. Except when he had taken a 0.8 gram dose of Veronal, his mind was never completely clear, and those moments of relative lucidity lasted no longer than thirty minutes to an hour. He spent his days in spiritual twilight, as though, so to speak, leaning on a thin sword whose blade had been chipped.

  THE VILLA OF THE BLACK CRANE

  1

  It was a cozily designed dwelling, with an unpretentious gate. As such, it was, to be sure, not unusual for the neighborhood. It was in its plaque—Genkaku Sanbō—and the trees in the garden that rose above the height of the wall, that it clearly outshone every other house in elegance.

  The master was Horikoshi Genkaku. Though rather well-known as a painter, he had made his fortune in the acquisition of a patent for rubber seals and subsequently in the purchase and sale of properties. The soil of the land he owned on the outskirts of the city had been so poor that not even ginger could be grown, but now all of this had been transformed into a “cultural village,”1 boasting red- and blue-tiled roofs . . .

  Genkaku Sanbō was nonetheless a cozily designed dwelling, with an unpretentious gate. Adding to the sense of refinement were both the straw ropes recently used to protect the pine trees from the snow and the bright-red ardisia berries amidst the withered pine needles carpeting the entrance. There were few passersby along the alleyway that ran by the house. Even the bean-curd peddler, putting down his shoulder pole and tubs in the thoroughfare, would signal his presence with no more than a toot of his trumpet.

  “What is the significance of the name?” asked a long-haired student of painting who happened by, carrying an oblong color-box under his arm. His companion, likewise dressed in a gold-buttoned uniform, said in reply:

  “Well, I should hardly think a pun on ‘severe’ or ‘straitlaced’!”

  The young men laughed lightheartedly as they continued on their way. The path was now again quite deserted, except for a thin blue thread of smoke rising from a Golden Bat cigarette that one of them had left discarded on the frozen lane.

  2

  Even before becoming Genkaku’s adopted son-in-law, Jūkichi had worked for a bank. Thus, on his return home each day, the electric lights were just coming on. For several days now, he had, on entering the gate, immediately detected a strange smell. The source was the bad breath of the old man, who lay in bed afflicted with pulmonary tuberculosis, a rare disease among the elderly. There was nonetheless no reason for the odor to have spread beyond the house. As Jūkichi, a satchel pressed under the arm of his overcoat, made his way along the stepping-stones leading up to the entrance, he could not help worrying about his state of nerves.

  Genkaku was situated in an isolated room. When not flat on his back, he would sit up, leaning on a mountain of quilts. Jūkichi would take off his hat and coat and, without fail, put in an appearance to announce his return or to inquire about his father-in-law’s condition. Even so, he rarely went beyond the threshold, in part because he feared contagion but also because the odor offended him. Genkaku’s greeting in return was no more than a syllable or two, and these he murmured with a voice so weak that it sounded closer to mere breath. Such would sometimes fill Jūkichi with pangs of guilt, but his loathing of going in remained unchanged.

  He would then call on his mother-in-law, O-tori, next to the sitting room. She too was bedridden and had been for seven or eight years, well before her husband. Unable to walk, she could not even go by herself to the privy. It was said that Genkaku had married her not only because she was a daughter of the principal counselor to a high lord but also because he had had his heart set on a belle. In this, her eyes retained something of their beauty despite her years. Yet as she sat in her bed, painstakingly darning her white split-toed socks, she bore a more than faint resemblance to a mummy. “Mother, how are you today?” Jūkichi would say as a similarly short salutation before entering the six-mat sitting room.

  When his wife, O-suzu, was not there, she would be working in the cramped kitchen with her maid, O-matsu, who came from Shinshū. Needless to say, Jūkichi was much more familiar with both the tidily arranged sitting room and the modernized kitchen than with areas of the house occupied by his parents-in-law.

  The second son of a politician who had once served as a provincial governor, he was a brilliant young man, more like his mother, who had been an old-fashioned poetess, than his father, who had always had the aura of le grand homme about him. His character could also be discerned from his friendly eyes and delicately narrow chin.

  Coming into the sitting room, he would change from Western to Japanese clothes, lounge at the long brazier, smoke a cheap cigar, and playfully tease his only son, Takeo, who had just entered primary school that year. Jūkichi, O-suzu, and Takeo invariably ate together, gathered around their low dining table. Their usual liveliness had recently been partly replaced by a discernible air of formality, the cause of which was the arrival of Kōno, the nurse now taking care of Genkaku. This did not, to be sure, affect in the least Takeo’s propensity to engage in childish pranks; indeed, the presence of Kōno-san only aggravated it. Sometimes his mother would glare at him with a frown, but he would respond with no more than a look of utter incomprehension, as he shoveled rice from his bowl into his mouth with an exaggerated flourish. Being a veteran reader of fiction, Jūkichi sensed something “male” in Takeo’s exuberance, but though he was not always unperturbed by such behavior, he usually tolerated it with a stoical smile, as he ate in silence.

  Nights in the villa were quiet. Takeo, who had to go to school the next morning, would, of course, be asleep by ten, but his parents too generally retired at the same hour. Only Kōno would remain awake, having begun her vigil at about nine, sitting at Genkaku’s bedside, her hands at the red-glowing brazier, never once dozing off. Genkaku himself was also sometimes awake, but he only spoke when his hot-water bottle had grown cold or when his compresses were dry. The only sound to be heard in this isolated room came from the rustling bamboo thicket. In the stillness and the cold, Kōno would ponder this and that as she watched over the old man—the state of mind and feelings of the various members of the family, her own future . . .

  3

  One cloudless afternoon after a snowfall, a woman of twenty-four or -five appeared at the kitchen entrance of the Horikoshi residence, holding a slender boy by the hand. Through the window set in the roof, the bright blue sky could be seen.

  Jūkichi was, of course, not at home. O-suzu, who was sitting at her sewing machine, was not entirely surprised but was nonetheless taken aback. She arose and, walking past the long brazier, went to meet the visitor, who, on entering the kitchen, arranged her own footwear and that of the boy,2 who was clad in a white sweater. Even in this gesture, she was demonstrating considerable deference—and not without reason, for this was O-yoshi, a former maid, whom for the last five or six years Genkaku had o
penly kept as his mistress somewhere in the outskirts of Tōkyō.

  As O-suzu looked at her face, she was astonished to see how quickly O-yoshi had aged. And the evidence was not in her facial features alone. Until four or five years before, her hands had been round and plump. Now they were so slender that the veins were visible. In what she wore as well—the trinket of a ring on her finger—O-suzu could see that her domestic circumstances were indeed wretched.

  “My elder brother has instructed me to offer this to the master.”

  With even greater diffidence, O-yoshi placed in a corner of the kitchen a package wrapped in old newspapers, before entering the sitting room, her knees to the floor. O-matsu had been in the midst of washing, but now, without pausing for a moment, began to cast furtive and disparaging glances at O-yoshi, who wore her hair in a freshly arranged ginkgo-leaf bun. The sight of the package only renewed her frosty expression. It was undeniably true that it gave off an unpleasant odor hardly in keeping with the modernized kitchen or its delicate dishes and bowls. O-yoshi’s eyes were not directed toward O-matsu, but she appeared to detect an odd look on the face of O-suzu, for she explained: “This is . . . i-it’s garlic.” Then turning to the child, who was biting his finger, she said: “Now, Botchan, make a bow.”

  The boy, whose name was Buntarō, was, of course, the son of O-yoshi by Genkaku. O-suzu was struck with pity for O-yoshi that she should address him as “Botchan,”3 but common sense also immediately told her that with such a woman this was only to be expected. Feigning unconcern, she offered what tea and cakes she had on hand to the two sitting in a corner of the room, as she spoke of Genkaku’s condition and sought to amuse Buntarō.