To the Spring Equinox and Beyond

by Sōseki Natsume

  After hearing the talk, Keitaro had suspected that the man had been victimized by a kind of neurosis, and with this reflection Keitaro gave no further concern to such a state of mind. But when he thought it over during these several days of worrisome idleness, he found some resemblances between himself—who had never once experienced the delight of completing anything—and the feelings of this religious man before he became a monk. Of course, since his own suffering was incomparably trivial and of an entirely different nature, he did not have to make the kind of great decision that the religious teacher had to make. If only he had learned how to brace himself a little more, how to exert himself just a bit, he might have been able to be more satisfied with himself, whether his aims were attained or not. Up to the present moment he had not given sufficient attention to this deficiency in himself.

  Thinking alone in this way, Keitaro felt he had to make some headway in any direction whatsoever. On the other hand, it seemed that all his decisions had come too late, and he idled away the next days without any objective in mind. During this interval he had gone to see a play at the Yurakuza Theater, had heard comic tales told by professional storytellers at a variety hall, had chatted with friends, had walked the streets, and had done various other things. But in none of these activities could he lay hold of the world any more than he could hair on a bald head. It was as if, wanting to play go himself, he was forced to watch others at their game. And he wished, since he had to remain a mere spectator, to at least be watching a more exciting game full of critical moves.

  This wish at once brought into his imagination the relationship between Sunaga and the woman seen from behind. He felt that their relationship was not likely to be as deeply constructed as his wild fancy had colored it, and even if it were, his interest would amount to no more than poking his nose into another's affair. He derided himself for his folly and considered all his interest absurd, yet right after such thoughts his curiosity was aroused, and the idea that something lay behind their relationship flashed through his mind from time to time as it had just then. These thoughts led him to the consideration that if he pushed himself further ahead along this route with a little more patience, he might come across something more romantic than he had yet experienced. He began to regard his own short temper, which had caused him to get angry at Taguchi's door and had made him give up his research on the woman, as a weakness unworthy of his own strong curiosity.

  As for a job, he reflected that he ought not to have alienated himself from Taguchi by letting out, if even only a few words, a spiteful remark due to a trivial mishap. Those words had cut short a future that was still evolving, indefinite though it was about its success or failure. And so he had brought on himself an annoying dissatisfaction with his own irresolute self.

  Sunaga's mother had assured him that Taguchi was of a kindlier disposition than his appearance suggested. If so, it might well be that he would condescend to see Keitaro again after returning from his trip. But it would be stupid to ask for a second interview and be scorned as someone who was deficient in common sense. Yet in order to at least take firm hold of the feeling of thoroughly proceeding toward some end, he perhaps had to push his way even to the extent of enduring the pain of being called fool.

  In such ways did Keitaro's thoughts turn during those perplexing days.

  But Keitaro's situation was quite different from the kind that demands an immediate decision on a question of the greatest importance to a person's life. In his mind something light and buoyant was hovering in spite of his apparent worry. Should he proceed along this route to the very end, or should he abandon it and make preparation to shift to something new? The question needed no real analysis, for from the very beginning it had been quite simple. The perplexity in his mind came not from the fear that once having drawn a losing lottery ticket, he would sink into depths from which he would not be able to emerge, but rather from the unconscious working of his idle thought that whatever the outcome, it would not ultimately affect him that much. Like a person who reads a book while feeling drowsy yet who tries to catch the clear meaning of the letters without making a conscious effort to resist that drowsiness, Keitaro was worried that the egg of prompt resolution warming in his rather easygoing bosom would not hatch properly.

  Under the pretext that he had to free himself from his own irresolution, he tried to fan secretly the flame of his own love of curiosity. The idea occurred to him that he ought to size up his future by appealing to a fortuneteller. The education he had received was not that unscientific to make him fully believe in such things as incantations, prayers, charms against evil, exorcisms, or mediums, but he had retained from his boyhood years not a little interest in all these mysteries. His father had been a nervous man who had gone deeply into the study of directions and horoscopy. One Sunday, Keitaro, a primary school boy at the time, saw his father sally out into the garden, his kimono tucked up and a hoe on his shoulder. He wondered what his father was going to do and was about to follow when his father said, "Stay here and keep your eye on the clock. As soon as it begins to strike twelve, give a loud shout, and I'll start digging at the root of the plum tree standing to the northwest." Keitaro's boyhood mind took it as another of his father's cherished theories on the aspects of houses, and the moment the clock began striking, he cried aloud as commanded, "It's exactly noon!" Nothing amiss occurred at that moment. But Keitaro wondered why his father, so anxious to be punctual in the first digging with the hoe, had not taken care to set the clock right beforehand, for Keitaro knew that according to the clock in his school, theirs at home was wrong by about twenty minutes.

  On a subsequent day when the family returned from a herb-gathering excursion, Keitaro was kicked by a horse and fell down an embankment. Strangely enough, no injury appeared anywhere on his body. Delighted, his grandmother said to him, "You've been saved by the grace of Jizo-sama, for he put himself in your place. Come see!" She led him to a stone image of the guardian-deity for children standing by the spot where the horse had been tied. The head of the stone Jizo-sama had broken off; only the traditional bib placed there by some mother remained around its neck. At that moment a cloud of strange hue drifted into Keitaro's mind. Though it varied in its density according to Keitaro's bodily condition or the circumstances surrounding him, quite evidently it had not slipped away even though he had grown to adulthood.

  For this reason Keitaro always regarded a fortuneteller on the street, his paper lantern on a handle shaped like a bow, as belonging to one of the interesting professions handed down from past generations to the civilized world of Meiji. His belief, however, was not ardent enough to allow him to spend his money listening to the sounds of divining rods twirled in the hands of a fortune-teller, but often on his walks when he saw a woman standing forlornly before a diviner's stall, her chilled face illuminated by the lantern, he would half in fun, yet driven by curiosity, steal into the shadows to eavesdrop on what hopes, anxieties, fears, or assurances were being given to the helpless woman brooding over the gloom cast onto her future.

  Once a friend of Keitaro's, despairing of his own talent, was troubled about whether to take his final examinations or to leave school. During a trip an acquaintance of this student had visited Zenkoji Temple and sent him a sacred Buddhist lot that he had drawn for him. This good luck fortune, numbered 55, contained such sentences as "The clouds are dispersed and the moon is bright again" and "The flowers are in bloom and prosperity returns." Encouraged by these words, Keitaro's friend undertook the examination as a trial and passed. This incident interested Keitaro so much that he went around to various shrines and randomly drew sacred lots, although at that time he had no particular objective in mind. So it could be said that even in ordinary times Keitaro had sufficient qualification to be a fortuneteller's client. On the other hand, even in the situation in which he now found himself, a considerable amount of frivolous pleasure was mixed into his idea of consulting an augury.

  Keitaro searched his memory for a fortune-
teller he could visit, but he couldn't come up with anyone. He had heard the names of some professional ones, one near Hakusan, another in Shiba Park, and still another in a certain block on the Ginza. Yet he could not bring himself to go to them because their very fame made him suspicious of quackery. Still less did he wish to fall prey to the impertinence of an imposter who would utter quite plausibly a random guess he actually knew was untrue. Keitaro hoped to find some old man with a generous growth of beard who, in a house not too crowded with clients, would get to the point in words that were succinct and epigrammatic. As he was thinking of such a fortuneteller, he recalled the image of the retired priest from Ipponji Temple in his hometown, a man his father used to visit for consultations.

  Keitaro suddenly seemed to awaken from the foolish state he had been in, unable to tell exactly whether he had been meditating or merely sitting. So he put on his hat, thinking vaguely he would at least go out and perhaps be lured by destiny toward some fortune-teller's shingle.

  It had been quite a while since he had last gone to Kurumazaka in the Shitaya district. He walked straight east along the street on both sides of which he saw temple gates, dealers in Buddhist articles, old-fashioned druggists, and shops which had heaps of junk handed down from the Tokugawa era lined up for sale, dust and all. He deliberately passed through the old grounds of Monzeki and came out at the corner where the Yakko, a restaurant famous for broiled eel, stood.

  As a boy he had often heard about the prosperity of the temple in Asakusa dedicated to Kannon, his grandfather knowing this district quite well at the time Tokyo was called Edo. In the old man's stories were the names of such places as Nakamise, Okuyama, Namiki, Komagata, and even some little used by Tokyoites nowadays, where, his grandfather had told him, various delicacies could be found. There was, for example, an elegant restaurant on Hirokoji, the Sumiya, famous for its rice boiled with rape leaves and bean curd baked and coated with miso, and there was another famous freshwater-fish restaurant with its pretty rope curtains hanging at the entrance just opposite a shrine at Komagata. But what had impressed the young Keitaro most was the old man's account of the swordplay artistry of Hyosuke Nagai, the sword-swallowing magician Mamezo, and the dried-up bodies of big toads with four forelegs and six behind, apparently caught at the foot of Mount Ibuki in Omi Province.

  Abundant explanations of these mysteries were conveniently offered to a child's imagination by the old picture books stowed away in a chest on the upper floor of the family storehouse. A man crouching on a small wooden table and wearing a pair of high clogs with only one thin support, his kimono sleeves tucked up with a sash as he was about to draw from its sheath a curved sword longer than his own height; Jiraiya, master of the occult sitting cross-legged on the back of a huge toad as he practiced the black arts; an ancient gray-bearded man at a Chinese desk holding a physiognomist's magnifying glass larger than his face, looking down through it at a man with a top-knot who was lying prostrate before him—most of these strange characters had come from those early picture books and had their existence in Keitaro's imaginary Asakusa.

  Thus, the image Keitaro had ever since his boyhood days of the compound of Kannon around the thirty-six-yard frontage of its main temple had always been enveloped in historically luring mysteries and dazzling colors. Since he had come to live in Tokyo, these strange illusions had inevitably been shattered, yet at times he would still drift back to fancy that under the roof of Kannon's temple one might find a stork's nest. Just some such vagary working latently in him had made him think Asakusa might hold what he wanted, involuntarily directing his steps there. But when he came out from the back of Lunar Park onto a street with a number of movie theaters, he was surprised by the congestion and felt this was hardly the place for diviners.

  He thought, before leaving the area, that he would at least pass his palm over the head of the Pindola for luck, but he could not remember in which part of the grounds it was. He went up to the main temple and, after looking only at a great paper lantern dedicated by a fishmongers' guild and at a votive tablet of Yorimasa killing the chimera, left by the Gate of Thunder.

  Keitaro was expecting to find a fortune-teller or two by the time he reached Asakusa Bridge. If he did, he would enter no matter what sort of fortune-teller it was. Or perhaps he might turn at the crossing just before the College of Technology and head toward Yanagibashi. He walked along as lightheartedly as if he were looking for a good place to eat.

  As often happens when one is searching for something, Keitaro could not find a single fortune-teller on the broad street he was walking along, though on his usual walks no matter where he went he would see any number of shingles for divination. He reached Kuramae feeling somewhat disappointed, thinking that in this attempt too, as was typical with him, he might have to stop halfway without seeing it through to the end.

  At last he caught sight of the kind of house he was looking for. He saw a thick oblong board of hardwood on which was written in two lines "Divination in Personal Matters," and under these characters were engraved in white the words "Fortune-telling with Bunsen Coins." Beneath these characters was a picture in red lacquer of a cayenne pepper. It was to this quaint sign that Keitaro's eyes were first drawn.

  As he looked more closely, he realized that the house was part of an apothecary shop which had been partitioned off, the narrow part having a neat built-in section like a lean-to attached to it. Inside were rows of bags filled with powdered spices, showing that the owner not only told fortunes but, as indicated by the picture on the signboard, sold these condiments as well. Having made this observation, Keitaro peered into the lean-to, which looked rather like a shop specializing in bean-jam rice dumplings, and discovered a small elderly woman doing needlework.

  Though there seemed to be no more to the living quarters than this narrow room, nothing could be seen of any fortune-teller. Keitaro thought he might be out, his wife taking care of the shop in his absence. But the construction of the shop suggested it was connected with the apothecary in back, so Keitaro could not conclude right then that the master was absent. He proceeded a few steps ahead and looked into the apothecary. He found no dried lampreys suspended there, nor any turtle shells exhibited. Nor did he see that old-fashioned anatomical model of the human body, the abdomen hollowed out to reveal its internal organs in various colors, each set on a shelf fixed into the torso. And of course there was no elderly bearded man inside bearing any resemblance to the retired priest at Ipponji Temple.

  Keitaro retraced his steps to the entrance with its signboard and went inside under the short curtain hanging in front. The old woman stopped sewing, stared over her big glasses at him, and uttered only a single word: "Divination?"

  "Yes," replied Keitaro. "Just a little thing I'd like to know. But the master's out, isn't he?"

  "Come in," the old woman said, putting in a corner the silk material she had on her lap.

  Keitaro went in. He found the room tidy though small, and certainly comfortable enough. The tatami, newly recovered, smelled of fresh rush. The woman poured boiling water from an iron kettle into a cup and set a spiced drink before her guest. Then from a shelf that had perhaps originally been made for holding a medicine cabinet, she took down a small desk covered with a cloth of plain wool and set it in front of Keitaro. Returning to her seat, she said, "I'm the one who tells fortunes."

  Keitaro was jolted. He had not given the slightest thought to the possibility that this simple, homely woman who had been so intently engaged in sewing, her hair done up into a small chignon, her kimono with its black satin neckband worn under a plain striped haori, should be the predictor of his destiny. He wondered all the more when he saw neither rods nor divining blocks nor a magnifying glass on her desk. From a long slender bag that she had placed on the desk, she jingled out nine coins, the kind with a hole in the center. Keitaro could only guess that these were the bunsen, the word he had read on the shingle. But of course he could not imagine in what way those nine coins should be related t
o the invisible strings of fate manipulating him. So he remained silent, looking now at the patterns engraved on the coins, now at the bag from which they had been taken. The latter seemed to have been made from costume material for a Noh play or from some remnant of cloth for mounting a hanging scroll. Gold strings on it glittered here and there, but its original bright colors had faded entirely through time and use.

  The old woman, whose fingers were white and delicate for her age, arranged the nine coins in rows of three. Suddenly she looked up at Keitaro and asked, "Do you want to know your future?"

  "It wouldn't be bad knowing about my entire life. But I've got something that seems more important for me to decide now. So please tell only about that."

  "I see," she said and then asked how old he was. She also made certain of the day and month of his birth. She began to count on her fingers as though she were mentally calculating something and then fell into a kind of reverie. Presently with her pretty fingers she arranged the coins. On the faces of some there was a wave pattern; others showed the character bun. Keitaro was staring at them as if he were seeing something deep in their order and arrangement.

  The old woman remained silent for some time, her hands on her knees as she gazed at the old coins. Soon her expression indicated that she had settled on a clear point.

  "You are now vacillating," she affirmed, looking directly at him.

  He deliberately remained silent.

  "You are undecided about continuing something or abandoning it. But that is to your disadvantage. Go forward, for even though it may seem unfavorable, it will turn out all right in the end." She paused, her lips closed as she threw another searching glance at him.