Mandarins: Stories by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa

by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa

  He replied with a smile: “Where is it, this room of yours?”

  We walked shoulder to shoulder, as though the best of friends, passing through a group of softly speaking foreigners. Entering my room, he sat down with his back to the mirror and began talking about this and that—or at least of this or that woman, for such was his principal topic.

  I was without doubt among those whose sins would send them to hell, but this sort of lascivious gossip only drove me further into depression. Momentarily assuming the role of a Puritan, I began deriding those women.

  “Look at S’s lips. How many men do you suppose she has kissed to give them that appearance?”

  I suddenly fell silent and looked at the back of his head in the reflection of the mirror. He had a yellow plaster bandage below one of his ears.

  “How many men she has kissed?”

  “That’s the sort of person she strikes me as being.”

  He smiled and nodded, and I felt him looking at me carefully as though to learn some secret buried within me. And yet we continued to dwell on women. I felt less loathing for him than shame at my own cowardice, and this only deepened my sense of utter gloom.

  When at last he had left, I lay on my bed and started reading An’ya Kōro. One by one, I could keenly feel the struggles in which the protagonist was engaged within his own mind. The realization that, by comparison, I was an utter fool brought tears to my eyes, and these gave me a feeling of peace, though only momentarily. My right eye was now again seeing semitransparent cogwheels. As before, they steadily multiplied as they turned. Fearing that my headache would return, I put the book down next to the pillow and took 0.8 grams of Veronal, resolving in any case to sleep soundly.

  I dreamt, however, that I was looking at a swimming pool, where children, boys and girls, were splashing above the water and diving below. I left the pool and walked into the pine forest on the other side. Someone called out to me from behind: “Otōsan!” Half turning around, I saw my wife standing in front of the pool and was immediately struck by a painful feeling of regret.

  “Otōsan, don’t you want a towel?”

  “No. Watch the children.”

  I continued walking, but at some point my path turned into a platform—at a country railway station, it seemed—with a long hedge. There was a university student (H), together with an older woman. When they saw me, they approached and began talking at the same time.

  “What a terrible fire!”

  “I barely escaped myself,” said H.

  I thought I had seen the woman before. I also felt a kind of euphoric excitement in talking to her. Now the train pulled in quietly next to the platform amidst a cloud of smoke. I was the only one to get on; I walked through the corridors of the sleeping compartments; inside, white sheets hung from the berths. On one was the reclining figure of a naked woman, much like a mummy, looking toward me. It was once again the goddess of vengeance—that daughter of a lunatic.

  I woke up and, without thinking, immediately sprang out of bed. The room was still bright with the electric lights, but from somewhere I heard the sound of wings and the squeaking of a rat. I opened the door, went out into the corridor, and hurried to the fireplace. I sat down in a chair and gazed at the tenuous flames. A hotel attendant dressed in white came to add more wood.

  “What time is it?” I asked.

  “About three-thirty, sir,” he replied.

  Even so, there was a woman who sat reading in a corner at the opposite end of the lobby. I took her to be an American and could see even from across the room that she was wearing a green dress.

  Feeling that I had been rescued, I resolved to remain where I was to await the dawn—like an old man who, having gained a respite from years of a tormenting illness, now placidly waits for death . . .

  4. Not Yet?

  In my hotel room, I managed at last to complete the short story I had been writing and prepared to send it to a certain magazine. The remuneration I would receive would not, of course, pay for a week’s lodging expenses. I nevertheless felt satisfied at having finished the project and wanted now to visit a bookstore in the Ginza for an intellectual stimulant.

  Perhaps it was the fluctuating winter sun on the asphalt that gave the crumpled scraps of discarded paper the appearance of roses. I felt buoyed by a sense of benevolence as I entered the bookstore, which likewise seemed neater and tidier than usual. The only troubling presence was a girl in spectacles talking to a clerk. Remembering the roselike paper scraps that I had seen on my way, I purchased a collection of conversations with Anatole France and the collected correspondence of Prosper Mérimée.

  I went into a café with my two books, took a seat at a table in the back, and waited for my coffee to come. A woman and a boy were sitting across the way—mother and son to all appearances. The son could have been my younger self, so strong was the resemblance. The two talked intimately, face-to-face, quite as lovers might. Indeed as I observed them, I had the feeling that at least he was well aware of providing consolation for her, even of a sexual nature. Such exemplified for me the sheer power of human affinities, something of which I too had some knowledge, providing yet another example of a certain will to transform this vale of tears into a veritable hell.

  Nevertheless, fearing that I would fall into yet another round of anguish, I happily took the coffee brought to me at that moment and began reading Mérimée’s letters. As with his novels, they are full of brilliant and biting aphorisms. Reading them gave steely reinforcement to my disposition. (It has been a weakness of mine to be so easily susceptible to such influences.) After the coffee, feeling “ready for whatever comes,” I left the café.

  As I passed along the streets, I looked into the various shop windows. A picture-framer had hung up a portrait of Beethoven, his bristling mane giving him the air of true genius. I could not help finding it quite comical . . .

  On my way, I ran into an old friend from secondary school; a professor of applied chemistry, he was carrying a large folding satchel and had a bloodshot eye.

  “What’s wrong with your eye?”

  “Oh, it’s just conjunctivitis.”

  I remembered that for the last fourteen or fifteen years, I have developed the same sort of eye infection whenever I find myself drawn to someone. But I said nothing about that to him. Slapping me on the shoulder, he began to tell me about our mutual friends and then, without pausing in his chatter, led me into a café.

  “It’s been a long time. I haven’t seen you since the dedication of the Shu Shunsui monument.”

  He was sitting across a marble table from me, having lit a cigar.

  “Yes, not since Shu Shun . . .”

  For some reason I stumbled over the pronunciation, and this was troubling, all the more so, as this was the Japanese form of the name. But my old school chum went on talking as though quite unaware—of K, the novelist, of the bulldog he had just purchased, of a poison gas known as Lewisite . . .

  “You don’t seem to be writing anymore. I read Tenkibo. It’s autobiographical, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “I found it a bit pathological. How is your health at the moment?”

  “I’m still getting by with a constant supply of medicine.”

  “I understand. I too am suffering from insomnia.”

  “‘I too’? Why do you say ‘I too’?”

  “Isn’t that what you said yourself? Insomnia’s a serious matter, you know!”

  There was a trace of a smile in his left, bloodshot eye. Before replying, I had sensed that I would have difficulty in pronouncing the final syllable of the technical term.

  “How could the son of a lunatic be expected to sleep?”

  Within ten minutes I was again walking the street. The crumpled papers scattered on the asphalt were now sometimes taking on the appearance of human faces. A bob-haired woman was coming toward me. From a distance, she appeared to be quite beautiful, but as she passed, I could see a face that was lined, wrinkled, an
d indeed ugly. She also appeared to be pregnant. I instinctively turned my face away and turned into a broad side street. A few moments later I began to feel hemorrhoidal pain. For me, the only remedy was a Sitzbad. A Sitzbad . . . Beethoven too had resorted to such . . .

  My nostrils were immediately assailed by the smell of the sulfur used in the therapy, though there was, of course, nothing of the sort to be seen on the street. Turning my mind again to the paper-scrap roses, I endeavored to walk with steady steps.

  An hour later I had shut myself away in my room, sitting at the desk at work on a new story. My pen raced across the paper at a speed that quite astounded me. After two or three hours, however, it stopped, as though held in check by an invisible presence. Having no other recourse, I stood up and paced the room. It was at such moments that my delusions of grandeur were most striking. Caught up in savage joy, I could only think that I had neither parents nor wife and children, that there was only the life now emanating from my pen.

  Four or five minutes passed, and now I had to turn to the telephone. I spoke into the receiver again and again, but all I could hear in response was a vague mumbling, endlessly repeated, that nonetheless doubtlessly had the sound of mohru. I finally moved away from the telephone and again paced the room, still haunted by the word.

  “Mohru—Mole . . .”

  The English word for the burrowing rodent. The association was hardly a pleasant one, but then two or three seconds later, I respelled it as mort, la mort. The French word for “death” instantly filled me with anxiety. Death had pursued my sister’s husband and was now pursuing me. And yet in spite of my fear I found myself feeling strangely amused and even smiled. Why? I had no idea.

  I stood in front of the mirror, something I had not done for a long time, and directly looked at myself. My reflection too was, of course, smiling. Staring at my own image, I remembered a second self, the Doppelgänger, as one is wont to call such in German, that I had, most fortunately, never encountered. On the other hand, the wife of K, who had become an actor in American films, had seen my double in a theater corridor. (I still remember my perplexity when she apologized to me for not having greeted “me” on that occasion.) So had a one-legged translator, now deceased, in a Ginza tobacconist’s shop.

  Perhaps it was not I who was death’s prey but rather my double. But even if I were . . . Turning my back to the mirror, I returned to my writing desk in front of the window. The square, tuff-framed window looked out on withered grass and a pond. As I gazed at the garden, I thought about all the notebooks and uncompleted theater pieces that had gone up in smoke in that distant pine forest. Picking up my pen, I resumed work on the story.

  5. Red Lights

  Sunlight had begun to torment me. I was truly living the life of a mole, assiduously continuing to write, the window curtains closed and the electric lights burning even during the day. When I was too weary to go on, I read Taine’s Histoire de la littérature anglaise and perused his lives of the poets . . . They had all suffered misfortune . . . Even the giants of the Elizabethan age . . . even the era’s great scholar, Ben Jonson, having suffered nervous exhaustion, found himself imagining the Roman and Carthaginian armies going into battle on his big toe. I could not help feeling a cruel, spite-filled joy at their misfortunes.

  One night when a strong east wind was blowing (which I took to be a good omen), I left the hotel from the basement and went out on the street, resolved to visit an old man of my acquaintance. He lived in an attic of a building housing a Bible publisher, where he worked as the lone caretaker. There he devoted himself to prayer and reading. Sitting under a cross, our hands stretched out toward the brazier, we conversed: Why had my mother gone insane? Why had my father failed in business? Why was I being punished? . . . He knew these secrets and would always listen to me, a strangely solemn smile on his face. Sometimes he would draw in a few short words a caricature of human life. I could not help feeling respect for this hermit in the attic. Yet as we talked, I discovered that he too was capable of being moved by human affinities.

  “The daughter of the nurseryman is a beautiful girl, with a sweet disposition . . . She is very kind to me.”

  “How old is she?”

  “Eighteen this year.”

  Perhaps for him it was a kind of paternal love. But I inevitably caught in his eyes a sign of passion. On the yellowed skin of the apple he offered me I saw the shape of a unicorn. (On occasion I would discover mythological animals in wood grains and finely fissured teacups.) The unicorn was indeed the qílín. Remembering that an unfriendly critic had once characterized me as “the qílín’s offspring of the 1910s,” I realized that even here in this attic, under the cross, I had no safe haven.

  “How have you been these days?”

  “As ever, at the edge of my nerves.”

  “For that, no medicine will help you. Have you no desire to become a believer?”

  “As if the likes of me could manage that . . .”

  “It’s not in the least difficult. You need only to believe in God, in Christ His Son, and in the signs and wonders that He performed.”

  “Well, what I can believe in is the devil.”

  “Then why not believe in God? If you believe in shadows, you must necessarily believe in light.”

  “There are shadows without light, are there not?”

  “Shadows without light?”

  I could only fall silent. He walked in shadows no less than did I. Yet he believed in a light beyond. It was, to be sure, the only point of difference between us, but it was, at least for me, an impassable gulf nonetheless.

  “But the light necessarily exists. Evidence can be seen in the miracles, which occur again and again even in our own times . . .”

  “Miracles that are the work of the devil . . .”

  “Why do you dwell on the devil?”

  I felt tempted to tell him everything I had experienced in the last year or two, but I was afraid that he might tell my wife and children, that I might follow my mother’s footsteps into a psychiatric hospital.

  “What do you have over there?” I asked.

  The vigorous old man turned toward his ancient bookshelves, with something of a Pan-like look on his face.

  “The complete works of Dostoyevsky. Have you read Crime and Punishment?”

  I had, of course, avidly read four or five of Dostoyevsky’s works a decade before. But I was struck by his incidental mention—or was it?—of Crime and Punishment. I borrowed his copy and returned to my hotel. The streets, with their electric lights and crowds of people, were as unpleasant as ever. Any chance encounters with acquaintances would be particularly unbearable, and so, like a thief, I carefully chose the darker paths.

  But then a few moments later, I began to have stomach pains, for which the only remedy was a shot of whiskey. I found a bar, pushed on the door, and started to go in. The narrow confines were enveloped in cigarette smoke. A group of young people, apparently artists, were drinking, and in the very middle was a woman, her hair covering her ears in keeping with the latest Occidental fashion. She was energetically playing the mandolin.

  Feeling instantly at a loss, I turned and left. Now, however, I found that my shadow was swaying from left to right, and that, ominously enough, I was being bathed in red light. I stopped in my tracks, but my shadow went on vacillating. I hesitantly looked around and saw at last a colored glass lantern hanging from the eaves of the bar and swinging slowly in the strong wind . . .

  It was to a subterranean restaurant that I next made my way. I went to the bar and ordered whiskey.

  “Whiskey? I’m afraid that Black and White is all there is.”

  I poured the whiskey into the soda and began sipping it in silence. Next to me sat two men in their late twenties or early thirties, journalists, I assumed. They were speaking in low voices—and in French. With my entire body, I could feel the focus of their eyes on my back, indeed as though they were sending out electric waves. They clearly seemed to know my name and wer
e clearly talking about me.

  “Bien . . . très mauvais . . . pourquoi? . . .”

  “Pourquoi?. . . le diable est mort! . . .”

  “Oui, oui . . . d’enfer . . .”

  I put down a silver coin, my last, and fled the cavern. The night wind was gusting through the streets, soothing my nerves, as my stomach pains eased. I remembered Raskolnikov and felt the desire to confess all. And yet that could bring only tragedy, not just to me and to my family but also to others. Moreover, the sincerity of that desire was dubious. If my nerves could become as steady as that of a normal person . . . But for that I would have to flee somewhere: Madrid, Rio de Janeiro, Samarkand . . .

  I was suddenly jolted by a small white advertising sign hanging down from the eaves of a shop: a winged automobile tire trademark. I remembered the story of the ancient Greek who, though able to fly by means of artificial wings, allowed them to be burned by the sun and so plunged into the sea and drowned . . . To Madrid, to Rio de Janeiro, to Samarkand . . . I had to laugh at such fantasies—and at the same time remind myself of Orestes being pursued by the Furies.

  I followed the dark street along the canal. I found myself recalling the suburban house of my adopted parents. It was clear that they were spending their days waiting for me to return, as were perhaps my wife and children . . . But I feared the force that would inevitably bind me if I were, in fact, to do so.

  Moored in the choppy water was a barge from whose hold a faint light was leaking. A family surely lived there, men and women hating one another out of love . . . But now, though still feeling the intoxicating effect of the whiskey, I summoned once more my combative strength and headed back to the hotel.

  I sat again at the desk and continued reading Mérimée’s correspondence, which eventually revived me. When I learned that late in life he converted to Protestantism, I instantly felt that his mask had fallen away, that I was seeing his true face. Like us, he had walked in the darkness. In the darkness? Shiga’s An’ya Kōro was being transformed for me into a terrifying work. In an attempt to forget my depression, I began to read Anatole France’s conversations, but this modern Pan too, I could see, had borne a cross . . .