Longing and Other Stories 9780231554411

Citation preview

Longing and O er Stories

Weatherhead Books on Asia Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University

Weatherhead Books on Asia Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University For a list of titles in the series, see page 149.

Longing and Oer Stories Jun’ichirō Tanizaki Translated by

Anthony H. Chambers & Paul McCarthy

Columbia University Press

New York

This publication has been supported by the Richard W. Weatherhead Publication Fund of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University. Columbia University Press wishes to express its appreciation for assistance given by the Pushkin Fund in the publication of this book.

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2022 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Tanizaki, Jun’ichirō, 1886–1965, author. | Chambers, Anthony H. (Anthony Hood), translator. | McCarthy, Paul, 1944– translator. Title: Longing and other stories / Jun’ichirō Tanizaki ; translated by Anthony H. Chambers and Paul McCarthy. Description: New York : Columbia University Press, [2022] Identifiers: LCCN 2021018905 (print) | LCCN 2021018906 (ebook) | ISBN 9780231202145 (hardback) | ISBN 9780231202152 (paperback) | ISBN 9780231554411 (ebook) Subjects: LCGFT: Short stories. Classification: LCC PL839.A7 L66 2022 (print) | LCC PL839.A7 (ebook) | DDC 895.63/44—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021018905 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021018906

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America Cover design: Lisa Hamm Cover image: Evening Cool, 1925, Ito Shinsui (1898–1972), Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Robert O. Muller Collection, Bridgeman Images.

Contents

1. Longing

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2. Sorrows of a Heretic 3. The Story of an Unhappy Moer Translators’ Afterword Acknowledgments

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98

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Longing and O er Stories

1. Longing Translated by Paul McCarthy

Does it long for the past—the bird that cries, passing over the sacred spring, where the ever-green yuzuruha grow? — Man’yōshū

T

he sky is heavily overcast, with the moon swallowed up behind thick clouds; and yet, even so, light must be slipping through from somewhere, for outside the house everything is bathed in a clear light. The light is clear enough to reveal the outlines of even the pebbles by the roadside; and yet there seems also to be a kind of mist before my eyes. When I stare into the distance, my eyes feel prickly. It is a strange, phantasmal sort of light, one that suggests some far, far distant, eternal land quite separate from our human world. The evening was such that one might regard it as a dark night or as a moonlit night, depending on one’s feelings at the time. Amid the whitely shining surroundings, there was one even whiter road that went straight on in the direction I needed to go. On each side of the road, a long, long

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row of pine trees stretched as far as the eye could see. From time to time there was a soughing of the boughs with their pine needles as the wind blew in from the left. The wind was oddly humid and carried a strong salty scent. The sea must be close by, I thought. I was a boy of six or seven and had always been a very timid child, so walking alone late at night on that lonesome country road made me feel forlorn indeed. Why hadn’t my nurse come along with me? Perhaps, tired of my annoying ways, she had up and quit, I thought. Still, I didn’t feel as fearful as usual and kept walking steadily along the road. My child’s heart was filled, not so much with fear of the road at night as with a deeper, wrenching sorrow. My family, which had lived in the very center of bustling Nihombashi, had been forced to move to this godforsaken country neighborhood. The sudden, radical change in our family’s fortunes filled me with inexpressible sorrow, child though I was. I thought myself a very unlucky lad. Just the other day, I was wearing a wadded kimono of yellow silk and a glossy, hand-woven haori coat over that; and if I went out somewhere for even a bit, I put on calico tabi socks and low clogs with protective covers over my toes. And now look at me! I’d turned into the kind of boy who appears in the “Temple Schoolroom” kabuki play—a drooling, shabby, miserable-looking child who’d be ashamed to appear before proper persons. And my hands and feet were all chapped and cracked, and as rough as a pumice stone. No wonder my nurse had left us: our family no longer had enough money to hire such a person for me. And not only that: I now had to help Papa and Mama with daily chores and other work as well! Drawing water from the well, lighting the fire,

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mopping the floor, going on errands a long way from home—I had to do all that and more. Would I never again be able to wander the lanes of Ningyōchō at night, where everything was as colorful and lively as the vivid prints sold in bookshops? Could I never go and enjoy the festivals at the Suitengū shrine or the Temple of the Healing Buddha in Kayaba-chō? And what would my friend Miichan from Komeya-chō be doing right about now? What had happened to Tetsu, the son of the boatman from Yoroibashi? And what about Shin, from the fish-cake shop, and Kōjirō, the clog seller’s son, and all my other friends—did they still hang out together and spend day after day putting on “plays” on the second floor of Kakiuchi the tobacconist’s house? I doubted I would see any of them again, not until we were all adults. The thought filled me with resentment and misery. But the sorrow that was piercing my heart was not due only to things like that. Just as the color of the moonlight falling on the lines of pine trees was inexplicably sad, so too an infinite sorrow overcame me, apparently without reason. Why should I be so sorrowful? And why, sad as I was, did I not cry? Crybaby though I had always been, I didn’t shed a single tear now. A sorrow as pellucid as pure, clear water, as sharp and piercing as the sad notes of a samisen, entered the depths of my heart from somewhere unknown. Beyond the long, long line of pine trees to my right, there was what seemed to be a field; but as I walked along, I suddenly became aware that it was no longer a field but rather something like the surface of a dark sea stretching far into the distance. And here and there on that surface were pale, fluttering things that appeared and vanished. Each time the wind

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smelling of salt and the sea came blowing in from my left, the number of pale, fluttering things grew more numerous, making a faint, dry sound like an old man’s weak, rasping cough. Were they whitecaps on the surface of the sea? I wondered. But that seemed unlikely. Why should the sea give off such a dry sound? It occurred to me that demons might be showing their whitish teeth as they sneered at me, so I made a point of trying not to look in that direction. Yet the weirder it all felt, the harder I found it to keep from stealing glances that way. No matter how many times I ventured to take a peek, I couldn’t figure out what the things were. In the midst of the soughing of the wind through the pine trees, that dry, withered sound assailed my ears more and more. Meanwhile, from far beyond the line of pines to my left came the thudding sound of the actual sea—without question, the sound of waves. The distant boom of the sea, I thought. It was a faint yet heavy, powerful rumbling—rather like someone using a massive grindstone in some faraway kitchen. The sound of waves, the sound of the wind in the pines, that uncanny dry, withered sound—from time to time, I stopped in my tracks and listened to those sounds that entered deep within me; then I would plod on. Now and then I was aware of a smell like fertilizer in a rice field coming from somewhere or other. I turned to look back along the way I had come and found that the same pathway between the rows of pine trees stretched back limitlessly, just as it stretched forward in the direction I was going. In neither direction was there a light or any other sign of a human dwelling; and I had been walking for over an hour now, yet there had not been a single passerby. The only things I encountered were telegraph

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poles, standing at intervals of over one hundred feet, parallel to the line of pines on the left. And these telegraph poles emitted a sound like that of the waves of the sea. To stave off boredom, when I passed one telegraph pole, I would focus on the next: one pole, two poles, three poles, I counted as I trudged along. Thirty, thirty-one, thirty-two . . . fifty-six, fifty-seven, fifty-eight—I had come to the seventieth pole, I suppose, when I first glimpsed a light far down the path. Naturally my focus shifted from the line of telegraph poles to that distant light. It glimmered, appearing and disappearing several times through the line of pine trees. It seemed to be about ten telegraph poles distant from me, yet as I walked along I realized it was not so near as that. I had passed not ten but twenty more poles, and still the light glimmered far in the distance. It was about as bright as a hand lantern and seemed to be fixed in one spot; but then again, it might have been moving in the same direction as myself and at the same speed. How long did it take me at last to come within about sixty yards of the light? Was it a matter of minutes, or of tens of minutes? It had looked as dim as a hand lantern’s light before, but now it grew gradually stronger and clearer until it made the dark road nearby as bright as day. I had gotten used to seeing the ground as pale white and the pines as black for such a long time now that it came to me as a matter of surprise that the pine needles were in fact green. The light was an arc lamp attached to the top of a telegraph pole. When I came directly under it, I stood still for a while and gazed at my own shape, clearly cast as a shadow before me. Since I had actually forgotten the green color of pine needles, I might well have forgotten even my own

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shape, had I not encountered the arc light at that spot. Having entered the circle of light, I saw that, apart from an area of thirty or forty feet immediately surrounding me, everything was pitch black: the lines of pine trees I had walked between up to now and the road stretching before me. I was amazed that I had been able to walk through such a dark place. Perhaps as I walked through it, I had become nothing but a spirit. And maybe when I entered the circle of light, my body had returned to rejoin my spirit. Just then I noticed that the dry, hoarse sound was still coming from the midst of the darkness to my right. The white, fluttering things seemed to be moving more visibly in the darkness than before, partly lit by the arc light. Since their movements were enveloped in a vague, unclear light, they seemed even more uncanny than they had before. I stuck my head out through the line of pines and into the darkness on that side and gazed steadily at those fluttering things. One minute . . . two minutes I peered out, but I still could not make out what they were. The white things began near my feet and spread far off into the utter darkness, now appearing, now vanishing, like innumerable spots of burning phosphorus. It was so strange a sight that I felt as if my whole body were drenched in cold water; but even so, I continued to stare at it for some time. As I did so, slowly, slowly, as when something you had begun to forget comes back to you, or as the night starts gradually to give way to dawn, I came to understand what those strange things actually were. That pitchblack broad expanse was the surface of an old marsh, with many lotuses growing there. The lotuses were already half withered, their leaves as dry as scraps of paper. Each time the

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wind blew, they made a dry, rustling sound as they brushed against each other, showing their white undersides. The old marsh must have been immense. It had been intimidating me for some time now. How far would it go on, from where I was? I gazed across the vastness of the marsh. It and its lotuses spread out endlessly, as far as the eye could see, finally joining the dull cloudy sky way off in the distance. It was like looking out over a great expanse of ocean on a night of violent wind and rain. But there was one speck of reddish light flickering there, like a fisherman’s torch in the offing. Oh, there’s a light! Someone’s living there! I’ve seen a house, so I must be close to a town. A feeling of happiness overcame me, and rousing my courage, I began to hurry along the road, moving from the brightness of the arc light into the surrounding darkness. As I walked some six or seven hundred yards, the light gradually grew closer. There was a thatchroofed farmhouse, and the light seemed to be coming from one of its shoji-covered windows. Who could be living there? Maybe, just maybe, my mama and papa might be there inside that lonesome country dwelling. It might be my own home! When I opened the shoji that covered the familiarseeming window where the light was burning, I might find my elderly father and mother feeding kindling to the fire in the hearth. “Oh, it’s you, Jun’ichi! It was good of you to go on an errand on a night like this. Come on in and sit here by the fire. You must have been cold and lonesome out there on the road tonight. What a plucky little lad you are!” And as they spoke, they would comfort me, I felt sure. The single road I had come along turned a little to the left at the farmhouse, and the light in the window, to the right,

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seemed to mark the end of the row of pine trees. Four shoji screens were closed tight at the front of the house, and next to them was the entrance to the kitchen, with a half curtain made of rope hanging down. Light from the kitchen passed through the rope curtain and shone softly on the road’s earthen surface, reaching as far as the roots of the tall pine trees on the other side of the road. I had come to within six feet of the house, and I could hear the sound of someone washing something in a sink that was hidden from view by the rope curtain. A thin line of smoke rose from a small window beside the eaves and condensed just under the eaves, like a swallow’s nest. What could the person living in the house be doing at such an hour? Could she be making the evening meal so late? No sooner had I thought that than the familiar smell of miso soup came to my nostrils, followed by the delicious odor of fatty oils slightly scorching, as when one grills fish. Oh, Mama is grilling my favorite saury fish—I’m sure of it! Suddenly I felt hungry. I was eager to go in and have some fish and soup together with Mama. I was now directly in front of the house. Peering through the rope curtain, I saw that I was right: Mama was facing away from me, squatting beside the brick oven, a kerchief covering her hair. She was blowing on the embers with a special bamboo pipe, blinking back the resulting smoke. Two or three pieces of kindling provided fuel, and from them, flames flickered up like serpents’ tongues. At such times, Mama’s face, which I could see in profile, became slightly flushed. When we were living comfortably in Tokyo, Mama had never so much as had to boil rice, so she must have found it very hard to perform a task like this. . . .

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She wore a soiled cotton robe thickly wadded inside with raw cotton and a ragged sleeveless jacket with an indigo pattern. Perhaps because she was so intent on feeding the fire, she looked like a hunchback from the rear. But when had my mother turned into such an old peasant woman? “Mama, Mama, it’s me, Jun’ichi!” I called to her from the entranceway. Then my mother slowly laid aside the blowing pipe, placed both hands in her lap, and, bending her body, slowly rose to her feet. “Who are you? Are you my son, perhaps?” She turned toward me, and her voice was more faint and witheredseeming even than the sound of the lotus leaves in the old marsh. “Yes, I am. I’m your son Jun’ichi, and I’ve come home!” But Mama just stared at me for a long time and said nothing. Ash from the oven had settled on the portion of her hair that was visible from beneath her kerchief, and many white strands were mingled with the black. Her forehead and cheeks were deeply wrinkled. She seemed quite senile. “I’ve been waiting a long time now—ten or twenty years— for my son to come home, but you don’t seem like him at all. He’d be much bigger by now. He should be passing in front of this house along this here road anytime now. I don’t have any son named Jun’ichi!” “Really? So you’re not my mother? You’re some other old lady?” And now that she’d said that, I realized that indeed, this old woman was not my mother. No matter how hard her circumstances might have become, my real mother could not look as old as this. But then, where in fact was my mother’s house?

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“Auntie, I’ve been walking along this road for a long time now, hoping to meet my mother, and I wonder if you know where her house is? If you do know, please, please, tell me.” “Your mother’s house, is it?” The old woman’s rheumy, bleary eyes widened. “How should I know where your mother’s house is?” “Oh, I understand. . . . But Auntie, I’ve been walking along this road tonight for so long that I’m awfully hungry. Couldn’t you give me something to eat?” The old lady then looked me over from the tips of my toes to the top of my head with a grumpy expression on her face. “Why, you’re still small yet, but you’re already an awfully bold boy, you are! This business about your mother—it’s a lie, I’ll bet. Your clothes are all dirty—you’re some kind of beggar!” “No, no, Auntie, I’m not! I’ve got a real father and a real mother, too. My family’s poor, so my clothes are dirty, but I’m not a beggar!” “If you’re not a beggar, then go home and eat something there! There’s nothing to eat here!” “Oh, but Auntie, look at all the food you’ve got right there. You were boiling rice just now, weren’t you? There’s miso soup cooking away in that pot, and there’s a fish on top of that grill, isn’t there?” “What a nasty child you are! Setting your sights on what’s cooking in the pot on top of my stove—that’s really nasty! This rice and fish and soup are not for you! Sorry, but when my own son comes back any minute now, I know he’ll be hungry, and I’ve prepared all of this for him. How could I possibly give the food I’ve made for my dear, dear son to the likes of you?

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I can’t have you standing around here like this. Get along with you—get out of my house! Can’t you see I’m busy? The rice is already boiling over, and it’s going to taste scorched, all because of you!” The old woman’s face seemed to swell up as she said these harsh things, and finally she went back to crouch beside the oven. “Oh, please don’t say such unkind things, Auntie! I’m so hungry I think I’m going to black out!” I made one last appeal, but the old woman kept busying herself with her back turned and didn’t say another word. It’s no good. I’ll have to put up with this hunger and hurry up and find my way back to my own home, and Mama. Telling myself this, I pushed out through the rope curtain. Some six or seven hundred yards ahead along the road that turned to the left, I saw a low hill. The road, faintly white in the surrounding darkness, ran straight toward the foot of the hill, but where it went from there, I couldn’t tell from where I was standing. The hill seemed to be thickly covered to its summit with a grove of tall black pines, similar to those that lined both sides of the road. It was hard to see clearly because of the darkness, but the sound of the wind soughing through the pines seemed to come from all over the hill, so it was easy to imagine how thick the growth of pine trees must have been. As I approached the road again, I saw that it began to wend its way to the right, through the pine trees, skirting the base of the hill. The deep darkness beneath the trees surrounded me and expanded bit by bit. The night was even darker than it had been before. I raised my head to look at the sky. But I could see no sky, it being blocked by the gloomy branches of

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the pines. Above my head there was only the same murmuring of the wind through the pines. I had by now forgotten all about being hungry and felt only fear. I could hear neither the moaning of the telegraph poles nor the dry rustling from the lotus marsh. The only sound was the pounding of the sea, which could still be felt as a tremor in the ground. The earth beneath my feet grew strangely soft—it felt as if it were giving way a little at my every step. No doubt the road had become sandy. If that were so, there was nothing very strange about it. Nonetheless, it was a weird feeling. No matter how many steps I took, I seemed always to be treading on the same spot. I had never experienced until then how difficult it is to walk on sandy soil. In addition, the road was no longer mainly straight, but turned to the left and then to the right any number of times over a short distance. I was afraid I would wander into the depths of the grove of pine trees if I were not careful. I was gradually losing control of my feelings. A cold sweat oozed from the pores on my forehead, and I could clearly hear the strong beating of my heart and my ragged breathing. I was looking down toward my feet when I suddenly felt that I had emerged from a narrow, cavelike place into somewhere broad and spacious. I looked up. The pine grove went on for some distance, but far beyond it I could see, as if through binoculars, a small, round light. It didn’t look like the light from a candle, though: it was a sharp, cold light that shone like silver. Ah, it’s the moon, the moon! It’s being reflected on the surface of the sea. I realized that at once. The pine trees just in front of me were thinning out, and through the resulting windowlike

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space, a perfectly clear silver radiance shone like glossed silk. The road I was following was still dark, but the clouds in the sky above the sea had broken, and the bright moonlight must have been shining through. As I gazed, the surface of the sea shone with a still greater radiance, which was reflected even in the depths of the pine grove to dazzling effect. Finally the blue-white moon etched the sharp shadows of the pine needles on me as well. The top of the hill moved off gradually to the left, and before I knew it, I found that I had emerged from the grove of trees and was standing, to my surprise, at the edge of a vast ocean lying before me. Oh, what a splendid scene! I stood there for some time in ecstasy, gazing at it. The road that I had been walking on continued, following a winding coastline on which waves dissolved in white foam as far as the eye could see. Were these the celebrated pine groves at Miho, or Tago Bay; the coast of Suminoe, or Akashi beach? At any rate, these pines along the seacoast with their gracefully formed branches, which I had seen on picture postcards from famous scenic spots, cast their clear shadows obliquely on the ground beneath, here and there along the road. Between the road and the shoreline against which the waves broke, a sandy area white as snow must have been rising and falling in soft undulations. But the moonlight was so bright and clear that those undulations were not apparent, and the sandy area seemed utterly flat and smooth. Beyond it, the bright disk of the moon in the vast heavens and the ocean that spread as far as the horizon were all that could be seen. What I had seen earlier from the depths of the grove of pine trees was the area directly beneath that moon, the part of the sea that was the

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most intensely radiant. It was not merely radiant—as it shone, one could sense it moving, as if it were made of twisting metallic coils. Or, one might say that because it was moving, its radiance seemed all the greater. This part was at the center of the sea, and since the waves roiled up from there, the entire surface of the sea seemed about to well up. In fact, the water had a swollen look, with this portion forming its elevated center. It spread out in all directions from this center, and the reflected brightness was broken into thin particles, like fish scales. These fell among and mingled with the small, rippling waves and then made their gentle approach to the sandy margins of the shore. Who knows? Breaking against that shore, they might even become mingled with the waters that had begun to creep upward until they lapped at the sandy path itself. Then the wind ceased utterly, and the branches of the pine trees, which had been sighing so audibly, fell silent. Even the waves that had been surging against the shore now made only a light, restrained, whispering sound, as if fearful of breaking the silence of this moonlit night. It was a faint, almost vanishing sound like a woman’s secret weeping, or like the little bubbles that a crab emits from the gaps in its shell. Yet it sounded like a prolonged voice of sorrow, continuing without end. That voice—though it was less a voice than a profound silence—created a melancholy music that made the quietness of this night still more mysterious. . . . Anyone who saw a moon like this could not help thinking of eternity. I was only a child, so I had no clear idea of eternity, but I felt, nonetheless, an emotion close to that fill my heart.

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I remembered seeing a scene like this somewhere before. And not only once, but over and over. It might have been before I was born into this world. Perhaps a memory of a former life was reviving within me now. Or was it perhaps not in the real world, but something seen in a dream? I felt that I had witnessed a scene just like this in dreams two or three times. Yes, I had certainly seen it in my dreams—two or three years before, and also just the other night. And I had thought that that same scene from my dreams must exist somewhere in the real world, and that I would encounter it at some point. My dreams were hints that that would come to pass, and now those hints had become a visible reality. Since even the waves seemed restrained in the way they broke against the shore, I too wanted to walk as quietly as possible, slowly and stealthily. Yet for some reason I felt strangely excited and found myself walking quickly along the road by the seashore, as if fleeing from something. The fact that everything surrounding me was so silent must have frightened me. If I weren’t careful, perhaps I too would become frozen in place, like the seashore pine trees and the sandy beach, unable to move. Then I would have turned into a stone upon the shore, with the cold moonlight pouring down upon my head year after year after year. Actually, if people encountered a scene like that night’s, they would feel, for an instant, as if they would like to die. After all, if one met it in a place like this, death itself would not seem so frightening. It was probably this thought that had excited me. The clear light of the moon shines over the heavens and the earth. And those on whom it shines are all dead. I alone am alive. I alone am living and moving.

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This feeling drove me onward. The more I was driven, the more quickly I walked. And then the very fact that I alone was hurrying in this way became a source of terror to me. I was painfully out of breath and stopped suddenly; then I could see, willy-nilly, all the things surrounding me. Everything was silent, as before: the sky and the waters and the distant fields and hills merged in the boundless moonlight. Their pale silence reminded me of when a moving picture’s images are frozen midway through the film. The surface of the road I was walking on was as intensely white as if frost had formed on it, and the precise shadows of the seaside pines lay across it like serpents that had crawled in from the roadside. The pines and their shadows were one at the roots, but the shadows were so clear that it seemed that even if the pine trees vanished, the shadows never would. I felt that the shadows were the main thing, and the pines secondary. And the same relationship held true for my own shadow as well. As I stood quite still and stared at it for a long time, the shadow that lay there on the ground before me was staring steadily up at me. The only thing apart from myself that moved was this shadow. “I’m not your underling. I’m your friend. The moon is so fine tonight that, somehow, I just wanted to come here and enjoy it. You must be lonesome, so I’ll accompany you on your journey.” That’s what my shadow seemed to be saying to me. Just as, earlier, I had been counting telegraph poles as I walked, now I was counting the shadows of pine trees. The distance between the road and the seashore grew sometimes greater and sometimes less. Once, the waves that were slowly and gently eroding the beach came so close that they seemed as if they were about to wet the roots of the pine trees. When

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they were creeping in the distance, the waves looked like thin white satin spread out upon the sea; but when they drew close, they had a depth of one to two inches and foamed up like bath soap dissolving in hot water. The moon took care to cast the shadows of even those one- to two-inch waves accurately upon the sandy ground. To tell the truth, on a moonlit night like this, even a single needle would not fail to cast its shadow. Whether from the distant offing or from beyond the great number of pines that stretched along the shore before me, I could not say, but a strange sound could suddenly be heard. It might have been my imagination, but it sounded like a samisen. It must have been that— given the way the sounds would abruptly stop and then just as abruptly begin again. When we lived in Nihombashi, I had often heard those same sounds of a samisen as, cuddled at my nurse’s bosom and covered by a warm quilt, I was just beginning to drift off to sleep. “Tempura kuitai, tempura kuitai,” my nurse would always softly sing along to the samisen’s tune.1 “Listen—that’s what the samisen’s saying, don’t you think? ‘Tempura kuitai, tempura kuitai.’ Doesn’t it sound like that to you?” Saying this, my nurse would peer into my face as I rested my hands on her bosom and began to play with her nipples. Maybe I was only imagining it, but it seemed to me that, just as she said, the samisen’s sad notes were saying, “Tempura kuitai, tempura kuitai.” My nurse and I would keep looking into each other’s eyes as we listened in silence to the sound of the samisen. On a cold winter night when hardly anyone was out

1. “Tempura, I want some. Tempura, I want some.”

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on the frozen streets, a wandering singer of pleasure-quarter ballads could be heard going from Ningyō-chō toward Komeya-chō, passing by our house on the way, his wooden clogs going clip-clop, clip-clop. The sound of the samisen he was playing moved farther and farther away and seemed about to vanish utterly. The once clear refrain “Tempura kuitai, tempura kuitai” grew gradually fainter, sometimes coming to us fragmentarily, sometimes not at all, depending on the wind. “Tempura . . . tempura kuitai . . . kuitai. . . . Tempura . . . tempura . . . tem . . . kui . . . pura kui. . . .” Finally the words would become vague fragments like this. Still, I listened very hard, as if I were watching a single small spark disappearing, disappearing into the depths of some tunnel. Even when the sound of the samisen was cut off, a voice whispering “Tempura kuitai, tempura kuitai” echoed for some time in my ears. Is that still the samisen? . . . Or am I just hearing things? I pondered this question as I found myself being drawn down softly into the depths of sleep. That remembered sound of the balladeer’s samisen was present again tonight, singing in sad tones “Tempura kuitai, tempura kuitai.” I could hear it now and again as I walked along the road. Unlike in Nihombashi, there was no hollow clip-clop of wooden geta, but there could be no mistaking the notes I was hearing. At first only the tempura part, “Tempura . . . Tempura . . . ,” could be clearly heard, but eventually the “kuitai” part also became audible—perhaps because the sounds were coming nearer and nearer. But there was no sign or shadow anywhere of a wandering balladeer, only the shadows of the pine trees and myself. I looked from one end of

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the moonlit landscape to the other, but there was no living thing on the road, not even a puppy dog, apart from myself. Perhaps the moonlight was so terribly intense that things were actually rendered invisible? That thought did occur to me. How long did it take for me to see, at last, the figure playing the samisen some two hundred yards in front of me? And how much had I been affected by the moonlight and the sound of the waves during the lengthy time until that happened? The words “the lengthy time” do not begin to express my actual sense of how very long it was. It often happens that people experience the passage of two or three years’ time in the space of a single dream. My feelings at the time were very similar. Perhaps I had been walking along this road for two or three or even ten years, with the moon in the sky above, the seaside pines along the road, the waves breaking upon the beach. As I walked, I wondered if I were still a human being belonging to this world. After a person dies, he begins a long, long journey. Was I not taking that journey now? That, at any rate, was how long it felt to me. “Tempura kuitai, tempura kuitai.” Now I could hear the sound of the samisen clearly nearby. Accompanied by the whisper of the waves washing over the sand, the sharp, clear sound of a large plectrum striking the samisen’s three strings pierced my heart with a kind of sublimity, like the sound of a trickling mountain spring or a pure silver bell. The player of the samisen was without doubt a very young woman. She wore a traditional sedge hat, like those formerly worn by strolling musicians at the New Year, and she bent slightly forward as she walked. The nape of her neck—was it only a trick of the moonlight?—was amazingly white. It could never be that

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white if she were not a young woman. And equally white was the wrist of the hand that adjusted the pegs at the top of the samisen, a wrist revealed from time to time when her right sleeve slipped back a bit. She was still more than 100 yards ahead of me, so I could not tell the pattern of the kimono she was wearing. Only the nape of her neck and her wrist stood out, as pure white as the whitecaps gleaming in the sea’s offing. Oh, I know! Perhaps she’s not really a human being. I’ll bet she’s a fox spirit that’s taken on a woman’s form! I was immediately overcome by a fit of cowardice, and I followed the figure in front of me fearfully, making as little noise as possible as I walked. She continued to play her samisen as she moved slowly forward, never turning to look back. Yet if she really was a fox spirit, there was no way she would not have known that I was following behind her. She must have been pretending not to notice, even though she was well aware of me. Also, when I came to think about it, I realized that the color of her pure white skin seemed like a fox’s fur, not human skin. Only fur could be such a glossy white, like a pussy willow. Even though I was walking slowly, I got closer and closer to the woman. By now we were less than ten yards apart. Very soon my shadow, cast on the ground, seemed about to come even with the heels of her white, white feet. As I walked one foot, my shadow lengthened by two. The head of my shadow was starting to brush against her heel even as I watched. Despite how cold the weather was, the woman was wearing hemp-soled sandals on her bare feet, which were as pure white as the nape of her neck and her wrist. If I had not been able

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to see them from farther away, it was probably because they were concealed by the long skirt of her kimono. And it was a terribly long skirt. It may have been of silk crepe, and it flowed down, like those that cover the insteps of the handsome men and beautiful women in stage plays; perhaps it even dragged a little over the sandy soil on which the woman was walking. That sand, however, was so clean that not a trace of dirt appeared on either feet or skirt. Each time she lifted her sandals as she minced along, I could see the soles of her feet, so white that I would happily have licked them with my tongue. I couldn’t yet tell whether she was, in fact, a fox spirit or a human being, but her skin was unquestionably that of a human. The moonlight seeped down through her sedge hat, revealing the delicate rise and fall of her backbone from the nape of her neck, looking chilly in the white light of the moon, to the line of her back, bent slightly forward. Her narrow, sloping shoulders on both sides of that line were as svelte as the hem of her skirt that dragged slightly along the ground. Her shoulders were narrower even than the sides of her hat, spreading out to left and right. When, from time to time, she bent far forward, I could see the backs of her earlobes, peeking out from between her lovely chignon, which gleamed as if freshly wetted with water, and the strap that fastened the hat over her hair. But those earlobes were all I could see, since her face was invisible, hidden by the strap. The more I gazed at the back of that figure, so graceful it looked as if it might be blown away by a strong wind, the more I felt the young woman was something other than human. I suspected that she was indeed a fox spirit. She might be showing

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me this utterly gentle, weak-seeming figure of a beautiful woman seen from behind only to turn on me when I drew closer, giving a fearful cry and revealing a hideous, demonic face. . . . She must have heard my footsteps by now. Knowing that I was behind her, she naturally would have turned once to look at me. The fact that she kept on ignoring me made me all the more suspicious. I needed to be on guard against any threat she might present, or who knew what might happen? My shadow, moving over the earth, had by now reached her heels and begun to climb up her skirt, foot by foot. The shadow of my head had now fallen on the area of her hips and then began to shift upward toward her obi sash. Soon it would begin to move slowly up her backbone. Her shadow was cast forward on the ground, just beyond my own. I was determined to move a little to one side. When I did so, my shadow promptly shifted away from her hip area and drew alongside her, our two shadows showing clearly on the road before us. By now, there could be no grounds for doubting that she was a woman. Yet, as before, she never turned to look at me. She just kept playing the Shinnai melody on the samisen with an intensity that was, at the same time, extremely calm and graceful. Her shadow and mine were now moving side by side without the least space between them. For the first time, I dared a quick glance at the young woman’s profile. Now at last I could see the rounded line of her cheek beyond the strap of her sedge hat. Certainly it was not the cheek of some demon, for how could a demon have such a softly rounded cheek? Then from beyond that rounded cheek there began to appear gradually, very gradually, the tip of her nose. It was

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like when a passenger on a railway train gazes out at the scenery and watches a promontory emerge bit by bit from beyond a mountainside. I so wanted that nose to be high and impressively refined. That a woman who looked so elegant as she walked along on a moonlit night like this might be ugly— that was an unbearable thought. The tip of her nose gradually revealed more and more of itself from beyond her cheek as I indulged in such thoughts. Soon one of her nostrils showed its soft line, and I could easily imagine the overall form of her nose from what I had seen. It was, without doubt, a high nose—a high and fine nose. There was no need to worry. . . . I was so happy! When it became clear that her nose was far more splendid even than I had imagined, possessed of a perfect beauty like that in a classical painting, I could hardly contain my joy. And now her profile, beginning with the serene line of the bridge of her nose, was revealing itself completely and was side by side with mine. Even so, she did not look in my direction. She made no attempt to show me anything more than her profile. The other half of her face, beyond the borderline of her nose, remained as hidden as flowers that bloom on the dark side of some mountain. As a result, her face, which was as beautiful as a picture, also seemed somehow flat, like a picture’s surface, with nothing on the back. “Auntie, Auntie—how far are you going to walk?” I asked her; but my hesitant little voice was drowned out by the sharp clear notes of her samisen and didn’t reach her ear. “Auntie, Auntie . . .” I tried calling out to her again. Actually, it was not “Auntie” that I wanted to call her, but “Elder Sister.” I had no elder sister and harbored a deep desire to have a beautiful one of my own. I had always been envious of those

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friends of mine who were blessed with such a relationship. When I called out to her, my heart was filled with sweet, nostalgic feelings, as if she were indeed my elder sister. It didn’t feel right to call her “Auntie.” But since to address her suddenly as “Elder Sister” seemed far too familiar, I had settled on “Auntie,” for lack of anything better. I thought I’d spoken in a loud voice the second time I called to her, but still she did not answer. Her profile never shifted. Steadily playing the Shinnai melody, she walked straight ahead, with head inclined, as the hem of her kimono’s long skirt moved lightly over the sand. Her gaze seemed to fall solely on the samisen’s strings. No doubt she was listening, entranced, to the music she herself was playing. I moved a step ahead and gazed directly at that face, whose profile alone I’d seen up until then. Her hat cast a shadow on her face, but that only made its whiteness stand out all the more. The shadow covered her features down to her lower lip, and only the tip of her chin, pressed upon by the strap of her hat, was very slightly exposed to the moonlight. That chin was as small and lovely as a flower petal. Her lips were heavily rouged. I had not noticed it until then, but in fact she was wearing heavy makeup. No wonder I had thought her color was too white: her face and the nape of her neck were both thickly covered with white makeup— excessively so. And yet her beauty was not in the least damaged by that fact. Under harsh electric lighting or the direct rays of the sun, such thick white makeup might look cheap; but under the pale white moonlight of this night, her face, with the heavy makeup of a voluptuously beautiful woman, seemed all the more mysterious, making the onlooker feel a kind of awe, as before a

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demonic spirit. Truly, her white makeup felt not so much beautiful or gorgeous as cold. For some reason the woman suddenly stopped, raised her head, and looked up at the moon in the vast sky. At that moment, her cheeks, which had looked palely white in the dark shadow of her hat, seemed to give off a silvery radiance, like the waves in the sea’s offing. Then tears began to fall, like drops of dew overflowing from a lotus leaf, glistening as they rolled down those white, white cheeks. They glistened and were gone, and again, glistened and were gone. “Auntie, Auntie, you’re crying. Those are tears that are shining on your cheeks!” Continuing to gaze up into the sky, she answered me. “These are tears, all right, but I’m not crying.” “Well then, who is? Whose tears are they?” “They’re the moon’s tears. The moon weeps, and its tears fall on my cheeks. Look up—see how the moon is weeping!” So I too gazed up at the moon in the night sky. I couldn’t tell, though, whether the moon was really weeping or not. It occurred to me that probably I couldn’t tell because I was still just a child. But even so, why would the moon’s tears fall only on the woman’s cheeks and not on mine? “No, you are crying, Auntie! You lied to me!” I couldn’t keep from saying that, because the woman began to sob wildly with her head still raised so I would not see her tear-covered face. “Oh no, no. Why would I be crying? I never cry, no matter how sad I am.” Those were her words, but clearly she was weeping without restraint. As she raised her face, her tears welled up from behind her eyelids and ran down along both

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sides of her nose toward her chin. Each time she tried to quell her sobs, the bones of her throat became painfully apparent beneath the skin and seemed to compress themselves so much that I feared she might be unable to breathe. The tears that at first had trickled down singly like drops of dew were now flowing over her cheeks in a watery stream that was invading her nostrils and mouth. She made an effort to swallow the tears that entered her mouth as she sniffled at the moisture in her nostrils. At the same time, she was wracked by violent coughs. “See—you are crying, Auntie! What makes you so sad you want to cry?” I gently patted her shoulder as she bent forward, overcome by coughing. “You’re asking me why I’m sad? Wouldn’t anyone be sad, walking outside on a moonlit night like this? I’m sure you’re sad too, deep inside.” “You’re right. I feel unbearably sad tonight. I wonder why. . . .” “That’s why I say to look at that moon. The moon’s what’s making us sad. If you’re really that sad, then please weep along with me. I beg of you, please, weep along with me!” The woman’s words sounded like music, music as beautiful as the Shinnai melody she was playing. Strangely enough, she continued playing her samisen even as she kept on speaking to me in this way. “Well then, don’t try to hide your tears from me, but turn toward me, Auntie. I want to see your face.” “Oh yes, that’s true—it was very wrong of me to hide my face from you. Forgive me, good little boy that you are.” She

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had been looking up at the sky, but now she suddenly turned toward me, gazing at me from beneath her sedge hat. “Now then, if you want to see my face, take a good long look. I am weeping, as you see. My cheeks are wet with tears. Now, weep along with me! As long as tonight’s moon is shedding its light, let’s go far, far along this road, weeping together.” She pressed her cheek against mine and was still more overcome with tears. She certainly was very sad, but the act of crying like that seemed, at the same time, intensely pleasurable to her. I could sense that clearly. “Yes, I’ll cry, I’ll cry. I’m happy to, so long as it’s along with you, Auntie. I’ve been forcing myself not to cry until just now.” My voice as I said this had a sweet melodic sound, it seemed to me. Hearing my own words, I felt tears rolling down my cheeks. My eyes seemed to grow hot for a time. “My, how you’re weeping! When I see that, my sadness grows. I feel unbearably, unendurably sad. But I like to be sad, so please, let me weep to my heart’s content!” Again she pressed her cheek against mine. No matter how much she wept, her white makeup remained unchanged. Those cheeks, wet with tears, gleamed radiantly, like the moon in the sky above us. “Auntie, Auntie, I’m crying along with you, just like you said. So won’t you let me call you ‘Elder Sister’ in return? That’d be okay, wouldn’t it? For me to call you ‘Elder Sister’ from now on. . . .” “Why? Why do you ask that?” She looked at me intently with eyes as narrow and delicate as the tufted heads of plume grass.

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“It’s because I feel so strongly that you are my sister. I’m sure you must be. Aren’t I right? And even if I’m not, you could become my elder sister from now on.” “How could you have an elder sister? You’ve only got younger brothers and sisters. It makes me even sadder to hear you calling me ‘Auntie’ or ‘Elder Sister.’ ” “Well then, what should I call you?” “Have you forgotten me entirely, then? I’m your mother.” As she said this, she brought her face as close as possible to mine. In that instant, I recognized her. She was indeed my mother. How could she be so young and beautiful, though? Yet she was unquestionably my mother. Somehow, I could not doubt that that was so. I was still a little child. So perhaps it was only right that she should be so young and beautiful, I thought. “Oh, Mama! You are my mother, yes? I’ve been looking for you . . .” “Oh, my dear Jun’ichi, you’ve finally recognized me? You know it’s me?” Mother’s voice trembled with joy as she spoke. She stood stock still, holding me tightly in her arms. I clung to her with all my strength and wouldn’t let her go. Mother’s bosom was filled with the warm, sweet fragrance of her breasts. As before, though, the moonlight and the sound of waves penetrated my body to the core. The Shinnai melody went on. Tears still fell unceasingly down our cheeks. Then I woke up. I must have really been crying in my dream because my pillow was wet with tears. I will be thirty-three this year. My mother passed from this world in the summer

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of the year before last. When I remembered this, fresh tears began to fall again upon my pillow. “Tempura kuitai, tempura kuitai . . .” The sound of the samisen still echoed deep within my ears—from a great distance, from far, far away, like a visitor from the other world.

2. Sorrows of a Heretic Translated by Anthony H. Chambers

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hōzaburō knew very well that he was dreaming. Fluttering over his head, the feathers of a white bird, its wings outspread, shimmered like satin. Sometimes the fluttering came so close to his nose that he found it hard to breathe, and the pure, soft feathers brushed faintly against his eyelashes, like a light spring snow that has begun to thaw. I’m dreaming, he thought more than once. His awareness began to go numb as he seemed to be lured into the depths of a sweet, fragrant sleep; but he pulled back, and a renewed alertness flickered in his brain. He wanted to be tossed about for a while longer, drifting in this state of semiconsciousness between sleep and wakefulness. I could wake up now if I wanted to, he thought, but, gazing vaguely at the phantom bird, he allowed his soul to savor a mysterious joy and contentment. The noontime sun of early summer poured through the window and sparkled in his eyes as he lay on his back. The sunlight had become the dream of a white bird; the sound of rustling feathers was probably a breeze. This ability to dream,

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even as he sensed things so clearly, seemed to him a rare and distinctive experience, and he cherished it as a precious state that could be achieved only by a person with his sort of morbid sensitivity. Wondering if he had the power to construct pleasing hallucinations of his own will and to his own liking, he set about replacing the image of a bird hovering before his eyes with the apparition of a captivating woman, whereupon the figure of the bird was gradually swallowed up into the dark background, and countless graceful bubbles arose, brimming with five-hued rainbows, like the soap suds that a child plays with; and on the surface of the largest bubble, he could vividly see the sublime, naked form of a beautiful girl appear and dance seductively, fluttering like smoke that is buffeted in a breeze. Wonderful, wonderful! My brain is endowed with a mysterious power. I have the ability to weave whatever dreams I like. Maybe I can meet my lover in a dream. I wish I could doze like this forever. But the moment he formed this thought, Shōzaburō’s eyes opened wide. Feeling an incoherent sadness, like that of a child who has destroyed a soap bubble by blowing too hard, he quickly shut his eyes again to summon back the illusory figure that had flown off into the void; but neither the beautiful girl nor the white bird seemed likely to visit him again. Sitting up wearily, he propped his elbows on the windowsill, rested his chin on his hands, and gazed at the scraps of cloud in the May sky, which he thought must be the original form of the phantom in his dream. In the summery, clear blue sky, a wind blew vigorously from the south and pushed the floating masses of cloud busily to the north.

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When there’s so much beauty in dreams and in the sky, why do I live in such a squalid world? Longing all the more for the phantom world he had just seen, Shōzaburō was overwhelmed by a feeling of helplessness. Here in the house where he lived, in this second-floor room of a tenement on a cramped back alley in the Nihombashi Hatchōbori neighborhood of Tokyo, there was nothing to arouse a sense of beauty except the thrilling sky visible through the west-facing window. The four and a half mats; the sliding door of the closet; the walls, like those of a jail cell—the surfaces enclosing him on all sides were as soiled as the cheeks of a naughty boy eating cheap sweets; and the damp stench accumulating all year in the stuffy, low-ceilinged space reached the marrow of anyone who lived there. Shōzaburō feared that he would have gone mad and died long ago if he’d not been able to glimpse the sky through the room’s only window. It was unbelievable that this could be the dwelling of an advanced creature who prided itself on being the master of all creation. But however filthy the human world might be, Shōzaburō had no desire to leap from the ground on which he lived and climb to a fictional paradise, like a child in a nursery tale, or to be delivered into a fantasy world. He wanted to seek pleasure while clinging to the real world, like a plant that grows from the soil, spreads its roots in every direction, and enjoys its life. This did not seem impossible to him. Though ugliness, shadows, and misfortune were never far from the wretched alley and ramshackle house where he lived, he couldn’t believe that the entire human world was as dark and cold as this. On the contrary: if he could acquire all the wealth and health he desired and live like a king, this world would no doubt be far

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more pleasurable and beautiful than any paradise or fantasy land. Sunk in adversity, he might resemble a man wishing for a delusional stroke of good luck; but this outcome was more realistic than trying to be reborn in paradise or in Huahsü, the perfect land of Chinese legend. Simply thinking this way kept him from despairing of his world or his life. Even if he couldn’t ascend to the status of a king, he wanted to be able to rise, little by little, from his present straits to a higher stratum of society. There was pleasure in climbing even one foot. It angered him, though, that he had no way to achieve even that single foot of progress. He too was a human being—why did he have to be born into poverty and start out from the lower depths of this society? Why had he been assigned a handicap by the gods of fate? The more he thought about it, the more exasperated Shōzaburō became. It might be different if he were a stupid, tasteless, worthless person, suitable to be born and die in a squalid alley; but he was a promising young man, educated in the best schools, about to receive the title of bachelor of arts. He was different from the poor who wriggled like worms, satisfied with mere existence from one day to the next with no selfawareness. He possessed great genius. He was exceptionally gifted. But because his genius and gifts happened to flourish only in the arts, and he showed no talent for material success or wealth, he would go on like this forever, unable to break out of his adversity. “Bah! They’re making a fool of me,” Shōzaburō said aloud, startling himself with the sound of his own voice. Suddenly aware of what he had said, he pulled himself together. Recently he’d gotten into the habit of speaking wildly to himself. It

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wouldn’t be so bad if these outbursts expressed coherent ideas that had occupied his mind for a long time; but sometimes a passing whim, unrelated to anything, suddenly rising from nowhere and crossing his brain from right to left, would burst from his mouth with no warning. Fortunately, there was usually no one around when this happened, because in some cases he came out with remarks that would be extremely embarrassing or frightening if anyone overheard them. These embarrassing or frightening words were always of a kind— erratic utterances that could only be taken for the delirious speech of a lunatic. Recently, the three most common were these: “Slay Kusunoki Masashige, destroy Minamoto no Yoshitsune.” 1 Second, he would call a woman’s name three times: “O-hama-chan, O-hama-chan, O-hama-chan.” Finally, “Kill Murai, kill Harada.” For some reason, these three were what he said to himself most often, and hardly a day passed that he failed to utter at least one of them. Each is short, but Shōzaburō would become

1. Kusunoki Masashige (1294–1336): Heroic supporter of Emperor GoDaigo during the period of the Northern and Southern Courts and a model of samurai loyalty. He figures prominently in the Chronicle of Great Peace (Taiheiki, fourteenth century). Minamoto no Yoshitsune (1159–1189): Samurai general who helped his half-brother Yoritomo defeat the Taira clan and consolidate power, as narrated in the Tales of the Heike (Heike monogatari, thirteenth century). His legend is the basis for many plays and works in other genres, including Tanizaki’s favorite kabuki play, Yoshitsune and the Thousand Cherry Trees (Yoshitsune sembonzakura). Tanizaki revealed his enduring interest in both Yoshitsune and the Southern Court in Arrowroot (Yoshino kuzu, 1931).

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aware only when he had completed one of them in full. In the first case, for example, he wouldn’t realize that he was speaking out loud if he stopped short of saying “destroy Minamoto no Yoshitsune” all the way to the end. He’d have no idea what he was doing until he pronounced “Yoshitsune,” and then, startled, he’d shut his mouth. In the case of the second utterance, he’d always say the name “O-hama-chan” three times. In the case of the third, no sooner would he say “kill Harada” than he’d begin to shudder with fright. He spoke quickly, at a normal pitch, like a person talking in his sleep. Among the names he blurted out, “O-hama-chan” might be judged to have some connection with his thoughts, for this was the name of Shōzaburō’s first love. A fickle young man, he’d broken up with her two or three years before and never gave any thought to where she might be now or what she might be doing, so he was surprised to find himself saying her name so often; even so, he felt more of a connection with this name than with any of the others. He thought he’d put her out of his mind, but no doubt the image of his “first love” lurked deep in his consciousness, and some impulse would bring her name to his lips now and then. Murai and Harada were the odd ones. These were the names of two of his middle-school classmates, but he didn’t recall having been particularly close to either of them. They’d simply been in the same year at school; he’d never even played with them. They were the handsomest boys in the class, however, and for a time their beauty moved Shōzaburō’s heart. In his youth, he’d been tormented by their images coming to him like phantoms in the night. For six months or a year, thoughts of these two good-looking boys tortured his mind every day;

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but his relationship with them had always been innocent and distant. They didn’t make friends with him, nor did he have the courage to approach them. He heard that when they’d graduated from middle school, Murai had returned to his home in the country and become a farmer, while Harada had entered a premed program at a higher school in Kyushu. The memory of these handsome boys, etched in his mind, grew dim as the years passed, and he’d almost forgotten their existence; but now, suddenly, memories of the two would flash through his mind like shooting stars, only to disappear before he had time to think. It was at the moment when they vanished that he’d say, “Kill Murai, kill Harada.” It was one thing to speak their names, but he couldn’t understand the reason for “kill.” Since he felt neither affection nor resentment toward them, it should go without saying that he wouldn’t have the slightest desire to kill them. Even if he had harbored some resentment, he was incapable of murder. Was this perhaps an omen that he might have occasion to kill them in the future, a sign that some terrifying bond from a former life existed between the boys and himself? He considered this possibility, but it was too absurd. The very absurdity of these words aroused the most intense anger in him. What if he were to speak out in someone’s presence? How startled that person would be! How embarrassed, how appalled he himself would feel! If he came out with it on the street and was overheard by a detective, he’d be dragged into the police station and treated like a criminal or a lunatic. “I’m not crazy!” No matter how much he screamed, who would believe him? If he were taken to a mental hospital and examined by a specialist, no doubt he’d be pronounced insane.

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And when it came to Kusunoki Masashige and Minamoto no Yoshitsune, his outburst was truly mystifying. He had no idea why these names would pop into his head. As a child he’d loved historical tales and pored over the Chronicle of Great Peace and Tales of the Heike again and again. Like any child, he’d worshiped Masashige and Yoshitsune. Later, though, he’d been drawn to Western thought and literature and gradually forgot his passion for Japanese history. The ancient exploits of heroes like Yoshitsune and Masashige exerted not the slightest influence on his present life. For one thing, the words “slay Kusunoki Masashige, destroy Minamoto no Yoshitsune” were virtually meaningless. When he uttered these phrases, he’d blush violently and try to hide an embarrassment that made him want to crawl into a hole. Why do I have this ridiculous habit? Maybe it’s a sign of severe neurasthenia. He couldn’t believe that his actions arose from a sane mind. He was somewhat mad—this he had to acknowledge. Fortunately, his fits of insanity were brief, and he was able to come to his senses quickly; for this reason he hadn’t attracted any attention so far. For a while after this outburst, Shōzaburō scowled and lost himself in gloomy thoughts, but finally he sighed heavily and went slouching down the steep staircase. Beyond the two-mat entry was the shadowy, six-mat sitting room, where Tomi, his consumptive young sister, lay quietly against a pillow, her pale forehead showing above the edge of her bedclothes. When Shōzaburō entered the room, the invalid turned her ghastly eyes, glittering in their deep sockets, to stare at her brother. There’s no saving her. She’ll be gone in a month or two.

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It may have been this awareness that recently had made Shōzaburō fear being glared at by his sister’s oddly clear, mysterious eyes and feel awkward when he needed to walk past her on the way to the toilet. Looking to one side, careful not to let their eyes meet, he’d hurry through to the veranda, open the door to the toilet, and show no sign of emerging anytime soon. Just the other day, a friend in the medical school had warned him, “When you get a headache, watch out for constipation.” Since then, he’d forced himself every day to drink hot water and move his bowels as often as possible. As a result, he was in the habit of visiting the toilet at least two or three times a day and squatting there for fifteen minutes at a time. He’d often lose himself in endless meditation, as if he’d forgotten what he was doing there. This day too, as he squatted over the toilet, fragments of nonsensical thoughts rose in his mind and faded, rose and faded, one after another, until he found himself thinking of the Chinese poet Po Chü-i. Wait a minute. Wasn’t I thinking of Po Chü-i while I was in the toilet yesterday too? he said to himself. Yes, definitely yesterday. And not only yesterday—I thought of Po Chü-i the day before yesterday at around the same time. I wonder why he comes to mind when I go to the toilet. What’s the connection between this toilet and Po Chü-i? As he traced the flow of his thoughts upstream, the answer came to him. Two or three days before, a sheet of newspaper had lain on the floor, and his eyes had fallen on an article about Hakone Hot Springs. No doubt this was the connection. As he scanned the article, he recalled the bath at an inn

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he’d come upon as he wandered through the greenish mountain air. The inn had been constructed on the banks of a brook in a cool gorge; the tub overflowed with a steady, limpid stream of hot water. When he recollected how his body had relaxed as he lowered himself to the bottom of the tub, a line describing the pleasures of the bath, in the famous T’ang-dynasty poem Song of Everlasting Sorrow, had risen from the depths of an old memory: “Soft the waters of the hot spring; they rinsed her pale skin.” The poem, in turn, inevitably had made him think of its author, Po Chü-i. No doubt this sheet of newspaper had lain discarded on the floor for three days, his eyes had fallen on the article any number of times, and he’d repeated the process of association until it finally led him to Po Chü-i. Judging from this experience, it would seem that his mental activity had been stuck in the same place for three days— that his mind responded to a stimulus by stubbornly nursing a single fancy. For Shōzaburō, at least, Bergson’s “uninterrupted stream of consciousness” did not flow unceasingly. Hmm. Then maybe Bergson was right about “pure duration.” For five or six minutes, his thoughts shifted to questions of psychology, and he tried to recall the point of Bergson’s Time and Free Will; but he’d forgotten almost everything and couldn’t summon up a single part of the argument. Nevertheless, he felt happy that he possessed an intellect capable of extending his thoughts, on occasion, to such lofty issues. When you come right down to it, he reassured himself, no one but me, in this backstreet tenement, among the hundreds of residents of Hatchōbori, knows about Bergson’s philosophy. If a person’s thoughts could be seen from outside as clearly as his actions, how the

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knowledge in my head would surprise the people of this neighborhood. He wanted to boast to someone: “Look! I’m thinking these splendid, complicated thoughts!” “Mother, is he still in the bathroom?” When he heard his sister’s voice, Shōzaburō finally staggered from the toilet. His legs were numb. Tomi went on grumbling and nagging while he wiped his hands at the washbasin on the veranda. “He was in there so long! He goes to the toilet two or three times, and the day’s already gone! What a poor excuse he is for a ‘son of Edo.’ Can’t he make it quicker? Mother? Mother!” Lying motionless all day, staring at the ceiling, his sister relieved the tedium by talking to her mother, the only companion she could turn to in the dark, lonely house. Frightened by the premonition that she’d be dead in a month or two, she’d feel sad, then anxious, and call out plaintively, “Mother, Mother?” Her mother, working in the kitchen, often couldn’t hear her. Growing fretful then, Tomi would cry, more and more impatiently, “Mother! Mother!” “Okay, okay,” her mother responded nervously from beyond the shoji. “Tsk!” the girl clicked her tongue. “You must be deaf,” she scolded. “I’ve been calling and calling. Surely you can hear me, even if you’re busy!” For a girl of fourteen or fifteen, she’d been frighteningly precocious, but since falling ill with an incurable disease she’d grown hypersensitive and as self-centered and willful as a small child. Moved to pity, her mother readily overlooked her selfishness. Shōzaburō, however, detested his dying sister’s impertinence. When he heard her wield the creepy weapon of

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“dying” as she insulted their mother and him, any sympathy he’d begun to feel for her turned quickly to antipathy. He often wanted to shout at her, “Idiot! A child shouldn’t talk like that. We keep quiet because we feel sorry for you, and you just get more spoiled and conceited. If you’re sick, you should act sick. Curl up under your bedclothes. I can’t stand a stuck-up person, even if they are about to die!” He even imagined that he wouldn’t rest until he gave her a good scolding, just once, before she died. But now, though the sick girl’s abusive comments about the toilet disgusted him and he glared at her savagely, Shōzaburō wilted and kept quiet when she glared back at him with her frightening, strangely calm eyes, as cold as the eyes of a Western femme fatale. If he argued with his sister now, the fixed stare of those strange eyes would be sure to linger in this room after her death and glare at him every night. It might have been different for someone else; but for the cowardly Shōzaburō, with his morbidly sensitive nerves, this was all too possible, all too certain. Of course it was wicked for a little girl to shout taunts at her mother and elder brother. A crime was a crime, and even a dying invalid should be scolded; but this invalid possessed a mysterious strength, so that it would be the scolder who was forced to bear the attacks of conscience. Knowing this, Shōzaburō had no choice but to restrain himself, however maddening the situation might become. Since no one would converse with her, the invalid seemed to lose interest in talking and soon fell silent, as if she were short of breath. Her blinking, glittering eyes followed her brother as he walked past the bed. Avoiding her gaze, he reached the bottom of the stairs, then retraced his steps and,

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with some trepidation, slid open the closet door next to where she lay. “Why are you opening that? What do you need?” she asked sharply, poking her nose in where it did not belong. “Do you remember the gramophone Mother borrowed from the Nihombashi house? Did we return it already?” Shōzaburō made an effort to pose this question gently, with his head inside the moldy closet. “We haven’t returned it. What are you going to do with it? It’s not in there.” “I’m thinking of taking it upstairs. Where is it?” Pulling his face out of the closet, he looked around the room. A square object, resting on a striped cloth on top of a bureau against the far wall, appeared to be the gramophone. “You can’t just drag it away! O-yō-chan lent it to me, you know. She’ll blame me if you’re rough with it and scratch a record or something.” “It’s all right if I borrow it for a little while, isn’t it? I won’t scratch anything, don’t worry.” “Mother! He’s taking the gramophone!” Shōzaburō casually lifted the machine from the bureau and began fiddling with it. “Shōzaburō, if O-tomi asks you to stop, you should stop.” His mother emerged from the kitchen, where she’d been doing the laundry, with her sleeves still tied back and her hands covered with suds. “O-yō-chan treasures that gramophone and didn’t want to lend it to us because she was afraid it’d get scratched, but O-tomi wanted to listen to music, so I insisted and borrowed it for her. A roughneck like you doesn’t even know how to use the needle. What do you think you’re going

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to do if you force it and break something? Nobody in this house has touched the thing except O-tomi, not even your father or me.” O-yō was the daughter of Shōzaburō’s uncle. While Shōzaburō’s immediate family watched its fortunes decline day by day, his uncle had steadily grown richer over the past ten years and now operated a fine general store on the main street in Nihombashi. It was this uncle who had helped pay for Shōzaburō to attend the College of Humanities for the past four or five years, and who’d covered O-tomi’s medical expenses ever since she took to her bed in the spring of the previous year; and yet, though they benefited from his support, the Hatchōbori household barely managed to get by. Already six months had passed since O-tomi’s mother, at the invalid’s request, had gone to Nihombashi to borrow O-yō’s gramophone. “O-yō-chan, I’m sorry to ask, but would you lend us your gramophone for a few days? O-tomi is lonely and asked me to come borrow it from you.” “Oh, yes, that’s fine. Please take it.” O-yō reluctantly agreed, but she deliberately hid her favorite records— including Kosaburō, singing “Tsuna’s Mansion,” and Rinchū’s “Ferryboat.” 2 After explaining how to position the needle, how to wind the spring, and so on, she finally surrendered the machine.

2. Yoshizumi Kosaburō, 1876–1972, a nagauta singer; Tokiwazu Rinchū, 1843–1906, a singer of Tokiwazu ballads. Nagauta are narrative ballads, a major component of kabuki performances.

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Shōzaburō’s narrow-minded father scolded his wife as soon as he arrived home from work. “I told you not to borrow something she values so much. Enough. What if we break it? Take it back tomorrow.” She wouldn’t give up easily. “What’s wrong with borrowing it? O-tomi says she wants to listen to it. It’s not as if O-yō refused and I forced her to lend it to us.” “Of course not. If you ask her, she’s not going to refuse. We need to back off a little. They’ve already helped us so much, we don’t need to borrow something she’d rather not lend to us.” “I don’t ask for help because I enjoy it. If you object, maybe you should see to it that we don’t need their help. You can’t make ends meet without someone helping you, and then when something happens, you blame it on me. I don’t enjoy feeling ashamed like this. If you’d just provide for us better . . .” Tears of frustration streamed down her cheeks as she made her usual complaints. Pulling a crumpled scrap of paper from inside her kimono, she blew her nose. She seemed less to think ill of her meek husband than to lament the circumstances into which she’d fallen and which sparked these tearful words so often. In fact, at the conclusion of the spats that arose between them almost every night, the curtain always fell on her complaints. Even as her quick-tempered husband was telling her off, with the veins standing out on his temples, he’d crumple and fall silent at a single word from her. “And whose fault is it that your wife and children have ended up in a tenement?” He had no response when she spoke to him like this. None of them—the father and mother; their son, Shōzaburō; and their daughter, O-tomi—had been born into

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poverty. When the father was adopted by the Mamuro family as their daughter’s husband, there’d been a substantial inheritance, and his bride was a happy young woman who expected to stay with the family house and want for nothing. In the twenty-some years since then, they were reduced to poverty, little by little, until now they could barely make it from one day to the next. This, she believed, could be entirely attributed to her husband’s lack of income. It wasn’t that he’d lost his wealth at a stroke by dabbling in speculative ventures or wallowing in debauchery; while he conscientiously took over the family business and was faithful to his position as an adopted son, he unwittingly became too shy and withdrawn for the times, grew indolent, and steadily whittled down his fortune. In short, the responsibility lay in his ineffectualness and poor judgment, but he still didn’t fully recognize his own shortcomings. Honest, stubborn, and timid, he seemed to think he could fulfill his duty as a human being by simply observing a passive morality; beyond that, all fortune and misfortune were the workings of fate. But when his wife attacked him directly, he’d look apologetic and hang his head, apparently feeling the pangs of conscience. Thus his wife always won their arguments, but even in victory she didn’t want to shout for joy. The more she won and the more her husband wilted, the more miserable she’d become, and in the end she’d lose control of herself and sob convulsively while she voiced her complaints. Their quarrel over the gramophone followed the usual course, with the father scowling shamefacedly and the mother wiping her tears in vexation. “It’s okay, Papa,” said O-tomi from her bed, trying to mediate between her parents. “I used to play the gramophone at

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O-yō-chan’s place, and I didn’t make a single scratch. There’ll be no problem if I use it, but please don’t let anyone else.” When her condition had been less grave than it was now, she’d been able to operate the machine as she sat on her bedding. With the thing resting on a small, worn Ikkan-lacquer table, she’d take charge of changing the needle and fitting a record onto the turntable as her mother cranked. Four or five days later, the father was listening raptly to a recording, sipping his evening cup of sake, as if he’d forgotten the quarrel. “Hmm. That’s Roshō, performing Tsubosaka. Play it again, O-tomi. Sure enough, Gidayū sounds good when you listen to it this way, doesn’t it?” Saying she liked nagauta, the mother had taken records of Ijūrō and Otozō from the box and asked O-tomi to put them on.3 There were times when it seemed that the machine they’d borrowed for the invalid was being used to entertain the parents, and their beloved daughter was nothing more than the technician who operated it. The father and mother never tired of listening to the twenty or so records, watching their daughter position the needle; but they were afraid to touch the thing and made no attempt to learn how to operate it. Painfully wasted, the sick girl would sit up in bed with a heavy, padded robe draped over her shoulders and quietly work the turntable as her parents sat beside her, listening respectfully with bowed heads. It was a wondrous sight. The daughter’s face at such times was as

3. Toyotake Roshō, 1874–1930: a female reciter of the narrative and dialogue (Gidayū[bushi]) of a Bunraku puppet play. Tsubosaka Reigenki (Miracle at Tsubosaka): a Bunraku play. Yoshimura Ijūrō VI, 1859–1935, and Fujita Otozō V, 1874–1928, nagauta singers.

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frightening as a shaman practicing some mysterious sorcery; the parents, for their part, looked as simpleminded as a man and woman spellbound by her magic; and the gramophone was treated like a miraculous machine beyond the comprehension of ordinary people. When O-tomi’s condition gradually worsened and she could no longer move around freely, there was no one to take her place as technician, so finally the machine was wrapped in a cloth and placed on top of the bureau. She and her mother were alarmed that the reckless Shōzaburō was about to carry the thing away. “Stop, Shōzaburō, stop! Nobody plays a gramophone in the middle of the day! What’s more, you’ve never used it before.” “Anybody in the world can play a gramophone. Don’t worry about it. I’m just taking it upstairs for a while.” It infuriated Shōzaburō that his mother and sister were being so petty and making such a fuss over a little thing like a gramophone. How stupid! he thought. There’s nothing unusual about gramophones anymore, but they’re afraid to touch the thing. If they’re going to worry so much, they shouldn’t have borrowed it in the first place. And what about the people who lent it? Do they have to be so puffed up about a simple machine, as if it were the only treasure of its kind? Don’t scratch it! Don’t turn the crank too hard! When you use it, of course it’s going to wear a little. If they feel that way, they shouldn’t have bought one. Now that he was so angry, Shōzaburō wouldn’t be satisfied until he’d taken the machine away and used it to his heart’s content. “Mother, Mother!” cried O-tomi. Turning to her brother, she said, “Don’t do that! If you shake out the cloth here, you’ll get dust all over the place.”

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“It’s all right, leave it for now and let him do as he likes,” said the mother. “I’ll tell your father when he gets home, mark my words. Really! You never go to school, you lounge around the house all day, you think of nothing but having a good time. Is there another university student like you anywhere in the world?” As his mother and sister took turns abusing him, Shōzaburō threw them a scornful glance and calmly took the box upstairs. Placing his desk by the window, he put the machine on top and began trying to assemble it; but to tell the truth, his mother had been on target—he’d never touched a gramophone before. Nothing to it, he thought, but when he actually tried to play it, the machine was more troublesome than expected and refused to function as he wanted it to. Taking out little pieces here and there and putting them back in, he found himself in some difficulty, and in the meantime his mother and sister were fretting loudly downstairs. “Shōzaburō, what are you doing? Didn’t I tell you? You said you could handle it by yourself, but you can’t, and if you force it, you’re going to break it. What did I tell you? If you want to use it, bring it back downstairs and ask O-tomi how to play it. Shōzaburō! Do as I say!” Shōzaburō saw red. More and more impatient, he tried furiously to get the machine to turn, but he must have made a mistake in the assembly, because the needle refused to move properly over the record. Heaving a hot sigh, he wiped the sweat from his brow with the back of his hand and glared resentfully at the machine. Unbearably sad, he felt his eyes fill with tears.

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Idiot! Who cries over a thing like this? he scolded himself. To cry over a stubborn contest of wills with pitiful people like his mother and sister was frustrating in the extreme. He always wanted to stay cool when he dealt with people beneath him. “No matter what Father and Mother say, Shōzaburō pays no attention to them. He’s not going to wake up until somebody with a firm hand gives him a good talking to.” Down in the sickroom, his cheeky sister was muttering insults again. Feeling both disgusted and angry, Shōzaburō quickly forgot his sadness of a moment before. “You’re talking nonsense, you little brat. Who wants to learn from you how to operate a gramophone! I’d rather smash it to pieces, do you hear?” He turned with renewed ferocity to assembling the machine, which just a moment before had been too much for him. This time, fortunately, the needle seemed likely to glide along smoothly, and so he put on a record labeled “Kiyomoto Hokushū: Shimbashi geisha Koshizu.” 4 “Cloaked in spring haze, Collar Hill / Her guest adjusts his collar / For the first visit of the year.” A woman’s captivating, sensual voice, ridiculously high-pitched, swelled joyfully and energetically from the machine. Shōzaburō sat entranced with his arms crossed. His mother and sister too lowered their voices, and then fell silent.

4. Kiyomoto: a type of narrative ballad. Hokushū: Hokushū sennen no kotobuki (District to the North: A Thousand Years of Longevity), a famous Kiyomoto piece. Shimbashi geisha Koshizu: the singer in this recording, a geisha from the Tokyo Shimbashi district.

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“How about that? Anybody can play a gramophone. What did I tell you?” Smiling contentedly, Shōzaburō was satisfied. Feeling as though this was the most thrilling feat he had accomplished in some time, he let himself be carried away by the music, keeping time with his head and hands until the singer came to the words “Willows and cherries in Nakanomachi / Petals have begun to fall . . .” Gradually the sound deteriorated, and then the turntable abruptly stopped. The spring had run down all the way, but this was not at all clear to Shōzaburō. He cautiously tried turning the crank five or six times. The record moved a little, lowing like a cow, and then stopped. “Shōzaburō, you’ve broken the machine, haven’t you?” His father had come home at some point and began to interfere. “It’s making a strange noise. Hey! Do you hear me?” He was shouting up toward the second floor. “You don’t know what you’re doing. You got careless and broke it, didn’t you. Hey! Shōzaburō! Listen to that! It’s just making weird noises. Bring it down here and let O-tomi take a look. Hey!” He sounded terribly worried as he yelled from the foot of the stairs. “She doesn’t need to look at it. The thing doesn’t work because it’s old, that’s all.” Refusing to accept defeat, Shōzaburō grew desperate and violently shook the machine. He expected his father to make a fuss when he heard the thuds. Sure enough, the clamor from below grew even louder. “Here, what’re you doing? Why are you throwing it around like that? You’re always careless, with no thought of the consequences, even when it’s something we’ve borrowed. If you don’t know what you’re doing, it’s time to stop.”

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A loud crash echoed from the second floor. “The machine was broken from the beginning,” Shōzaburō pleaded helplessly. “It’s damaged all over. There’s no way to make it work.” To himself he said, I broke it! It’s my own fault, whatever excuses I make. Mother’s face will be as white as a sheet when she lugs the precious thing back to Nihombashi. “O-yō-chan, I’m so sorry,” she’ll say, apologizing on bended knees. “Shōzaburō did thus and so . . .” And what will O-yō say to that? What will she think of me? Conscience-stricken, Shōzaburō no longer felt like jeering at the stinginess of others; rather, he thought, the baseness of his own nature in trying to use the borrowed machine on the sly was clearly visible to all. “It was not broken from the beginning!” his father shouted, still rooted to the base of the stairs. “You were careless with it. It wasn’t broken. It worked just fine before. We’re in trouble now. There’ll be no way to explain ourselves when we take it back to Nihombashi.” His father’s voice had grown spiritless and dejected, but then, apparently, O-tomi reminded him of something. “Shōzaburō, have you turned the crank? Maybe the spring has gone slack. O-tomi says you should wind it up all the way. Did you hear me? The spring has run down, hasn’t it?” “It’s wound all the way, I tell you.” Even as he said this, however, Shōzaburō, thinking he’d already broken the machine and so had nothing to lose, started turning the crank with all his might. Like magic, the turntable began to rotate smoothly, and once again Koshizu’s beautiful, lively voice rose to fill the house. “There, you see? It’s not broken at all. The spring had just run down.” His father sounded relieved.

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“That’s why you should’ve asked me from the start,” said his sister. “Why do you have to be so pigheaded?” Shōzaburō felt bitterly resentful when he heard her exulting in her triumph over him. He even thought he’d rather the machine were actually broken than give any satisfaction to the little brat. Unfortunately, while the machine was working again, he was too upset to derive any pleasure from it; but the records continued, fluidly and exuberantly, to pour out ever more sonorous music. Kiyomoto, Tokiwazu, Gidayū, nagauta—he tried putting on one after another, but his lingering resentment over the fuss about the spring kept him from delighting in the music as he normally would have. Now and then he forgot himself for a moment, when a bewitching melody struck his ears; but then something in his breast whispered, Look at the sorry state you’re in! This gramophone that you wrested so angrily from your parents and your sister— are you enjoying it that much? Is there nothing else in the world that you enjoy? and he’d feel disgusted at his own mean-spiritedness. Even so, the spiteful act he’d perpetrated against his family meant that he had to go on listening, even if he no longer enjoyed it. His actions came to seem all the more meaningless, and an absurd anger rose within him. He played every record until only one remained—Chihayaburu, a rakugo story narrated by Kosan. It was a wildly funny romp. “Do come in, Kin-san. Now then, you say that you don’t understand Narihira’s poem, right? If I’m not mistaken, it goes Chihayaburu kamiyo mo kikazu Tatsutagawa . . .” 5 Kosan’s familiar voice,

5. Yanagiya Kosan III, 1857–1930. Rakugo: a form of storytelling. Ariwara no Narihira (825– 880), the celebrated poet. The humor in the rakugo Chihayaburu comes from a preposterously wrong explication of

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bursting from the horn as he glibly began to tell the story, was so madcap that Shōzaburō let out a chuckle. Then suddenly he frowned, feeling somehow betrayed. He stopped the turntable. Deflated, he flopped down in the center of the room with his limbs outspread. “Kosan is a master,” he said out loud, in his usual way.

2 Leaving the gramophone and the records scattered around him, he dozed until sunset. “Shōzaburō, wake up, wake up.” Opening his eyes, he found his father standing beside him with a threatening look, prodding his backside with a foot. He may be my father, but he shouldn’t waken his own son with a kick, he thought, but did not say. What an ignoramus. Shōzaburō was indignant, but he knew it was his own misdeeds that provoked this coarseness. His father hadn’t always been rough and hardhearted toward his son. Even now, he seemed so good-natured with his wife and others that people looked down on him; it was only toward Shōzaburō, his son and heir, that he blustered like a fierce dog. This was the result of Shōzaburō’s being unfairly suspicious of his father’s nature and repeatedly ignoring his authority. He should have behaved,

Narihira’s poem Kokinshū, #294, and Tales of Ise, Section 106. The lines quoted here can be translated “In the Age of the Mighty Gods— / Unheard of even then / Tatsuta River.”

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at least outwardly, in such a way that his father could save face; but this alone Shōzaburō could not bear to do, so he treated his father brusquely. As a result, his father only grew angrier. Before I abuse my father for being ignorant, I should change my attitude, since I’m the one with a good education. No doubt he’d grow gentler over time and lower his guard if I did so. The logic of this was perfectly clear to him. He realized that his own conscience would be easier if he controlled his temper and treated his father kindly. Nevertheless, the moment he saw his father’s face or received the slightest rebuke, he’d turn strangely perverse and find himself incapable of yielding. As much as he looked down on his father, he did not, of course, shower abuse on him or raise a hand against him. If he were capable of such actions, he’d probably feel less animosity. No doubt he’d be happier if he could think of his father as a stranger and interact with him accordingly. Let the man who shouted abuse at him be a stranger: he wouldn’t hesitate to shout right back. If a stranger misunderstood him, he’d try to explain himself. If a pitiful man, a contemptible man, a poor man were a stranger, he’d be able to comfort him, keep him at a respectful distance, and treat him charitably. Depending on the circumstances, he might be able to sever relations. But this was his own father, and he was at a loss how to act. It wasn’t necessarily because Shōzaburō had morals that he was at a loss how to deal with his father. Always standing between them was a strange, sorrowful, angry feeling that lay darkly upon his breast and mind, a feeling that couldn’t be characterized simply as “morality.” He was unable to dispel it. When he found himself before his father, he’d feel a surge of unwarranted rebelliousness and be overcome

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with disaffection and rage. And yet, in his father’s haggard face there was a somber, touching shadow that aroused pity in others, and this prevented Shōzaburō from speaking or acting. When he reminded himself that he’d been born from this old man’s blood, the oppressive feeling was more than he could bear, and his body would suddenly go stiff. “Here you are, twenty-four or twenty-five already and you skip school every day. What do you intend to do with yourself? Eh? What do you intend to do with yourself, I said!” Now and then he couldn’t avoid a summons to his father’s side, where he’d be subjected to a sharp interrogation. Shōzaburō would sit facing his father and make no response. “You’re not a child. You must have some idea. Eh? Listen to me! What do you have in mind, lounging around all day? If you have a plan, tell me about it.” Speaking in this manner, his father would inch closer and closer, but Shōzaburō would remain silent, even for two or three hours at a time. I have a plan, but you wouldn’t understand, even if I explained it, he thought, but he never said it out loud. Nor did he feel like inventing something to placate his father for the moment. He felt so wretched that there was no room in his heart for such a response. In the end, his father would grow angry and use rough language, whereupon Shōzaburō would show his defiance in his face and attitude as clearly as he could. He might frown and glare ferociously at his father, and when his father started shouting at him he’d make it a point to yawn outrageously. Clicking his tongue in disgust, his father would say, “What’s the matter with you? What kind of person yawns when his

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father’s giving him advice? And what’s that look on your face? What are you glowering at?” Hearing this, Shōzaburō finally experienced a little relief. He was satisfied, realizing that the meaning of his facial expressions and attitude had at last gotten through to his father. “I can’t believe it. Talking to you is a waste of time. You’ve been listening with that sour look on your face, but you haven’t said a word. I don’t know whether you’re stubborn or just stupid. You’ve got to shape up. You can’t go on sleeping late. Get up at six or seven in the morning and go to school every day. And who knows where you spend the night—you can’t go on like that. You stay away from home for three or four days at a time. That’s no way to live. You’ve got to mend your ways. I won’t put up with it.” In the end his father would relent and assume a pleading tone, give a parting shot, and let Shōzaburō go. At this point Shōzaburō could always see tears glistening in his father’s eyes. If it’s enough to make him cry, why doesn’t he speak to me a little more kindly? And why can’t I be a little more gentle? Shōzaburō sensed a different kind of sadness pressing against his heart. He would have felt better if his father held consistently to a firm position. The sadness would last no more than a day, however, and when his father wakened him the next morning, the same thoughts would rule his mind as on the day before. He’d spitefully lie in bed until noon, as usual, or stay away from home for three or four days.

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If I despise my father so much, why don’t I leave home? Why don’t I have a huge quarrel with him, get disowned, and break off ties with him forever? There are lots of places more pleasant to be than this grimy tenement. Even if I lived as a vagabond, wouldn’t I be happier than I am now, no matter how far I fell in society? He’d made up his mind and planned his escape several times before. Selling some books and borrowing cash from friends, he’d put together a little travel money, slipped away from home, and roamed about for ten or twenty days. He found, however, that he couldn’t stay away from Tokyo any longer than that. It makes no difference what happens to me. I have neither parents nor friends. So he would tell himself; but in the end, the home of the parents who’d given birth to him, no matter how shabby it was, no matter how empty of cheer it might be, was the place where he always came to rest. The blind instinct that made him love the spot where he’d been born and the house in which he’d grown up always lurked somewhere in his heart and calmed the hot blood that sought to drive him out the door into a life of wandering. I’d never be able to come home again. I could rot away at the edge of some field or in the mountain depths, and there’d be no one to look after me. To the end of my life I wouldn’t see my father’s face. I could never again be with my mother, who held me as a child in her arms as I slept and gave me her milk to drink. When he pushed his thoughts to this point, he’d feel the helplessness of the vagabond. Then he’d find his way back to the tenement in Hatchōbori to be at loggerheads with his father again.

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And so his heart was a prisoner to his parents; but the more aware he was of the depth of their bonds, the more he cursed and feared them. Unable to let go of his parents’ hands, even as he shunned them, he was furious at his own weak will.

J “Shōzaburō! Get up, get up!” His father kicked him repeatedly in the buttocks as he called to him. “You’ve overslept again. And look at this mess! You leave the gramophone and everything else just lying around. Why can’t you put things away when you’re done with them?” Turning his bleary eyes toward the ceiling and affecting a malicious yawn, Shōzaburō still lay in a drowsy heap. Even so, he’d long been wide awake; but reluctant to get up meekly, he put on a show of hostility. “Get up, I said! Damn you!” Losing all patience, his father seized Shōzaburō’s wrist harshly and pulled hard enough to dislocate his arm. Then he took a telegram out of the folds of his kimono and thrust it under his son’s nose. “Pull yourself together. I don’t know where it came from, but there’s a telegram for you. It seems that a friend of yours has died.” “Huh,” Shōzaburō replied brusquely, taking the telegram from his father’s hand. He was more irritated by his father’s thoughtlessness in opening a telegram addressed to him than he was startled by a friend’s death. This wasn’t the first time. Recently almost all the letters that came to him had been opened and examined by his father.

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“Who is it? Must be someone very close to you for them to send a telegram.” “We weren’t that close,” Shōzaburō replied curtly. “They’re not likely to send you a telegram saying that someone you weren’t close to has died, are they? Eh? Why did they send it?” “I don’t know why.” “You don’t know?” snapped his father, inexplicably angry. “What kind of answer is that?” As he grudgingly started down the stairs, he muttered, “You won’t even give a decent answer when someone asks you a question.” “SUZUKI DIED 9 A.M. TODAY.” Still clutching the telegram, Shōzaburō was lost in thought for a time. The news of Suzuki’s death wasn’t particularly surprising to him, nor was it an especially sad development; but it forced him to recall the circumstances under which he’d grown close to Suzuki, and he discerned a strange trick of fate in his death. Suzuki was the scion of a wealthy farming family in Ibaraki Prefecture. Unusual among students of the time, he was a man of exemplary conduct, warm friendships, and a perceptive mind. Among his friends, no other young man was as respected for his virtue, as esteemed, or as beloved as Suzuki. When they were in higher school, Shōzaburō, who enrolled in the humanities program, had few opportunities to interact with Suzuki, a student of law; but late in the autumn of the year they entered the university, there came a time when Shōzaburō was desperate for five yen. By six o’clock that evening, he needed to raise the participation fee and attend his middleschool reunion, which was to be held at the Iyomon restaurant,

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in Shitaya. Iyomon was, of course, far too extravagant for a middle-school gathering; but Shōzaburō, who’d been put in charge of arrangements, pushed hard and finally, overruling the majority, selected it. “Eating sushi or a boxed dinner for a one-yen fee is just too grim, don’t you think? This time let’s call in some geisha and live it up. Come on, splurge a little,” he argued, puffed up with himself. “Five yen will be enough.” Most members of the group didn’t look pleased, but among them were a few rich youths who’d already begun to taste the pleasures of debauchery, and shop clerks who enjoyed some measure of prosperity: all together, seven or eight cocky fellows came together and egged Shōzaburō on. “You’re right. We can’t have a proper reunion with a fee of one or two yen. If some people can’t afford five yen, then we’ll have a gathering for the seven or eight of us who can,” they said, half in jest. “We’ll leave the location up to you. Kamekiyo, Fukagawa-tei—anyplace you like.” Neither those who supported his proposal nor those who opposed it realized that Shōzaburō himself was a penurious student who could scarcely afford five yen. “In that case, let’s go to Iyomon, in Shitaya. I don’t know the Yanagibashi district that well, but Shitaya’s within our territory as university students.” Putting on the airs of an experienced playboy, Shōzaburō threw up a smoke screen before his former classmates and briskly brought the discussion to a close. Nevertheless, it was clear to Shōzaburō from the beginning that he couldn’t afford a fee of five yen. For all his big talk, he’d never set foot inside Iyomon. He made up his mind that

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if he could find the money by the day of the event, fine; otherwise, he’d simply plead illness and stay away. Then, in the afternoon of the day in question, he chanced to run into Suzuki on the main street of Hongō. “Mamuro! It’s been a long time.” Neatly dressed as always in his school uniform and cap, Suzuki, who’d just come out through the university gate, greeted Shōzaburō with a warm, artless smile. In retrospect, Shōzaburō realized that Suzuki had already been looking pale at that time. Both of them were walking toward the trolley stop at Sanchōme. Falling in together on the paved street, they chatted as they went. Shōzaburō hesitated to say what was on his mind, but finally, when they reached the intersection and Suzuki was about to take his leave, he said, blushing, “Suzuki, I’m sorry to ask you this, but if you have five yen, could you lend it to me?” Given the distance of their relationship up to that point, he couldn’t help but feel ashamed of his own brazen, outrageous behavior. “Well, I do have five yen with me, but . . .” said the goodnatured Suzuki, puzzlement and reluctance showing in his face. Success, Shōzaburō said to himself. “I don’t mind lending it to you, but I must have the money back by Friday next week.” “That’s no problem. I’ll be sure to pay you before Friday.” “You’re sure, are you? If you don’t return it by then, I’ll really be in trouble.” He handed a five-yen note to Shōzaburō. “Thanks. I’ll get the money together and bring it to you next week. Today is an emergency, you see, and I haven’t had a chance to arrange things. Excuse me, then.” With this he strode off toward Ueno Hirokōji.

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I’ve gone and borrowed five yen. Will I be able to pay it back by Friday next week? Or will this have to end unpleasantly, with a rupture in our friendship? I’ve gotten into a bad habit. These thoughts ran through Shōzaburō’s mind as soon as he’d borrowed the money. Why was he driven by momentary vanity to pretend that he was wealthy? Why did he borrow from people, knowing all the while that he had no prospect of repaying his debts? Why had he asked Suzuki to lend him the money? Why had he been unable to stop himself? He was more inclined to be angry at a stubborn flaw in his makeup than to regret his actions. Regret is usually accompanied by contrition. But while he reproached himself for his actions, he couldn’t resolve to correct them. He may have wanted to reform, but he knew very well that it wasn’t in his nature to change his ways. If he were to find himself in the same situation again, he would without question promote the gathering at Iyomon and cheat Suzuki of his money. If his regret had been real, Shōzaburō would have skipped the Iyomon gathering and returned Suzuki’s money the next day; but this thought didn’t occur to him. I have a week until next Friday. Something will turn up during that time, or if it doesn’t, I’ll just feel awkward for a month or two. In any case, it’ll fizzle out. The worst that can happen is that he’ll have nothing more to do with me. Once he’d resigned himself this way, his nerves settled down and he felt free from care. Hurrying to Iyomon, he enjoyed himself more and more as he drank and called in geisha. I’m glad I borrowed that five yen, he congratulated himself. How can it be so much fun to have a good time with money I got by tricking a friend? My deceit will be exposed next

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Friday— why am I not worried? There’s probably no one in the world as indifferent to ethics as I am. Not only am I weak-willed, I must be a madman with congenital moral paralysis. Suspicious of his own abnormal mentality, he could only believe that he was insane. He visited Suzuki at his rooming house two or three times before the promised Friday, but from Wednesday on he kept out of sight. On Friday he stayed on the second floor at Hatchōbori, like a worm in its hole. For some time after that, he could not, of course, go to school or even stroll on the streets of Hongō. Two or three postcards arrived from Suzuki, but he sent no reply. Having neither the good faith nor the ability to pay back the money, he couldn’t make excuses. Suzuki would grow disgusted with him or give up; he’d leave matters until they resolved themselves. Even as he recognized his own moral insanity, he trusted firmly in Suzuki’s ethics. “He’s not the kind of narrow-minded person who would hold a grudge against me. He’s not so shallow that he’ll resent being cheated and go around telling our friends that I can’t be trusted.” Interpreting Suzuki’s character in the manner most favorable to himself, he prayed that his own misdeeds would be buried in ambiguity. Matters did not turn out as he hoped, however. When the money failed to arrive, a panicky Suzuki explained the situation to two or three men who knew Shōzaburō well and asked them to press for the money on his behalf. Hearing Suzuki’s story, Shōzaburō’s former roommates at the First Higher School—S, who studied law; O, in engineering; and N, in political science— all agreed that Shōzaburō’s behavior was contemptible.

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“So he’s even making trouble for you,” said N, stunned by the news. “No wonder he hasn’t shown his face recently. He’s at it again.” “He hasn’t been to my place since last year,” said O. “He used to come by almost every day and drag me to the brothels at Susaki and Yoshiwara, but he never once paid. He’d put all the responsibility on someone else, and to make matters worse, he borrowed fifteen yen from me, saying he’d pay it back the next day, and then he vanished like a ghost. I really made a fool of myself with Mamuro.” He spoke with a touch of humor, as if to ridicule his own stupidity. “But there’s something wrong with all of you,” said S. “Why do you keep quiet when Mamuro treats you like that?” He seemed to be struggling to control his temper. “You should go straight to his house and be more aggressive with him. If it’s difficult for you to go, then I’ll go in your place.” “I think we should forget it,” said N with a frown. “If he had any money, he wouldn’t be cheating people, but his family seems to be in very bad straits. I’ve never been there, but I hear it’s a backstreet tenement in Hatchōbori; isn’t that right? Nobody wants to go storming into a sad place like that.” N was the only one who took a generous view of Shōzaburō’s chronic problem and continued to associate with him. “To tell the truth, I was so angry with him that I barged in once,” said O with an embarrassed look. He scratched his head sheepishly. “It was last winter. I don’t know Tokyo that well, and it was the first time I went to that jumbled-up neighborhood. There were any number of little alleys twisting here and there, and it was way in the back and hard to find. ‘The only person in this tenement who goes to the university is the

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Mamuros’ son,’ one of the neighbors told me, and so I finally found his place. As you said, it’s shabby and dirty, just short of being a shantytown, and I couldn’t muster the courage to confront him. Then I found out that he’d been away from home for ten days, and his old man ended up asking me where his own son was living. I felt so sorry for him, I couldn’t get away from there fast enough. Given all that, I don’t know how Mamuro gets away with bragging about geisha all the time.” N stood up for Shōzaburō. “Of course he’s lying. Far from hiring geisha, some days he probably doesn’t even have pocket change. Mamuro’s no fool, and he ought to quit behaving the way he does. But he’s a strange one. Sometimes I try to warn him in a roundabout way, but then when I see him, he’s fun to talk with, and he’s always so easygoing I feel sorry for him and keep on seeing him. I’m probably the only one Mamuro can visit without looking awkward. When you get too close to someone, you can’t distinguish anymore between a good person and a bad one.” “I don’t miss the five yen, and I’d feel bad breaking with him over this,” Suzuki said, after listening to the others. “When you see him, please ask him to return the money whenever it’s convenient.” Shōzaburō effaced himself for about a month, but no more dunning postcards came, and so he guessed that Suzuki was probably resigned to the loss. One day he dropped in on N, the student of political science, and with an air of perfect innocence began his usual joking, spiced with the witty aphorisms he was so good at. N too seemed no different. As always, he welcomed Shōzaburō, treated him to beef sukiyaki and sake, and entertained him with small talk late into the

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night. Telling himself that N knew nothing of the Suzuki affair, Shōzaburō felt greatly relieved and drank until he was unsteady on his feet. N got drunk too, and they debated hotly over the characters of their friends, literary topics, and the like, until Shōzaburō was about to leave for home. N escorted him to the door and then started to speak in a cautioning tone. “By the way, Suzuki is very anxious these days. He says there’s something you absolutely have to return to him. It’s not a lot of money, so you ought to find it somehow and pay him back. It won’t do for you to keep on behaving this way.” N’s relationship with Shōzaburō was such that he didn’t hesitate to speak frankly. “Right. I’ll take it to him in two or three days. If you see him, tell him I’ll definitely be there with the money the day after tomorrow, or the day after that. I always intended to pay him back, you know.” Caught off guard and flustered, Shōzaburō gave N a pleading, servile look. “If you’re going to pay him back, you ought to send him a reply, don’t you think? He’s angry because he’s written to you again and again and hasn’t heard a word in return. You’ve gotten into a very bad habit recently. S is furious with you. He says he wants to punch you in the face, so you’d better watch out. You might feel better if you did get punched, though.” “I get it, I get it. I already feel bad, and when you talk that way it makes me feel even worse. Don’t say another word about it. I said I’ll return the money the day after tomorrow, all right?” “Are you really going to return it the day after tomorrow? I can’t depend on what you say, so I’m not going to mention

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it to Suzuki. That way, even if you can’t pay him back the day after tomorrow, you can feel free to come see me again. Actually, I miss you if I don’t see your face now and then.” “I’ll pay him back, I’ll definitely pay him back.” Shōzaburō really meant it for once. He promised himself that he’d find five yen by the day after tomorrow. When the day arrived, however, he’d forgotten his promise and stayed on the second floor reading sensational popular stories. Four or five days later, he called at N’s place again. “To tell the truth, I’ve been busy and I haven’t repaid Suzuki yet, but I thought I’d drop in to see you.” Looking embarrassed, Shōzaburō spoke up quickly in his own defense, before N had a chance to say anything. Shōzaburō was disgusted at the brazenness that allowed him to say things a normal person would feel ashamed of, and to say them calmly and with a smile. There was something criminal in his makeup, no doubt about it; he might be capable of anything. “That’s pretty much what I expected. It wouldn’t matter if it were anyone else, but Suzuki is such an honest person, he’s counting on you, so it’s all the more unforgivable if you don’t pay him back.” “No problem. This time I’ll definitely pay him back in two or three days.” “ ‘Two or three days’ again! If you don’t pay him back, I’ll get S to attack you!” Shōzaburō calmly made his excuses, and N calmly scolded him. They went back and forth a number of times, exchanging the same words each time, but Suzuki still didn’t get his five yen.

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Then in early May, a virulent strain of typhoid broke out, and Suzuki caught it. He’d always been exceptionally careful about hygiene and appeared to have a strong constitution, but unfortunately his heart was weak. He was hospitalized. “He has a high fever. Let’s hope it doesn’t affect his heart,” said his friends, showing their concern on their faces as they visited him. “Suzuki’s gotten worse. He’s thin as a thread, just a shadow of what he used to be,” said N each time he met Shōzaburō. “Shouldn’t you go see him?” “I’d like to, but I’m afraid of catching it. I have a weak heart too.” It was true that Shōzaburō had a weak heart. Even if that hadn’t been the case, however, the typhoid outbreak had set his nerves on edge, and the obsessive thought that he might contract the disease at any moment tormented him like a nightmare. “I’ve been to see him so many times, I might be infected too. There’s no hope for Suzuki now. He’s going to die.” “Don’t say such a thing! If it turns out you’re right, you’ll feel even worse.” Strangely agitated, Shōzaburō quickly tried to negate N’s words. Suzuki—the same Suzuki who was as fit as the rest of us until the other day—is about to leave this world, he said to himself. The word “death,” which he’d always before uttered without a thought for its significance, now suddenly assumed an enormous weight and lay darkly and ominously on his heart. “He’s going to die.” N’s casual remark echoed grotesquely and cast a shadow as dark as “death” itself. N didn’t press him again for the five yen. The fact that neither of them mentioned it, even though neither had forgotten,

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struck Shōzaburō as both comical and awkward. He imagined that the mischievous gods of fate were mocking him, saying, “You never fulfilled your obligation, and now Suzuki is dying. This means that their distrust in you will naturally die out. How lucky for you.” Shōzaburō had taken the matter lightly. So what if I fail to pay back a debt to a friend? It’ll work out in the end. Sure enough, the affair had concluded very well indeed. It hadn’t turned out happily for the other party, but how much better this was for him than if Suzuki had gone on living and Shōzaburō had been attacked from all sides for failing in his obligation. Very sad for Suzuki, but fortunate for Shōzaburō, no matter how he looked at it. Lying upstairs in Hatchōbori and gazing at the early summer sky, he daydreamed about the patient who was dying in the hospital. Though Shōzaburō himself had stayed away, N’s eyewitness accounts allowed him to picture the piteous scene in the sickroom. Suzuki’s robust features—his lively, ruddy face, with a few pimples here and there—had withered pathetically, and his eyes were sunken in their sockets as he lay silently on his bed. Ice packs rested heavily on his pale forehead and above his faintly beating heart, while a nurse moistened his lips, parched by fever, with drops of grape wine. The sickroom was filled with strange medicinal odors; surrounding him, members of his family stared silently at the bed, frightened by presentiments of the imminent, ominous event to come, and tiptoed as they passed in and out of the room. All of those present—the patient’s father and mother, his siblings, his friends—were reminded again of what an admirable person Suzuki had been. Secrets of the spirit and of “death,” not

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easily glimpsed by ordinary people, were about to be revealed to this patient: raising him all at once to the heavens, the visitors honored him as a man of extraordinary character, a wondrous sage who stood between humans and the gods. This solemn, suffocating, terrifying scene unfolded vividly in Shōzaburō’s mind. He tried to imagine the thoughts of the feverish, moaning patient. On the surface of his cloudy consciousness, as it wavered between life and death, what would appear among the scraps of illusion, now vanishing, now forming, like foam? Did the patient still feel resentment about the money that had not been returned to him? Maybe he was exclaiming deliriously, “That hateful Mamuro cheated me. Even if I die, I’ll get my money back.” Shōzaburō shivered at the thought. If the patient was saying such things about him, then he should have returned the money after all. The self-centered Shōzaburō recalled the old saying, “A dying man’s words are good.” It seemed unlikely that the dying Suzuki, universally regarded as a broad-minded gentleman, would hold a grudge because of Shōzaburō’s betrayal. Surely he’d forgive a friend’s trifling misdeed with good grace. “I feel sorry for Mamuro,” he’d say with a smile of pity as he died. “He can’t help it; it’s because of his own sickness.” In any case, for the patient’s sake and for his own, Shōzaburō prayed that Suzuki would achieve the generous, openhearted spirit of a saint and die nobly and beautifully. “I don’t want to visit him at the hospital, but if he dies, please let me know,” he had asked N previously. “I’ll want to attend his funeral.” N had fulfilled his promise by sending a telegram.

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“He’s dead. My friend and creditor is dead.” Though he knew such thoughts were unworthy, he couldn’t stop himself from whispering these words. Wonder at his own guilty stroke of good luck outweighed sorrow for his late friend.

3 Four or five friends wearing university uniforms gathered at N’s room in a boardinghouse at Hongō Morikawa-chō. Suzuki had died the day before. That morning the students had accompanied their late friend’s relatives, who’d come to the city from their home in the country, as they delivered his remains to the crematorium at Nippori. They’d just returned and were trying to ignore their hunger in the midday heat. They lay about, exhausted from days of anxiety and apparently lacking the energy to eat right away. “I’m worn out. It’s so hot, I think I might die too,” said the engineering student, O, in a sleepy voice. He’d taken off his jacket and covered his face with a handkerchief, and lay sprawled on his back. “What time does the train leave tomorrow morning?” asked N. “I might just go to the station and then excuse myself. It’d be an imposition if all of us went to the Suzukis’ home. Why don’t we designate someone as our representative?” He took off his shirt and wiped the sweat from under his arms. “I intend to go.” S, the law student who’d said he wanted to punch Shōzaburō, spoke eagerly, soberly. “I wouldn’t mind serving as our representative, but don’t you think we should

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all go? The more of us from Tokyo, the more pleased the Suzukis will be. It would be best for all of us to go.” As they were talking, Shōzaburō, who hadn’t shown himself for more than two months, came in hesitantly, wearing a serious expression. The quick-tempered S made a sour face and looked away. “Excuse me for barging in. It’s been a long time,” Shōzaburō said with a dejected look. His words were a little too polite and apologetic for a group of university students. The others sat up reluctantly and nodded to him without saying anything. The words “It’s been a long time” were not simply an apology for his long silence but also an expression of regret for his recent misconduct. At least this is what Shōzaburō intended. He also wanted to interpret their grudging nods as a sign that his crime was forgiven. “I suppose you got the telegram I sent yesterday,” said N, trying to lighten the gloom. “Yes, thank you. I came today to ask what’s happening. When is the funeral?” “The funeral will be held at his home in the country, S will go to represent us, and the rest of us will accompany the ashes as far as the station. Be at Ueno Station by ten o’clock tomorrow morning.” “Wait a minute, maybe I’ll go to the countryside too,” said O, sitting up straight and speaking as though he’d just remembered something. “You have another reason for wanting to go, don’t you?” said N. “I saw how you were buttering up Suzuki’s little sister at the crematorium this morning. You’re quite the sociable one when it comes to that.”

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O smiled brightly. “But she’s very good-looking! I heard about her while Suzuki was still alive, but I had no idea she was such a beauty. I want to see her in her formal white-silk kimono at the funeral, eyes swollen with tears.” “If that’s the way you feel, you should have said something to Suzuki while he was still alive. I doubt her parents would have turned you down if you wanted to marry her.” “I should have done that. What a pity.” O sounded half serious and a little regretful. “It’s not too late. His family will trust us if we tell them you’re a close friend of her late brother’s. Come to think of it, I’ll go along too, and give you some competition.” “That’s right, that’s right,” said S, with a cheerful laugh. “Both of you should come along to fight over Suzuki’s sister. I’ll be bored, you know, riding the train all alone as your representative.” Talk of women was usually enough to energize Shōzaburō, and normally he would have drowned out everyone else; his mouth was twitching, but this time he listened quietly to the other three. Maybe he thought he was unqualified to compete with the others. His ignoble character wasn’t the only disqualifier; given his circumstances, he lacked the social standing to marry someone like Suzuki’s sister. No one but the daughter of a backstreet beggar would consent to a proposal from Shōzaburō. Thinking this over, he envied the wealth of the other three. His friends may have been joking, but at least they were in the enviable position of being able to dream of marrying a rich farmer’s daughter and building a happy family. If he, like O, N, and S, had been born into a prosperous house and were free to pursue his studies with no

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obstacles, he surely wouldn’t have developed such a base character. If he too were the son of a rich family, he probably wouldn’t have turned into someone who was shunned and despised by his friends. The cause of his relative weakness came down to the question of money. If only he had money, he’d be in no way inferior to them, whether in the breadth of his learning or the quickness of his mind. Indeed, he possessed an artistic genius that they could hardly aspire to. Just wait, Shōzaburō thought. You ostracize me now, but I’m going to do great things. He’d lapsed into a dark, moody silence. Perhaps N noticed this and pitied him, for he abruptly changed the subject and spoke comfortingly. “Speaking of younger sisters, I hear that your sister has been ill for some time. Is she better now?” “No. There’s no hope for her. She won’t last much longer,” said Shōzaburō sadly. Revived by the mention of his sister, he contrived to look concerned and glanced at the other three with pleading eyes, as if to appeal for sympathy. “What’s wrong with her?” asked O, speaking in a friendly way for the first time. “It’s consumption.” As soon as Shōzaburō responded, the joy of setting down a heavy burden glowed in his face. “You spend too much time thinking about your friends’ younger sisters,” interjected N, setting out to make fun of O. “In any case, I hear that Mamuro’s sister is good-looking, unlike her brother. It’s always been true that women who contract consumption are beautiful, so I know that she’s good-looking without even seeing her. She’s fourteen, a pure child of Edo, and apparently very bright too, so she might be

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a better catch than Suzuki’s sister. Why don’t you visit Mamuro’s place and put your famous social skills to work?” “I’ll take a pass on consumption, thank you, no matter how beautiful she may be. I’ll use my social skills when she recovers.” “If she recovers, I’ll make her a geisha, and O can be her patron. She truly is a fine-looking woman. I shouldn’t say so about my own sister, but you won’t often find a face like hers.” Shōzaburō was getting carried away. Surely he’d never before thought of his sister, reduced by illness to skin and bones, as “a rare beauty” or someone he’d “make a geisha.” It was pure nonsense; but by entertaining his friends with this kind of talk, he hoped to dispel their antipathy. “Shall I marry Suzuki’s sister, then, and take Mamuro’s sister as my mistress? Knowing her brother, I’m sure she’d make an exceptionally skillful geisha,” said S, laughing brightly. His gaiety seemed so artless that Mamuro, N, and O all fell over laughing, even though they’d caught the sarcasm in S’s words. And S is the one who wanted to hit me, thought Shōzaburō. If even that hothead is smiling at me now, everything should be all right. Both O and S have forgotten their enmity toward me, thanks to the departed spirit of Suzuki and the living spirit of my dying sister. Success! It seems that human beings can’t hold grudges forever. Having ensnared his three friends, Shōzaburō was delighted at wrapping things up so nicely. Unwilling to let the opportunity slip away, he fired off vulgar jokes and gestures, like a jester at a geisha party, and had his friends holding their sides with laughter.

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“Ha, ha, ha. I haven’t seen Mamuro in a long time,” cried S, “and he’s still the funny one, isn’t he?” He imitated the praise that a party guest might use with a professional entertainer. In response, Shōzaburō assumed the manner of an entertainer as he said, in an odd, tremulous voice, “By the bye, I haven’t had lunch yet. How would it be if you treated me to  some beef? I’m awfully hungry . . .” He studied N’s expression. “There you go again, demanding to be fed. You don’t have to look so pathetic, you know.” “But if you’re going to feed me, I’d rather not have boardinghouse food. Come on, treat me to some beef. I haven’t had meat for two or three days, and I’m longing for beef. Some beer would be nice too.” “Ha, ha, ha! All right, I feel like some beer now too. Hey, N! Mamuro’s thirsty. Why don’t you splurge and get a half dozen bottles?” Shōzaburō’s delivery was so amusing that S and O burst out laughing instead of getting angry. It seemed that their memories of his odious conduct were fading, even as their contempt for him grew. “Mamuro’s a good-natured fellow when you get to know him. He’s not a bad person at heart; it’s just that no one trusts him anymore because he’s so blasé and careless. He’s a pathetic character, when you think about it. If you’re careful not to lend him money, he’s fun to be around.” They seemed to be trying to think of Shōzaburō in these terms. For his part, Shōzaburō had no desire to form a deeper association with them than that. He wasn’t one to place much value on friendship. Knowing that he was constitutionally

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selfish, immoral, and unsociable, he never dreamed of cultivating a kindred spirit among his friends. He never felt the urge to reveal his inner thoughts or speak seriously with anyone. To put it more succinctly, he felt no need to interact seriously with his friends. Of course a serious side lay concealed in his heart of hearts. In the future, when his genius matured, this side might be manifested in the form of art—poetry, fiction, or painting; but it wasn’t something he wanted to talk about glibly. He was always vaguely aware of the artistic impulses smoldering in his breast, but when he saw a friend’s face, he didn’t feel like contributing anything to the conversation beyond vulgar jokes. When he came face to face with another person, the wonders that swirled deep inside his head lost their radiance, leaving only the superficial, frivolous, dishonest, and lewd aspects to flourish. As such times, he thought of himself as a base human being and lost his pride, his sense of honor as a man. Aside from myself, no one, including my friends, can influence or affect me very much. We simply stay in contact—superficially, perfunctorily, no more than that. I think neither of praying for their happiness nor of using them to promote myself. How much do veneration and respect from such people affect my worth? How much do they enhance my artistic gifts? Shōzaburō was incapable of greater intimacy than this toward his friends, or toward anyone else in society. Among the relationships that form between people, only romantic love was important to him. Since this love resided only in the admiration of a beautiful woman’s body, it was no more than a sensual pleasure, like wearing beautiful clothing or eating beautiful food; it wasn’t a love directed at his companion’s

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character or spirit. Even if he were to drown in romantic love and throw his life away, it’d probably amount to self-sacrifice for the sake of his own pleasure, not for the benefit of his lover. Accordingly, not only did he lack such moral sentiments as kindness, universal love, filial piety, and friendship, but he also couldn’t understand the psychology of those who were capable of these feelings. He wasn’t necessarily a misanthropist, however. Though he had a low opinion of humanity, he loved to drink with people, buy women with them, and tell jokes. He’d be overcome with loneliness if he went for ten or twelve days without seeing a friend’s face. A contemplative spirit that longed for a tranquil, solitary life coexisted in his heart with a jester’s disposition, in love with the lights of a flowery banquet. When he failed to repay a friend and could no longer show his face in public, he’d confine himself for a time in his room at Hatchōbori or set out on an aimless trip. At such times he fancied himself a very great man. When the term of a debt expired and the lingering embers of disrepute cooled off, he’d suddenly feel the urge to see N or O and set out nonchalantly for their rooming house, where he’d unashamedly press for sukiyaki or join them in hiring geisha. And so it was that he derived great pleasure from his friends’ calling him a “joker” and celebrating him as “an easygoing fellow” and “a wit,” and from being prized like an indispensable entertainer at drinking parties. As a result, the relationship between him and his friends came to no more than that of drinking buddies. When now and then a friend would overestimate his character and seek a closer friendship, Shōzaburō would feel put upon. When he baldly and audaciously stated what he wanted from

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a friend, his underlying attitude was, in a nutshell, “I have a self-centered, untrustworthy nature, and people who dislike it shouldn’t associate with me. But in exchange for my negligence, I’m a good talker and I have a certain childlike appeal, and people who find this amusing should take my unreliability into account when they associate with me.”

J At ten o’clock the next morning, Suzuki’s remains turned to ashes, were placed in a jar that seemed too small to hold the remnants of a human being, and were carried from Ueno Station to his hometown. The nearly fifty students who gathered to see him off stood on the platform by the train windows. “Thank you for your many kindnesses to my son during his lifetime. Today, as well, you have come a great distance to say good-bye. We are very grateful to you.” Suzuki’s father went from student to student, greeting each one with sincere, countrified eloquence. The deceased’s younger sister, the one rumored to be a beauty, came bowing modestly after her father. Shōzaburō too was greeted by Suzuki’s father and sister. When the words “Thank you for your many kindnesses” were addressed to him, he felt that the customary response of “Not at all” would be insufficient. Adding, “It is I who should thank you,” he glanced uncomfortably at the little jar. Among the fifty students were some whom Shōzaburō had wronged so grievously that he supposed they might assault him if he met them on the street; but out of respect

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for the deceased, none of them sought to humiliate him. Suddenly he felt as though he’d been cleared of all charges. It would seem that Suzuki continued to show mercy to him, even in death.

4 The continual rains that marked the onset of the wet season paused, the late-afternoon sky grew perfectly clear, and the western sun glared through the window of the upstairs room. Sprawled on the floor as usual with his limbs outstretched, drenched in sweat as he indulged in a nap, Shōzaburō was wakened by creaking footfalls on the stairs. “I’d like to put her in the hospital too, but there’s no money. You can’t get around that.” Speaking in a husky whisper, Shōzaburō’s father came into the room. Behind him came Shōzaburō’s mother, bathed in tears and sobbing convulsively. She’s trying to persuade him again, Shōzaburō thought sleepily. Whenever they needed to discuss something without the invalid’s hearing them, his parents would creep upstairs and whisper to each other. “That’s why we should go to the people at Nihombashi for help. Everyone’ll think we’re heartless if we don’t at least put her in the hospital when it’s a matter of life and death.” She spoke in a saccharine, nasal voice, like a teenaged girl, and bit her sleeve pitifully to muffle her sobs. In her sorrow at the thought of losing her only daughter, she was beside herself and not thinking straight.

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“That’s how you always talk. What’s heartless about it? We’re doing everything we can for O-tomi, aren’t we?” Though his words were harsh at first, the father abruptly lowered his voice, and his eyes were shadowed as if he were witnessing something ominous and appalling. He tried to comfort her. “It might be reasonable to put her in the hospital if there were a chance for recovery, even if we had to borrow money for it, but it’s no use when we know she’s not going to get better. Anyway, the doctor said that in her condition he couldn’t be sure she’ll last through the rainy season. It’s sad for her, but there’s nothing more we can do. There, there; this is the girl’s fate, all of it; you need to resign yourself to that.” The mother responded by shaking her head like a spoiled child. “Even if she’s not going to recover, I won’t resign myself to anything unless we put her in the hospital and have a good doctor examine her. When the Kawamuras’ little Teru was dying, didn’t they go straight to the people in Nihombashi and have him admitted to the Juntendō Hospital? You must be the most . . . the most heartless father in the world to abandon your child, saying she’s not going to recover.” “Who’s abandoning her? We’re not abandoning her. We have Dr. Yoshikawa come to the house every day, and we’ve done everything we can do.” “What does that quack know?” “Don’t talk such foolishness! Yoshikawa’s a fine doctor, and everyone in the neighborhood respects him! You don’t know what you’re talking about.” Losing his temper, the father began shouting, but then, perhaps feeling sorry for his wife, he softened his voice and reasoned with her patiently.

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“Dr. Yoshikawa has been seeing O-tomi since she was little. There’s no telling how much better off we are to stick with him than to rely on some ordinary doctor. He said positively that she won’t recover, no matter what doctor we take her to, so O-tomi is completely out of luck. Of course, if you’re going to be unreasonable, you can talk about sending her to the university hospital or asking that famous Dr. Aoyama to examine her—there’s no end to what you could ask for, but in fact it just amounts to spending money to comfort yourself, even though you know she’s not going to get better. It doesn’t make sense for poor people like us to scrape money together and imitate the Kawamuras.” O-tomi’s voice floated up from the sickroom below. “Mother, Mother.” Her mother reluctantly broke off the conference and hastily wiped the tears from the corners of her eyes. “There! O-tomi gets anxious when we come up here. Go on down to her now. And don’t look so sad, it’s not proper!” “Mother? Mother! I get lonely when everybody goes upstairs.” “Okay, okay, I’ll be right there.” O-tomi’s mother was still sniffling as she went down the steps. “Hey, Shōzaburō! Napping again! Get up, get up, I said!” Following his wife toward the stairs, Shōzaburō’s father couldn’t keep quiet when he saw his son’s lazy figure. Poor Father. Attacked by his wife, disdained by his son, and about to lose his daughter. What an unlucky old man. These thoughts ran through Shōzaburō’s mind as he feigned sleep, but all his compassion evaporated the moment he felt another kick in the behind. The recumbent son and the kicking father

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competed briefly to see who could hold out longer, but when the warm sole of his father’s bare foot happened to stick to his thigh, the contact gave Shōzaburō a creepy, shuddery feeling. Unable to take any more, he finally raised his head. “You say you don’t sleep in the daytime, but what are you doing now? You have a lot of nerve.” His father glared as he berated his son breathlessly. Unsatisfied, he added, “If you have time to take a nap, then you can go fetch O-tomi’s medicine from Dr. Yoshikawa. She doesn’t have any for tonight, so go right now. You never do anything to help your sick little sister.” “And you’ve never contributed a penny to your son’s tuition,” Shōzaburō said under his breath, imitating his father’s way of speaking. Climbing to the second floor again the next day, the father and mother continued their argument, crying, bristling, and scolding. If they couldn’t send O-tomi to the hospital, said the mother, she wanted to hire a nurse or a maid. “I’ve put up with it quietly because I feel sorry for O-tomi, but everything’s been left to me alone, from the kitchen to caring for O-tomi, and I just can’t bear it. When I speak up, your only thought is to make it harder for me, saying we’re poor and there’s no help for it.” Puffing out her cheeks, she repeated her usual cutting remarks, while the father listened quietly, sighing helplessly with his arms crossed. His wife’s habitual way of thinking—her willfulness and extravagance—had not changed with time, and he seemed to have run out of patience. If they’re going to quarrel all the time, they should have gotten a divorce long ago. The way they are, they’re just going to get poorer and poorer. Watching from the sidelines, Shōzaburō saw both

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humor and pity in the situation. To his disinterested eyes, it wasn’t only his father’s inadequacy that had led his mother into her current difficulties. If he were in his father’s position, he’d probably want to say to her, “It’s your fault; you dragged us both into poverty.” Perhaps his father was actually the smarter one, simply because he restrained himself from saying this. His mother was always complaining that she had to do everything herself, “from the kitchen to caring for O-tomi,” but actually she was lazy and had never made her own breakfast. In fact, she didn’t know how to make breakfast. “You think the wife of a household can get by without cooking rice?” When the father spoke to her this way, she’d respond with a rebellious look. “I’m not handy with things,” she’d say, looking aside with a pout. “I never thought I’d end up in poverty like this and be forced to cook rice!” When the father dragged himself home from work in the evening, he’d tie up his sleeves, go into the kitchen, and wash the rice. In the morning, he’d rise while his wife, son, and daughter were still asleep and blow into the stove through a bamboo tube to start a fire. When he’d transferred the cooked rice from the pot to a bowl and heated the miso soup, the mother would finally emerge wearily from her quilts. When he’d finished these chores, the father would gulp down his breakfast, pack his own lunchbox, and rush off to his employer’s shop. He’d been employed for four or five years as the head clerk of a freight company in Echizenbori. Thus the father and mother seemed to be destined to live out their lives in destitution and misery, hoping only to get through each day without incident. The husband lacked the strength to control his wife, she lacked the determination to

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spur him on, and neither of them had a plan to escape their predicament. Every day they bewailed their misfortune and went on with their unlovely lives, neither exerting themselves nor committing suicide. Do life’s tribulations have to be so dreadful as this? Is it always this hard to live without starving? When I go out into the world, will I have to endure the same suffering and distress as my parents? Watching his family, Shōzaburō couldn’t help pondering his future. Though he despised his mother’s selfishness and his father’s lack of spirit, he couldn’t deny that he was their son and that he’d inherited their weaknesses. I have exceptional talent. While he believed this, he’d loaf whenever he could— napping, chattering, drinking, and womanizing, without making any attempt to cultivate his talent. More indolent and vain than his mother, even more spiritless than his father, he was a weak-willed, indecisive man. If he went on dawdling like this, he’d inevitably sink into the same pitiful fate as his parents. Not only was this his inevitable future: he felt as though he was already sinking from one moment to the next. I have to do something soon. If I’m going to make a name for myself, I have to do it before it’s too late. At times Shōzaburō would get alarmed and feel desperate. Suddenly rousing himself, he’d hide in the library at Ueno or the university, where he’d sit at a table for two or three days, clutching a pen, with writing paper spread out before him; but long periods of dissipation had left his mind as dull and listless as a stone. Whether reading or writing, he couldn’t concentrate for five minutes. No sooner had he settled down at a table and begun to work than he’d drift into rambling thoughts of women, the fragrance of fine liquor, and countless other

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morbid, fantastical pleasures. It amounted to dreaming while he was awake. Whether he was asleep or not, and without the benefit of opium or hashish, visions of a witch performing a weird dance, or the scene of a gory crime, or a magician’s bizarre performance would flicker in turn before his eyes, then vanish. As the functioning of his mind slackened, his neurasthenia worsened. Symptoms like forgetfulness, talking to himself, rage, and obstinacy would torment him repeatedly in the course of a day. The obsession that had occupied his brain since Suzuki’s death attacked his nerves more fiercely with each passing day. I don’t know when I might die. I could drop dead at any moment. When his thoughts turned in this direction, Shōzaburō was sometimes paralyzed with fear. From his terror of death came a hypersensitivity to any sudden illness. Cerebral hyperemia, cerebral hemorrhage, heart failure—every few hours, the suspicion arose in him that these catastrophes were about to strike, and his entire body would go numb. Feeling a sudden pain in his chest while he was walking on the street, he’d run madly for five or six blocks; riding the trolley, he’d get dizzy and jump off in a panic; throwing off his quilts at night, he’d rush down the stairs and splash water in his face. Shōzaburō was so agitated by terror that it seemed he must lose his mind. He’d go pale and tremble all night, holding his head and breast in his arms. Then, when he saw the sunlight at dawn, he’d feel reassured and sleep soundly until noon. He had no idea whom to consult or how to escape the clutches of this cruel illness. It seemed unlikely, to say the  least, that his disease could be treated with everyday

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medications. “Please, Doctor, help me. I live in terror. I’m dying.” There was little that a physician could do in response to his cry of despair. “What are you afraid of? There’s nothing wrong with your body. Don’t worry; you’re not going to die. There, there, it’s all right.” The most he could hope for was that the doctor would cross his arms impotently and offer a few words of comfort. If, on the other hand, the physician was unusually perceptive—perceptive enough to see not only physical sickness but also spiritual sicknesses that hide under the flesh— then he’d no doubt smile coldly and say, “Aha, this is a grave illness, but it’s nothing a physician can cure. Since childhood you’ve worn down your soul by indulging in unnatural lusts, and now you’re feeling the consequences. I know very well what kind of person you are. You were born with a defective spirit. Both medicine and God have abandoned you. I’m sorry, but there’s nothing I can do to save you.” The doctor would pronounce this verdict with a look of annoyance. But Shōzaburō knew the source of his illness better than anyone else and was not inclined to go in search of a physician just to hear the verdict. His only response to his illness was to relive the feelings of despair and anguish again and again. He heard his conscience whisper, “Your suffering is heaven’s punishment, the punishment that anyone must receive who lives in defiance of heaven. A person like you who audaciously tries to live in defiance of heaven will end up insane. Are you sure you don’t want to mend your ways?” He responded to the whisper this way: “Who gave birth to me as a person that must live in defiance of heaven? Who endowed me with

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this grotesque nature, which keeps me from appreciating goodness and only allows me to take beautiful, wicked deeds seriously? I don’t recall receiving heaven’s punishment for my immorality!” One way or another, he must resist this unjust punishment from heaven. He couldn’t willingly put up with the whips of chastisement wielded by the gods above. He wanted to live as fully as he could, warding off the terror of death that advanced on him like a tsunami. Yes, his circumstances were miserable; but the world into which he was born seemed to brim with an abundance of pleasures taught by the devil. He wanted to live on and just once immerse his body and his senses in a sea of the poisoned wine of pleasure. Just as an inveterate drinker values every drop in his cup, he wanted to savor a few more sips of fine liquor. Having accepted that there was no way to thoroughly treat his illness, he strove only to forget, even for a moment, that accursed suffering. When he felt the onset of terror, whether at night or in the daytime or in the middle of the street or on a trolley, he’d frantically take a drink. If he got drunk immediately, his nerves would settle down, even at the most terrifying moments, and his body would stop shaking. He knew that this temporary expedient would only make his condition worse, but he had no time to think of the future when relief lay before his eyes. If you drink, there’s nothing to fear. —This superstition gradually came to possess him. Liquor was more essential than food to sustain his life peacefully from day to day. In particular, he’d lie sleepless at night if he failed to drink a certain amount before going to bed. When he had money, he’d

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buy a small bottle of whiskey and hide it in the folds of his kimono whenever he went out. When he ran out of money, he’d greedily drink anything that contained alcohol. Now and then he’d evade his parents’ eyes and steal ten sen from a drawer in the hibachi to spend on cheap Okinawan rice wine. He’d even scrounge around the kitchen in the middle of the night until he found the cooking sake, which he’d then drink up, straight from the bottle. “I was wondering why we ran out of cooking sake so fast. I think Shōzaburō must be drinking it at night. I’m sure of it,” his mother said to his father one day. “But that stuff’s undrinkable. He’s a fool to drink it,” said the father, only half believing his ears. “It doesn’t matter. Hide the bottle someplace tonight. He’ll ruin his health drinking that stuff.” When Shōzaburō came to search the kitchen again that night, the cooking sake was nowhere to be found. Suspecting the truth, he peeked through a hole in the shoji into the sitting room and saw a bottle at his father’s pillow, next to the tobacco tray. Lying on either side of O-tomi’s sickbed, his parents were fast asleep, one snoring, the other with her mouth agape. Strangely enough, both his worrywart father and his crybaby mother had always been ridiculously sound sleepers. Keeping an eye on the breathing of his sister, who day and night lay face up like a recumbent marble statue, Shōzaburō was able to make off with the bedside bottle. Hiding in the toilet, he gulped it down, making a face at the foul smell. Five or six nights later, aiming for a time when the family would be asleep, Shōzaburō came down the creaking stairs again and surveyed the sitting room, which was vaguely illuminated by

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the light of a lamp; but the bottle no longer sat at his father’s pillow. “So they’ve hidden it someplace else,” he muttered. Standing blankly in the center of the room, he peered down at the three sleeping figures. As always, his father emitted an awesome snore, and his mother’s mouth was wide open. The sight of them sleeping there peacefully seemed to him as heartrending as seeing a sick traveler lying unattended at the roadside. He gazed at his parents’ faces, feeling that he’d not looked at them closely in years. His father slept peacefully, his bony, hairy shins protruding from the skirt of his dusty, ragged silk nightwear, and his insteps, like wilted petals, turned to the ceiling. His cheeks were so sunken that the eye sockets and teeth were visible through the skin. He looked more like the corpse of someone who’d starved to death than like a sleeping man. Shōzaburō’s mother lay with one knee raised and her arms outstretched; her pale, plump flesh lay exposed to her breast, comparatively unaffected by poverty, thanks to her strong constitution. The more deeply they slept, the more Shōzaburō felt sorry for them. Exhausted by a full day of work and anxiety, they had nothing to rely on but a good night’s sleep in what remained of their ruined lives; their quiet lips and eyelids didn’t flash with the angry looks or resound with the abusive language that they directed at Shōzaburō during the day. It was as if the old couple prostrated themselves at their child’s feet and begged for his compassion and help. “Shōzaburō, please save us. You’re our son, aren’t you? In the whole world, there’s no one but you who can help us. Please take pity on us. Please mend your ways and be devoted to your parents.” Their disjointed breathing, like

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gasps at the pain of the hard world, sounded to him like pleas. Why did he treat these sorrowful people unkindly; why did he detest them? Why did he rebel against such wretched parents? Shōzaburō felt a lump in his throat. “I must be the most wicked person in the world. I’m a complete immoralist. I’m a man forsaken by both heaven and the gods. Mother, Father, please forgive me.” He pressed his hands together spontaneously. “You’ve come to drink the cooking sake, haven’t you?” He’d thought O-tomi was asleep, but at some point she’d awoken and fixed her crystalline eyes on him. “They hid it carefully, so you won’t find it, wherever you look. Why do you go on this way, when they tell you not to drink it? They can’t leave anything lying around, because a huge mouse with black hair shows up in the kitchen almost every night.” The sick girl made this sardonic remark in her weak, faint voice as she wheezed over the phlegm caught in her throat. For a long time, Shōzaburō stood stock-still, as though terrified, and glared into the sick girl’s expressionless, transparent eyes; but then his long-suppressed hatred erupted. “You little smarty pants, no more of your lip!” Feeling uncomfortable, he spoke softly. “What’s the matter with you? For an invalid who can’t even stand up, you mouth off too much, always giving me a hard time! When I don’t scold you, out of pity, you get all puffed up and conceited. I don’t need you telling me what to do. Be quiet and keep to yourself. At any rate, a sick person like you . . .” Shocked at the cruelty of what he was about to say, Shōzaburō finished evasively, “should forget about poking your nose into other people’s business and try not to be a burden. Idiot!”

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The invalid said nothing further. In the hushed, muggy room, late at night, her expressionless eyes were riveted icily on Shōzaburō. To him they seemed to say, “I understand very well the meaning of the words you held back. At any rate, I’m going to die soon.”

5 Around that time, Shōzaburō, a masochist, found a prostitute who acceded to all his demands. Resorting to every means he could think of to raise funds for his dissipation, he went to meet her almost every day at a bordello in Kakigara-chō. Naturally he used the “tuition and textbooks” money that he extracted from his relatives in Nihombashi; he also resumed duping the friends with whom he’d been at pains to improve relations and in the end sold off the books he’d borrowed, all for the purpose of visiting the woman at her place on a street behind the Suitengū shrine. Held prisoner in turns by intense fear and intense pleasure, he tumbled into a chasm of unconscious delirium. He’d stay away from home for three or four days, then come back to Hatchōbori at one or two o’clock in the morning. Rendered as limp as a wad of cotton by fatigue and the effects of cheap sake, he’d pound on the rain shutters and waken his parents. “What do you mean, coming home at this hour? Don’t you realize that banging on the shutters like that scares O-tomi? You’re not a parent and you’re not a child; someone like you

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can just go away; go wherever you want. Don’t come back here again.” Hearing his father’s shouts coming from inside, Shōzaburō pounded the boards all the more furiously, and he’d go on kicking until the exasperated old man finally came to slide the door open. “I told you to go away. Are you just going to stand there? Why don’t you go?” No sooner had he opened the door than he grabbed the front of Shōzaburō’s kimono and struck him on the side of the head—his usual response. “Father, Father! That’s enough. Think of the neighbors.” The mother came between them, her voice choked with emotion. “Shōzaburō! Don’t just stand there; say you’re sorry!” “Damn you! Are you still here?” The father’s eyes glistened with tears and his voice quavered as he struck his son on the head, again and again. Still, Shōzaburō didn’t apologize. He stood like a post, holding his head up doggedly, until his mother took hold of his father’s flailing arms and finally dragged him inside. It actually felt good—like some sort of excruciating pleasure—to have his head, numbed by night after night of malignant stimulation, pummeled until his eyes swam.

J At the end of June, after days of continuous rain, the sky was unusually clear for once. Shōzaburō’s sister, whose condition had grown critical in the past four or five days, called to her father, who was about to leave for work at seven o’clock in the morning. “Papa, I’m so lonely today, please don’t go out, stay

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with me. Please, Papa,” she pleaded. Her voice was uncustomarily sad. The girl whom Shōzaburō rebuked for impertinence had lost her spirit and reverted to the foolishness of a six- or seven-year-old child. Afraid to be alone at night, she slept in her father’s scrawny arms. She seemed to believe that she wouldn’t die as long as her father held her. “Father, O-tomi says she’s lonely. Why don’t you take the day off for her sake?” the mother said, taking up her daughter’s plea and signaling to him with her eyes. “All right, Papa will stay home with you all day today,” he said gently, untying his work apron. Shōzaburō, who’d been at the brothel in Kakigara-chō since the evening before, woke to the noon cannon. The woman was no longer in the room. O-tomi might die tonight. The thought came to him suddenly, fixed itself in his mind, and spread hazily like a swarm of flies. The “premonitions” and “vague apprehensions” that people speak of must refer to a sensation like this, he thought. It even seemed to him to be an indisputable fact, already known to everyone, that his sister would die tonight. Though he’d never been as concerned as an older brother should be about his sister’s illness, they were, after all, blood relatives, and the thought of a “premonition” was unsettling. He didn’t want to believe that their relationship was that deep. Around one o’clock in the afternoon, he settled his bill and left the assignation house, determined to spend his remaining two yen, one way or another, before the day was out. A drink, a drink. If I just have a drink, this vague apprehension will subside. He casually passed through the shop curtain

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of a beer hall in Ningyō-chō. Downing glasses of whiskey and sake, one after another, he finished off three plates of Western food. It was so hot it burned his tongue. When he finally stepped outside, feeling pleasantly tipsy, the sun scorched the back of his neck like the breath of a drunken whore. He felt so dizzy that he almost lost his balance, but the apprehension was gone. “Now I’ll go to Asakusa. I’ll see a motion picture at Asakusa, and then I’ll go home. That’ll be fun,” he shouted to no one in particular.

J It was about nine o’clock that evening when Shōzaburō returned to the house at Hatchōbori. As he slid open the lattice door, his mother called tearfully, “Is that you, Shōzaburō? Come quickly, come quickly.” His parents and Nihombashi relatives, both men and women, were packed into the six-mat room, enduring the muggy heat and their greasy perspiration, seated in a circle around the sick girl’s bed. “O-tomi-chan, O-tomi-chan, your brother is here.” O-yō spoke into the patient’s ear. Since she was soon to be married, O-yō’s hair was done up in a splendid Takashimada chignon. “But it’s strange, isn’t it?” said the mother, wiping her red eyes. “Shōzaburō is always late, but today he came home early.” The patient seemed to be able to hear everything clearly, but she couldn’t say a word; maybe her lips had already gone stiff. She simply raised her eyes like an intelligent dog and peered at Shōzaburō’s face.

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O-tomi, O-tomi, how can you glare at me like that? he thought, but did not say out loud. I was just letting off steam when I scolded you the other day. Please don’t glare at me that way. Forgive me. I’m your brother, aren’t I? I had a premonition today. He sighed heavily. His breath stank of alcohol. “Father, let’s ask Dr. Yoshikawa to give her another injection,” said the mother. “We can ask him, but it won’t change anything. Shōzaburō has come home and everyone else is here, so there will be no regrets. Trying so hard to keep her alive would actually be sad for her.” A twitching smile showed on the father’s lips as he spoke. A wretched, breathless, agonizing hour passed in silence. Suddenly, the patient’s lips wriggled gently, like a squirming slug. “Mother, I have to take a poo. Can I do it here?” “Oh, yes, yes, of course.” The mother readily agreed to her child’s last bit of willfulness. For a time, the patient fully regained consciousness and spoke haltingly to the people around her. “It’s so stupid, dying at fourteen or fifteen. . . . But it doesn’t hurt or anything. Is dying such an easy thing as this? . . . ” Everyone strained to listen, as if attending to a philosopher’s lecture. This was the voice of the spirit about to take leave of the flesh. When it was over, the patient stopped breathing. “A sick person usually hiccups when they die, but this child didn’t hiccup at all. They always do it on the stage,” the father said doubtfully as he watched the end. The body was still moving slightly. The shoulder muscles stirred and stiffened, and the pale tongue lolled from between the lips like a faded

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purple leaf. The mother began to wail noisily and shamelessly; but then, admonished by the father, she bit her sleeve and collapsed beside the corpse.

J Two months later, Shōzaburō entered the world of letters with the publication of a short story he had written. The tenor of his work differed completely from that of naturalist fiction, which was in vogue at the time. His was a sweet, aromatic art that drew its material from the strange nightmares fermenting in his brain.

3. The Story of an Unhappy Mother Translated by Paul McCarthy

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he story of an unhappy mother— or the story of an unhappy mother-in-law would do as well. There are plenty of examples in our society of mothers-in-law mistreating their sons’ brides. It often happens that a lady who has been a fine wife and mother reveals an unexpected mean streak when she becomes a mother-inlaw, seemingly turning into an entirely different person. My own mother certainly changed radically after my elder brother brought his bride to live with us. His marriage marked a great turning point in her life. In that respect, it can’t be denied that Mother had within her the proverbial mother-in-law’s temperament. She died some four or five years ago, and my brother died shortly after— exactly one year after, to be precise. It seems clear to me now that there was a frightening connection between these two deaths. In a sense, one might say that it was my brother who killed my mother, and that it was my mother who killed my brother. His manner of death, in particular, was not of an ordinary sort. When I put things this way, the reader might think that my mother was a demon mother-in-law, and that my brother

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was an unfilial son who thoroughly abused her. But, dear reader, for the sake of both my mother and my brother, I beg you not to interpret what I write in such a way. If I led you to think that for even a minute, I would feel even more sorry for the two who have passed on than I already do. My mother was not some sort of demon: she had been a chaste wife to her husband and a kind and loving mother to her children. Nor was my elder brother unfilial: as a husband, he gave his wife his passionate love, and as a son, he served his mother with great warmth and consideration. That things should have come to such a painful pass was fated—that’s the only way I can explain it. And yet, I am inclined to be more sympathetic to Mother. There was a reason—from her point of view, a fully sufficient reason—that someone of her gentle disposition should have changed so completely, if one follows the sequence of events. But on the other hand, if I had been my brother and encountered the same situation he encountered, would I, in fact, have been able to act in a better way than he did? I’d like to say that I would have been able to—I wish I had the courage to say that decisively. If I didn’t say so, then Mother’s resentment would extend to me as well, I feel sure. It fills me with painful regret that I don’t really have the courage to say so decisively. Then I feel the voice of conscience cry out within me, Oh, Mother, forgive me! I’m afraid I’m the same kind of man my elder brother was. . . . And the more strongly I sense that inner voice, the more clearly the sorrowful image of Mother before her death appears before me. The image of Mother before her death—it was truly sorrowful, as I have said. Mother’s whole person, her very

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existence, was as sorrowful as the saddest music. I doubt that even she herself was aware of how deep her sorrow was. Or even if there were moments when she was somehow aware of it, no doubt she did her best to avoid it. For if she had not done so, her fragile spirit and body would surely have been unable to bear the weight of that sorrow. I said earlier that my brother’s marriage was a turning point that made Mother a different person from before. And truly, it was from then on that she began to make such an enduringly sad impression on us all. Up to then, she had never been a melancholy sort of woman. The loneliness of her latter years remains so firmly lodged in my memory that I tend to forget about how she had been before; but as I recall her in the old days, she had been a gay and lively person. I remember how when people spoke of “the widow of the Tokioka family,” they all said she led “such an enviably relaxed and happy life.” “Auntie Tokioka,” “that good-humored, sociable widow,” “always so healthy, youthful, and fun to be with.” The women and children among our relatives felt close to her, and even the merchants who came to the house with their wares flattered her to the skies. She could be quite difficult and demanding when it came to the servants, so she may not have been so well thought of by them; but in the world at large, everyone made a great fuss over her. And being treated so well by so many people obviously made her immensely happy. Her smiling face at such times was that of a perfectly happy, fortunate person. “A healthy, talkative, somewhat vain lady, with showy tastes in clothing and the like; and yet very fragile and easily moved to tears”—that about sums Mother up as she was then. Her tearfulness was a bit comical, in fact. The smallest things could

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easily move her to tears of happiness or sadness. And so her tears were no more than lovely, charming things—visible guarantees of her fundamental happiness at the time. When Father, her husband, died, Mother clung to his body and cried her heart out, like a child. Yet all of our relatives urged her “not to lose heart”: they were not excessively worried about her; and fortunately her sorrow at the time did not leave too great an emotional scar afterward. Father had been suffering from stomach cancer for a year, and everyone knew it was the end. He had left sufficient savings that the family could continue to live comfortably, and Mother was resigned to what was to come. Thus, the fact of “her husband’s death” naturally caused her grief, but not to an extreme extent. I myself was just about to graduate from middle school, and my elder brother was a year or two away from getting his bachelor’s degree. My brother and our fourteen-year-old sister and I all did our best to console Mother, distracting her from her grief by taking her to the theater or on short sightseeing trips. And our relatives too invited her to go out with them whenever the opportunity presented itself. Mother loved the theater and was quite a connoisseur when it came to kabuki plays based on Jōruri puppet dramas and the special vocal and instrumental music that accompanied them. And so she was able to forget the sad fact of “her husband’s death” before too long. Later on, it was only when she went to our family temple once a year on the anniversary of Father’s death and listened to the priest reciting the sutras that she would recall her grief and start to cry. And her tears then meant no more than that Mother was a person with tenderness and depth of

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character. Surrounded by filial children, treated with great consideration by her relatives, this “happy widow” had nothing in her daily life to cry about, and so she would go to the theater to see sad plays and cry a little there. “Mama, you really are a crybaby, you know.” When our younger sister would tease her like this, she would say, “But the play really was sad,” and dab at her slightly reddened eyes with a handkerchief, smiling through her tears. Mother began putting on a little weight after Father’s death, contrary to what one might have expected. And her complexion, which had always been good, became even more so. With a little more flesh on her white, healthy-looking body, she looked much younger than she was. She was the mother of five children, but there was nothing of the frail-looking or aging widow about her. She had, unfortunately, lost her husband, but it was clear that she wanted to live a good long time, see her children well settled in life, and enjoy the sight of grandchildren and all the other pleasures of old age. Not only did she think that way, but she said so to anyone who would listen. Just talking about it made her look happy. As for “growing old” or “dying”—there were no subjects she hated more. She continued to dye her hair even as she approached fifty. There was a story that became quite a joke among the family and relatives, and which shows how very much she was terrified of “death.” One day she happened to eat a pickled plum just after eating an eel dish. After two or three hours, she began to feel pains in her stomach. Then she turned deadly pale and began to raise a ruckus. We had to call the doctor and spread her futon on the floor so she could take to her bed like someone suffering from a grave illness. Then we had to

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send a telegram to our elder brother, who was traveling in Chiba, and summon him home. Finally, all of us siblings had to sit by her bedside in formal attendance. The doctor came at a run to examine her and, after hearing the reason for being called, wrote out a prescription of some sort just to set her mind at rest, biting his lips all the while to keep from laughing. “Doctor, do you really think I’ll be all right? I’m not going to die, am I?” “No, you’ll be just fine. Just fine.” He gazed with a kind of pained wonder into her desperately pleading eyes, kept on reassuring her that all would be well, and finally took his leave. After he had left, Mother said with great resentment, “He’s a cold one, that doctor!” The doctor was merely resented, but I was not so lucky. Knowing it was all a lot of foolishness, I fled her sickroom as soon as the doctor came and went to a nearby friend’s house for an hour’s conversation. Mother was not best pleased by that, to say the least. As soon as she saw me return to her sickroom, she stared at me, her eyes full of tears. “Hiroshi, you needn’t stay here. . . . Everyone else is staying by my side out of fears for my health, but if you’re so bound and determined to amuse yourself, why, go anywhere you please! You’re no child of mine, it seems. . . .” She said this quietly, in a trembling, thickly nasal voice, and at the same time, tears poured down her cheeks. And yet by this time her stomach pains had stopped and her spirits revived. I was completely bewildered by this attitude of hers, but the more I thought about it, the more comical it came to seem. “Now, Mother, be serious. Nobody dies just from eating a pickled plum together with eel. If you scold me so over something like this, you’ll be the laughingstock of the family!”

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“No, you’re quite wrong there. Terrible things can happen from mistakes like that. People have always said that eel and pickled plums are a dangerous combination. You’re making fun of me, but what would you have done if I’d died from it?” “But you didn’t die, did you, Mother?” “No, I didn’t. I was lucky enough to be saved this time, but what if I had? With you gallivanting around that way, you might have missed your mother’s death!” “Well, but if you had been really ill, I would have stayed home. I knew right away that it wasn’t anything serious. The doctor said you’d be fine, after all. And look at you now. . . .” “No, that won’t do. It won’t do, I tell you. You may think it was nothing to worry about, but you never know when a person is going to die. And even if I didn’t die, there I was, worrying if I would live or die, and you go and leave the house— outrageous, I call it. I’m trying to tell you that you lack normal human sympathy. And if that’s the case, then I worry about what’ll happen when I really am very ill. . . .” By this time, Mother was all excited again and began to cry. “No, it was very bad of me. I don’t want you to think I lack normal human sympathy, but I did go out because I thought from the beginning that there was nothing to worry about. If that was wrong of me, I sincerely apologize—I really do, Mother.” I felt I was trying to humor a fretful child as I said this, but then looked into Mother’s face as she blinked back her tears and decided to assume a very serious tone in order to win her over: “Well, thank God it turned out to be nothing serious. Is your stomach feeling all right now?”

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“Yes, thanks. It seems to be pretty much back to normal now. . . .” Mother seemed a little embarrassed at this point, and my younger sister and the maids, who had been holding it in for some time now, finally started to laugh. “Well, it’s good that you’ve recovered, but you really are the nervous type, Mama, making such a hullabaloo about dying right away over something like that!” said my younger sister. “But listen: I wouldn’t be able to give you a little scolding after I’d died even if I wanted to, now would I?” At that, everyone burst out laughing, and even Mother was forced to give a laugh as she finished off with: “It’s really no laughing matter, and you’re all wrong to treat it that way. As it turned out, we can laugh it off, but I’m not sure what might happen someday. . . .” As she spoke, it turned into a kind of excuse for herself, and she began to smile with a strange look on her face that might have been either tears or a smile of happiness. And of course, her resentment of me seemed to have cleared away. The next morning, when my elder brother, who had been startled by the telegram he’d received, came back from Chiba by overnight boat, Mother looked embarrassed, to be sure; but, more than that, her son’s kindness seemed to have pleased her in the deepest possible way. He was just about to become a junior at the university and had gone to Chiba to prepare for important examinations, so he had lost a lot of precious time, having been called home over the issue of Mother’s health. She made a great show of feeling bad for him on that account, but in fact, she felt happy he had done so, rather than regretting it. She had that kind of willful innocence about her.

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So what did she say to me that morning? “See? Your brother is much more filial toward me than you are. You were here at home but went out somewhere, while he spent an entire night coming back to see me, busy though he was!” Mother was still rather resentful about my conduct of the previous night. The above is just one example of her ways: there were many others. We children began to feel more and more that we were being tested for our filial piety. If she had a touch of diarrhea or if she caught cold, she would take to her bed as if it were a major illness. We all had to look anxious and take care to coddle her, or there would be hell to pay—that was Mother. And if she heard a rumor that someone she vaguely knew had died, she’d begin to tremble, so extreme was her fear of “death.” Anything that made her feel to the slightest degree the threat of “death” would shock her almost to the point of fainting and leave her panic stricken. And it was not enough that she would feel panic— she had to make others feel the panic too. How terrified she was of infections that were going around, of the smallest of earthquakes, or of a faint rumble of thunder in the distance! In the last case, if she heard a rumbling no louder than some priestly incantation, she’d become immobile with fear and have us light incense sticks immediately, then put up a mosquito net for her to sit stock-still inside of, protected by at least one of her children. If the thunder gradually grew louder and there was a single flash of lightning, she seemed on the point of death at that moment. (Ah, it makes me sad to think that Mother, who was so afraid of “death,” who feared dying more than anyone, should, in the end, have died!) I was often told

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to protect Mother inside the mosquito net in those days, and I couldn’t help but feel sorry for her, so pitiful did she look. If I were God, I would have made sure that at least this mother of ours would not have to die. To give “death” at some point to someone who was so terrified of it just seems too cruel. More cruel than killing ten other, ordinary people. So when I realized that Mother too would one day die, I felt unbearably sad. It was not only that I felt sorry for her—I sensed that this world itself is a terrible place. Her desire to depend absolutely on the kindness of her children clearly helped Mother deal with her fear of death to a great extent: “My children take such good care of me and make such a fuss over me. . . . I’m a fortunate person who lacks nothing.” To have her faith in that confirmed was her greatest joy and consolation. She looked far happier and more contented when people praised her children’s filial piety than when they said flattering things about herself. “Your situation is truly enviable! Why, your sons and daughters are all so good to you, and . . .” People who were really skilled at the art of flattery had a good grasp of Mother’s feelings and always made comments like these. From the above, I think the reader will have a good general sense of what our mother was like. She was proud but also timid, easygoing yet highly nervous, a willful but kindly lady. A not uncommon type of woman, I’d say. Such women are especially prone to change their opinions of others easily, and to be vain about themselves. My mother, in particular, was a true “child of Edo,” having been born into a merchant family in the plebeian lowlands of Shitamachi. She had led a sheltered, cosseted life as a girl, so even though she was near fifty

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with five children of her own, she always remained something of a spoiled child. But when you have someone like this as your mother, even her various flaws make you feel a nostalgia that you never forget. And so from an early age, all of us siblings felt much closer to Mother than to Father. We indulged her, and she indulged us; and that mutual indulgence resulted in a deep love. We were often the objects of her anger or her tears and were called “unfilial children.” But deep down, each side trusted the other and both were at peace. Mother must often have thought, Why are you all such unfilial children? And for that very reason, she was able to live a most comfortable and active life. But Mother changed into a different person entirely after my elder brother’s marriage. Why did she change? Was she displeased with his marriage? —No, I can say with absolute assurance that that was not the case. Because not only did Mother not have any objection to the marriage from the start, but also she was very much taken with the new bride’s character and actually rushed the marriage preparations. I remember well how, as the day for the new bride’s arrival at our home approached, Mother’s face was wreathed in smiles, her eyes narrowed in joy. To tell the truth, Mother had been looking for a suitable bride for my brother from around the time of his graduation from university. It goes without saying that that was done for her own benefit as well. She wanted to get my brother’s situation settled as quickly as possible. Not content with only “a filial son,” she wanted to have “a filial daughter-in-law” and the grandchildren she would produce too. With a mother like this, to find a bride who will exactly suit her tastes can

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sometimes cause real problems for the son and prospective bridegroom. There are cases where, luckily, the mother understands the son’s feelings and chooses a bride with whom both she and he will be satisfied, and everything goes well. But I myself, to say nothing of my elder brother, was somewhat worried about whether things would go so smoothly in the case of our family. As I said before, all of us children loved our mother, and she was really a good-natured person, so that if she once accepted the new bride, she would not be so hard to deal with as a mother-in-law. But if it should happen that Mother decided to force on her son a bride whom he himself did not like, things would become difficult for him. Besides, leaving other things aside for the moment, my brother seemed to me to be the sort of young man for whom the question of love and marriage was quite important. Regarding such matters, he might very well flatly refuse his mother’s choice of a bride for him, no matter how filial a son he might be. But Mother would not have dreamed that such a thing could happen: “My son is a wonder! Brilliant at the university, always correct in his behavior, obedient to his parent . . .” Now all this was true, and as a result, Mother had absolute trust in her son. If he had not been such a conscientious man and had, for example, begun to live licentiously, our fragile Mother would no doubt have broken down in tears. But in that respect she was marvelously fortunate, it must be said. Mother, however, took her good fortune for granted and was sure that her fine eldest son would not dream of going against her commands. So if, by any chance, she met with any opposition from him, think how amazed she would have been, how angry, and finally how despondent and panicky she would have become.

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And if it had come to that, I would of course have had to support my brother in the dispute, and that would have amazed Mother even more and left her more downhearted. She would have felt I had betrayed her. And even if that had been a feeling that would eventually fade, it would have been terribly painful for me. So all I could do was hope and pray that my elder brother would handle the whole matter tactfully, finding a partner who met his own ideals, yet at the same time carefully respecting Mother’s position and views. Fortunately, my brother, who was the principal actor in all this, had begun worrying about the issue long before I did and was anxious to bring the whole thing off to everyone’s satisfaction. In fact, he already had a girlfriend at the time, so he had to be all the more careful. I’m not sure just when, and under what circumstances, he had fallen in love with his bride-to-be, but my sister and I became aware of it about a half year before the marriage. When we learned of it, we were sympathetic toward my brother’s situation but also a little envious of him. The reason was not only that the brideto-be, Fujiko, was well known as a young pianist who had graduated at the top of her class from the Music Academy, but also that we ourselves had seen her perform at concerts two or three times, always dressed in a brightly patterned kimono. No doubt that is how my brother first came to know of her too. At the time, my brother was twenty-six while Fujiko was twenty-one. She was a little older than Mother’s ideal bride; and, while Mother liked Japanese music and had a taste for things that were a bit showy, whether she would care for someone as fashionably chic as Fujiko was a major question. Still, my brother was absolutely set on this marriage

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so my sister and I, though envious, nonetheless prayed for his success, and in fact quietly lent him our support. We did not, of course, say a word to Mother about all this until our brother gave his permission. Our worries turned out to be unnecessary, however, and the engagement plans went more smoothly than we had expected due to the skillful way my brother handled everything. Everything went well— or perhaps, ultimately, not so well; but my elder brother’s methods were undeniably skillful. And he really had no other options, from his point of view. Determined to reach his goal, he chose a method that allowed him to succeed. This was the way he thought: I am by no means disregarding Mother’s interests on account of my love for Fujiko. Fujiko has a gentle disposition and will certainly understand Mother’s temperament and do her best to respond to her wishes. Besides, Mother hates to be alone and loves to have guests in our home, so she will certainly like a sociable woman like Fujiko, with her wide circle of friends. Of course, there’s a contrast between Mother’s old-fashioned habits and Fujiko’s up-to-date ones, but both of them are very sociable types. They are a perfect fit as mother-in-law and bride! I am absolutely certain that this marriage will ensure Mother’s happiness as well as my own. But if I say that, Mother probably won’t listen to me. She’ll only be confident about a bride she has chosen herself. If I tell her that I have a girlfriend, or that I’ve already promised to marry her, there’ll certainly be a backlash from Mother. So, to bring this marriage off, I’ll have to take a passive stance and let Mother choose Fujiko herself. Once Mother has a chance to see Fujiko, she’ll be sure to choose her as my bride. I don’t have anything to worry about on that score.

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My brother had a shrewd, cunning side to him. Also, it occurred to me later that this idea may not have been his alone, but rather the result of careful planning between him and Fujiko. But even if that were true, I don’t think either of them ought to be criticized for it. It may have been a cunning plan, but it proceeded from a perfectly fine motive. And so things proceeded as follows: my brother frankly explained the situation and his plan to our younger sister S-ko and asked for her help. S-ko was to make friends with Fujiko and provide her with the chance to visit our home freely. Then Fujiko was sure to catch Mother’s eye. Actually, around that time Mother seemed to have a similar idea in mind: when friends came to visit my sister, she would breeze into the room where they were for a little chat and, asking the girls this and that, would casually conduct her own bride search. Naturally S-ko readily accepted our brother’s request. Fujiko immediately became her fast friend, and was just as quickly noticed by Mother. But no, it was far more than a matter of being “noticed.” I’m sure the reader will get the general idea of what happened without my going into great detail; but I want him or her to have a correct understanding of what really happened during this period. Fujiko was a very brilliant young woman. She was not a great beauty, but her facial expressions and attitudes and ways of talking were extremely charming. And using that particular charm of hers, she easily captured Mother’s heart. No doubt she employed some artifices in doing so. Or she may have depended on suggestions from my brother, who knew Mother’s soft spots so well. But, though I speak of “capturing Mother’s heart” or “employing some

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artifices,” I don’t mean that in a bad way at all. Fujiko’s charm was a natural gift she had, not something specially contrived; and as for her “artifices,” they were no more than the adroitness a young woman with broad social experience gains without being aware of it. It was only to be expected of a girl who was as sharp as Fujiko and already twenty-one. In short, because she was in love with my brother, she did her best to be liked by his mother— or one might even say to ingratiate herself with her. One could not, however, say that she “deceived” Mother. I think that even now. As for my sister and me, we felt somewhat overwhelmed by Fujiko’s talents at the time. We were slightly dazzled by her. “If I have such a splendid person as Fujiko as my elder sister-in-law, I’ll feel really embarrassed!” S-ko said this in a dispirited sort of way because even before the marriage, it was evident that Fujiko was capturing our mother’s highest favor. And indeed, Fujiko may have had a tendency to depend too much on her great talents, but she was a good-natured person. Since both my sister and I understood that from the very start, we were sympathetic to her situation. Mother, without letting my brother or my sister and me know anything about it, had apparently conducted a thorough investigation into Fujiko’s person, family, everyday conduct, circle of friends, and reputation at school. Nothing negative could be found. Since Mother knew nothing at all about Western music, she had no prejudice against women musicians, which was a great blessing. Besides, as a pianist, Fujiko knew many people from high-status families, and there were many girls of distinguished background among her circle of friends, which Mother had so painstakingly investigated. This

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above all appealed to Mother’s vanity. With Fujiko as her daughter-in-law, she would be able to hobnob with the wives and daughters of the nobility. This must have figured in Mother’s calculations. Thus, my brother’s stratagem was almost too successful. Mother chose Fujiko herself and proposed the marriage to the other family through a go-between. She selected a bride for her son in the most normal, conventional way. “Oh, but you know, my dear, that to bring things this far took the most . . .” “It is just as you say! And I’m sorry to have caused you all so much worry over it. . . .” “Thanks to you, it’s all ended happily, with no real difficulties along the way— nothing could make a mother happier!” “I feel tonight that a great burden has been lifted from my shoulders, I really do!” These were the kinds of things Mother said to everyone. Surrounded by relatives and friends on the evening of the wedding reception, she was showered with compliments from all sides: “Congratulations to you!” “Now you can relax!” “You’ll be looking forward to seeing your grandchildren’s healthy, happy faces soon. . . .” “How happy this must make you, Madame Tokioka!” Smiling radiantly, she kept on repeating the customary formulas of appreciation. And so things continued until night came. The bride and groom left on their honeymoon from Shimbashi Station that very night. They planned a week’s travel from Hakone to Atami. In their absence, Mother continued to be full of joy: “I did my very best for them, so I can look forward to having the new couple repay my kindness a bit from now on. . . .” “After they come back from their honeymoon, I’ll ask them to take me to such-and-such a scenic

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spot. . . .” “I can hardly wait to hold my grandchildren by the hand and go cherry-blossom viewing with them!” Mother indulged in such innocent imaginings and delighted in sharing them with all and sundry who came to see her. The newlyweds each sent a postcard every day, from wherever they happened to be. My sister and I also got ones occasionally, but almost all of them were addressed to Mother alone. As she looked at the picture postcards, perhaps she felt unable to wait for the pair to come back, because when they were just on their way from Hakone to Atami—though she did manage to hold back for a day or two—she sent off a telegram and then set out to meet them. “She shouldn’t bother them on their honeymoon, for heaven’s sake!” was my reaction, but Mother was not to be deterred. She had a superstitious reverence for customs and good form, and this was the only time she had done something so lacking in common sense. I suppose the temptation to interfere was just too great to resist, in this case. Looking back on it now, my sister and I really felt apprehensive about it. We should have made every effort to stop her. But perhaps the reader can imagine just how enthusiastic Mother was, and how happy she seemed about the whole thing. The maid who accompanied Mother to Atami came back to Tokyo the next day. “Madame was terribly carsick on the light railway to Atami, but after she reached it, she seemed just fine. The young master and his bride must have been delighted to see her,” she informed us. “They must have been terribly undelighted to see her!” I said, and laughed. “Absolutely! Naughty Mama for going off to interfere with their honeymoon. God was punishing her with that

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carsickness, I’m sure. Served her right!” said my younger sister, sticking out her tongue. “God’s punishment,” however, did not end with a bout of carsickness. We don’t know exactly what happened between Mother and my brother and his bride there in Atami. But two or three days later, just when we were thinking they would all come home tomorrow or the next day, at around ten o’clock in the evening the following strange telegram arrived: “All three of us got wet. Bring changes of clothing to Kōzu right away.” It was clearly from my elder brother. But the line “All three of us got wet” was odd; and surely they had brought plenty of changes of clothing with them on their trip, and they were already in Kōzu, so that part of the message too was hard to fathom. But I suddenly had the feeling that something bad must have happened to them. So it was decided that I would go, and having packed changes of clothing for all three of them, I took the last train for Kōzu. The message said “to Kōzu,” but where in Kōzu? I wondered as we arrived at the Kōzu stop. But there on the platform stood my brother, dressed in an inn’s quilted kimono (it was February, after all) and with an attendant by his side, holding a hand lantern. “What happened? Where are Mother and your bride?” “Right over there at that inn.” Walking beside me, my brother spoke in a gloomy voice, without looking up. Something had happened, I knew. “It said in the telegram that you had all gotten wet . . .” “I put it that way since nothing too bad had happened, and I didn’t want to worry you. Actually, our boat capsized, and

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we had a terrible time of it. All three of us were rescued, so it didn’t end badly, but . . .” “Your boat capsized? Where did you board it?” We continued talking as we walked to the inn. “We came by boat from Atami. I thought we’d come back by light railway, but Mother said she was sick and tired of the light railway. ‘Well then, we’ll have to go back by rickshaw or automobile,’ I suggested. But she didn’t want to use them, either. The road was dangerous, and think how terrible it would be if we slipped off a cliff and into the sea, she argued. “Ah, Mother never gives up, does she?” I said, laughing. My brother tried to laugh as well but couldn’t manage it. He did not look in the best of moods. “A rickshaw was out, and a car was out, so the only thing left was to come back by boat. She knew she’d get seasick on the boat, but a little seasickness was better than risking her life, she decided.” My brother’s tone as he said this was strange. It could have been interpreted as showing his bad feelings toward Mother. I didn’t know just when the unpleasant incident happened, but my brother’s emotional disturbance and physical fatigue seemed still to linger. And, whether from the cold or from emotional upset, his voice was tremulous and clouded, as if he were trying to hold back a sob. I found myself wondering if he were not in fact crying. “So where did the boat capsize, then? Were there no injuries to Mother or either of you?” My greatest concern was to know what happened to Mother at that time. “Oh, talking about capsizing is an exaggeration, really. The lighter we were on capsized at the edge of the beach right after

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we arrived in Kōzu. I was surprised at the time, but none of us was hurt in the least. We just found ourselves in a little water all of a sudden.” My brother was trying to minimize what had happened, but I learned little by little that the matter was not as simple as he was suggesting.

J Mother and my brother and his bride had boarded a boat leaving Atami in the afternoon of that day, and by the time they had reached the offing near Kōzu, it was already very dark. Mother, who had been lying prostrate with few signs of life until then, became a bit livelier, but when they tried to shift from the boat to a lighter that would take them to shore, she had a problem. Had she not been able to see the lights of the town of Kōzu glimmering a short distance away, she could not have summoned up the courage to make the shift. From her point of view, she must have done it with the awareness that she might die in the attempt. The sea was quite rough at that point, and a wind had come up from the evening of that day, making the waves high. To make matters worse, the small boat was overloaded with passengers. The lighter capsized a mere 120 feet from shore. At the moment the lighter capsized, Mother, who was between the newlyweds, seems to have held on tight to the two of them with both hands. But once they fell into the water, the three of them became separated. My brother of course knew how to swim, and strangers immediately tried to grab on to him. He, however, concerned about Mother and his bride, brushed

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these hands aside and began to search in the dark waters surrounding him. Right beside him, he noticed a knot of two or three people who were shouting “Save me!” as they rose and sank in the water. Ah, my wife is there! he thought, recognizing Fujiko’s voice among the noisy calls for help. She was calling as loudly as she could for her husband to rescue her. In all the confusion in the dark waters, he could hardly be expected to distinguish her voice, but through the mysterious power that those who love each other have access to (my brother didn’t say this, but I think it was so), he intuited that it was her. He quickly swam over to where the voice had come from and grasped the body of his bride, who was on the point of drowning. But what has happened to Mother? That thought must of course have risen in his mind immediately; and in fact, my brother has said that it was so. But this was followed by another immediate thought: I can’t save more than one person at a time. If I try to save both of them at once, all three of us will drown. And right now, my wife, whom I by chance found first, is clinging to my hand for dear life. I should get her safely to dry ground first, and then look for Mother. Having decided this, he continued to struggle painfully in the water while fending off with all his strength those people who were trying to cling to him. Finally he managed to swim to shore, carrying his bride with him. By the time they reached the shore, Fujiko had lost consciousness. My brother threw her chilled, exhausted body there on the beach and plunged once more into the water. He spent some thirty minutes searching the whole area, but he couldn’t find Mother. By then five or six rescue boats had arrived and were picking up those still in the water, one by

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one, so there was no longer any trace of anyone on the surface of the sea. “Motherrr!” my brother cried out, facing the dark and lonely sea. He felt as he did so that “the sea seemed a strangely fearsome yet also nostalgic presence. This vast, dark black sea was the home where I’d spent my early childhood years, and now I was going to meet my mother there.” As he strained his voice calling to her there in the water, he felt himself to be a pitiful infant crying for his mother’s milk. He felt he needed to be saved by his mother. “I feel bad about saying this,” he said to me, “but for an instant, I completely forgot about Fujiko. I was filled with thoughts of Mother and felt that if I couldn’t find her, I ought to die right where I was.” I certainly do not doubt these words of my brother. He surely must have had such thoughts. Because when the captain of the rescue ship found him and told him to “climb on board,” my brother kept calling out to Mother, and shouting “I’ve killed my mother! It was inexcusable of me, so just let me die!” he fought against his would-be rescuer like a madman. It was only natural that he should be so worried about Mother in the situation in which he now found himself— he who had always been so good to his mother, and regardless of how much he loved his new bride. Furthermore, it seems to me that he had to react as he did, given the circumstances. Fortunately, though, Mother was rescued by a fisherman, unbeknownst to my brother, and had been carried to the S. Inn in front of the station, where she was being cared for in one of the inner rooms. But my brother learned of that only long afterward. He had been pulled onto the rescue craft by force and taken to shore, where his bride, who had slowly recovered consciousness, was waiting

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for him. No sooner did she see him than she threw herself on him, asking “Mother? What about Mother?” “We’ve failed her, we’ve failed her miserably,” the two of them cried and, still embracing, fell down on the sand, where they wept together for a long time. It was only after some time had passed that the couple saw Mother’s face again and knew that she was safe. She had swallowed only a little water and had been saved almost immediately. She had quickly returned to consciousness; but when the couple came into her room, she was lying in bed like a very sick patient, her face deadly pale, silent, and with her eyes closed tightly. She could barely speak. “Forgive me, Mother,” my brother said. “It must have been a terrible shock. How are you feeling now?” Fujiko asked. Mother slowly opened her sad-looking eyes a bit and said in a voice that was barely audible, “I’m glad everyone was safe.” That was all she said before she once again closed her eyes like one who has died, and failed to answer any questions they put to her. “If you aren’t feeling well, shall we call a doctor for you?” they asked, but all she did was shake her head in reply. Seeing how she was, my brother and his wife felt sorry for her, and also deeply apologetic. They didn’t know how to deal with this “spoiled child” of a mother.

J Having heard this account, I felt able to guess more or less accurately the states of mind of Mother and my elder brother

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that night. Knowing Mother’s character, I thought it inevitable that she should harbor some resentment about the relations between her and her son, and her son and his bride. The realization that “the newlyweds were rescued first while she was in imminent danger of death” would be a source of the greatest loneliness and sorrow to her. And for my elder brother, the fact that he had caused his mother to feel that way even in the slightest must have been unbearably painful. But there was nothing to criticize in my brother’s behavior; and the fact that Mother too was saved without injury showed that her son’s sincerity had moved Heaven’s heart, so for her to maintain resentment against him forever was just too selfish. Thinking this way, I at first couldn’t help having more sympathy for my brother than for Mother. “What’s wrong, Mother? Having swallowed a little seawater is nothing to worry about. Thank heaven you were not hurt at all. The newlyweds are very worried about you, so please show us all you’re feeling better.” As I was on my way to the guest parlor at the S. Inn together with my brother, I stopped and sat by Mother’s pillow, making a point of speaking casually. She, however, made no reply to me. She opened her sad-looking eyes and looked into my face steadily and resentfully until finally a tear trickled down her cheek. That single tear was Mother’s only reply. Mother had always been a bit of a crybaby and tended to weep at the slightest thing: she cried at plays at the kabuki theater, she wept over novels she was reading. I was used to seeing her tears at such times. But her tears that evening were not that sort of sweet, lovely tears. As I witnessed them, I deeply regretted the words I had just spoken so casually. To

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utter such words to Mother, who seemed so deeply disheartened and lonely, was just too cruel. Mother has changed, I thought at once. The Mother we all knew would have been overjoyed that I had come at a run to be by her side. “Oh, I’m so glad you came to help me. I didn’t know what to do!” she would say in her usual exaggerated way, and be sure to get her way with everyone’s cooperation. And if my brother and his wife, my sister and myself treated her with kindness and consideration, she would shed tears of grateful happiness. Tonight, however, Mother was not at all like that. She just stayed silent, as quiet as death. When we said something to her, she would answer in a sad voice, “Yes, maybe so . . .” She didn’t resist, she didn’t show anger, she just accepted meekly whatever was said. “She’s not her usual self, but this too is a kind of childish behavior. She had a great shock, so her way of expressing her childishness has gotten darker, that’s all.” That was my brother’s view. And I tended to agree. I’m going to give those sons of mine a real surprise, she must have been thinking. And if we all went along with her and showed real concern for her, our good-natured Mother would get over her bad mood in two or three days, I thought. But in fact, things didn’t go as I’d expected. The next morning the three of us took Mother back to Tokyo, but both in the train and after we got home, Mother’s attitude did not change in the slightest. The more we tried to draw her out, the sadder she looked, turning her face away. And she didn’t seem to be consciously acting in a spoiled child’s sort of way. On the contrary, she herself seemed to want to be closer to us, but when she tried to do so, she would become even sadder and finally become

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unable to speak. Even after one or two months had passed, Mother never became again the lively lady we had all enjoyed. From that fateful night on, she had turned into a different person, so total was the change. Why had she changed so much? What was the deep reason for it? Let me leave discussion of that for later. Mother’s life from that point until her death was, as I mentioned at the beginning of this account, as sad as the saddest music. Whenever I recall Mother as she was then, I see her figure always seated in front of the family Buddhist altar, in the dimness of her private quarters, earnestly reciting the sutras in front of Father’s funerary tablet. It seemed that feelings of yearning for her dead husband formed the basis of her daily life at that time. Even if we invited her to see a play or go sightseeing with us, she would say, “No, no. I’ll look after things in your absence, so you go and have a good time,” giving us a lonesome smile. When we persisted and tried to flatter her into coming with us, she would become tearful and withdraw to her private quarters in embarrassment. This was true with regard to my sister and me as well, but her reaction seemed even stronger when my brother and his wife tried to invite her. It was not that she envied the closeness of the married couple, but she found having it displayed before her very eyes painful. That was my impression. She, who had been so proud of her son and his bride, now never uttered a word about her children. It had been our custom to gather around the dinner table for the evening meal and have lively conversation over our food. Now, although she didn’t refuse to join us, Mother never made any effort to join in our conversation. Only when some practical matter came up would she say, “Yes, yes, of course,”

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and do what was asked of her as meekly as a housecat. Occasionally she would throw down her chopsticks with a clatter in the midst of our meal and rush off to her private quarters. We all knew without discussing it that she had suddenly been overcome by the need to cry. We didn’t really know how to deal with her anymore. And the most difficult times were when some relative would pay us a visit. “Your children are all so loving toward you . . . You really are the luckiest person, my dear,” the visitor would flatter away, as if envious of our happy family. Then Mother would look as if she were being forced to endure some severe pain in her chest, give a lonesome little laugh, and quietly direct her gaze downward. The pained smile on her face affected us even more than her tears. It was obvious that Mother was working hard at smiling when she ought to have been crying. Things were not so bad as long as Mother could cry; when finally her very tears dried up, that was truly frightening. From then on, she would hardly eat. She seemed to be no more than a living shadow. Gradually she grew thinner and weaker, until she died, as if vanishing. As she drew her last breaths, my brother and Fujiko and all of us in the family came to her bedside. “Oh, don’t come so close, please, all of you. . . . Your father is coming to welcome me.” She died while warding us off with her hands. Those were her last words.

J As I wrote earlier, sometime later my elder brother killed himself.

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While Mother was still alive, I began carefully to note my brother’s attitude toward her, and the relationship between him and his wife, and such things. Mother hated having us look her in the face, and that was especially apparent in the case of my brother. It was not that she resented him; it was rather that when she was in his presence, she quietly looked down, in a forlorn way. And each time she did that, it caused a reaction in him. He, of course, by no means resented her, but neither could he love her. He was forbidden to love her, it seemed. Still, one couldn’t say that he was a completely unhappy person. The reason was that even while he was in such a painful situation, he was always passionately loved by his wife. They tried to hide that as much as possible from both Mother and the rest of the family. But I was well aware of it, and the more they tried to conceal it, the more I sensed that they were bound together with the strongest of ties. In saying this, I am not criticizing my brother at all. But looking at the matter from Mother’s point of view, it must have greatly deepened her feelings of loneliness. And as for my brother, being so intensely loved by his wife must have made him taste even greater pain—or so it seems to me. After Mother’s death, my brother gradually fell into a state of intense neurasthenia. One summer day, while his wife was out for a while, he holed up in his study and abruptly shot himself with a pistol. The connection between his death and our mother’s is shown by the note that I will reproduce below. He had prepared two wills, one for his wife and one for us, his siblings. What follows is the will that we siblings were given:

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I am about to commit suicide. I have to die. I understood that early on, but, to tell the truth, I couldn’t bring myself to make the final resolution. But now I have decided. I am resolved to die. And why? Ah, I am afraid to give the reason! Even as I face death, it terrifies me to have to say it. I wonder if it would not be better for me to go to my death without revealing to anyone else the secret that only I and Mother know. But my conscience will not allow me to do so. I have been lying to you up to now about what happened that evening in Kōzu. But forgive me—I couldn’t tell you the truth without revealing it also to Fujiko. She loves me so much and believes in me so strongly that to tell you what I have been hiding even from her would be to wrong her terribly. — Oh, I really don’t want to die! I still love her so much! That I should cast her aside and leave this world, that I now must do that, is a most painful fate. Even saying that, though, makes me feel I am wronging Mother, whom I will meet in the netherworld. . . . If you read this, my final letter, to the end, you will surely understand how painful is the state into which I have fallen, and with what sort of feelings I must now cast aside this world. I repeat, I have not grown sick of this world, nor do I regard people as despicable. I will go to my death simply because of that chance happening. I am being forced to leave forever the world in which that dear, beloved woman is living, as if I were a living tree being cut in half. I want to feel resentment against someone, but I don’t know whom to resent. The only proper object of my resentment is that chance happening. I alone, out of so many people, was chosen to run up against that terrifying event—that was my fate.

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I said before that I lied to you about what happened that evening in Kōzu. But I didn’t do it from the base motive of hiding my misdeeds from you. I couldn’t stand to reveal the truth for the sake of Mother and Fujiko. You must have speculated that there was some profound reason Mother became such a lonely person after that night. You would have judged that her transformation was too radical to be explained by the occurrences that appeared on the surface. Now at last I will say it clearly: that evening, in the pitch-dark sea, in the moment when I saved Fujiko, I did something unforgivable to Mother. I became aware of that—that the person who suddenly tried to grasp the arm in which I was holding Fujiko was perhaps Mother. It was only somewhat later that the horrible doubt assailed me, and I tried my best to close my eyes to it. But it turned out that that doubt was true. In my concern for my wife’s safety, I failed to recognize Mother. I was bent on saving my wife, and so, with my hand, I pushed my own mother farther into the water. Fujiko didn’t notice it, but Mother knew, most certainly. She never spoke of it while she lived, but that she knew is beyond doubt, when you consider how changed she was from that night on. Why couldn’t I recognize my mother? Was it that I loved my wife so much that I had forgotten my mother? I do not think so for a moment. If my hands had been holding my mother first, rather than my wife, I am sure I would not have been able to recognize my wife. In that case, even if my wife tried to grab on to me, I would have ignored her, saying “I must save my mother!” And, loving me as much as she does, I’m sure my wife would gladly have died for the sake of my mother. Unfortunately, however, the first person to grab onto my hand was my wife. My wife, who was on the point of drowning. My mind was filled

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with the desire to “save my wife’s life.” Anyway, the two of us at least must live! Was it unnatural of me to feel that way under the circumstances? Wouldn’t anyone feel the same way? Only, the fact that one of “the two of us” was not my mother but my wife— that chance happening led me into a frightful mistake and great unhappiness. I had picked an unlucky number in the game of life. Having written this much, I feel no need to further explain why Mother changed the way she did. I have said that I resent that chance happening, but Mother must have resented things beyond that as well. She saw her own son push her back into the water without pity in order to save his bride. How many mothers in this world have had to see so cruel a sight? And to have this happen to Mother, who was so very afraid of death and who depended so much on her sons—what a dreadful fate! That evening, no sooner had I managed to save my wife than I went back into the sea in order to search for Mother. If I couldn’t find her, I was determined to lose my life in the attempt. Now, looking back, I see that Mother having been saved by a stranger was an unhappy outcome for both her and me. And even if she had been saved by me, her son, Mother would certainly not have rejoiced. “If you were to save me, why did you not save me first? Why did you put your wife ahead of me?” I am sure she would have said that. And if I had answered, “It was mere chance that made me save you later,” she would have spoken of “Hateful chance!” “If you couldn’t save me first, why didn’t you let all three of us die there together?” she would have continued. In truth, it would have been better if I had died then, rather than have things turn out the way they did. If I had died trying to save her, how happy that would have made Mother! That she and I were somehow

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saved was an unparalleled tragedy for us both. Mother had to see, day after day for a very long time, the face of the “parricide” son who had pushed her back into the sea. She could not forget her resentment of that until the day she died. To her, my face must have seemed that of the devil himself. And it was not a matter of me alone: none of her “children” could be depended upon. They must have seemed completely unfilial, willing to betray their mother for the sake of their lovers. When I recall how Mother in her last years spent so much time reciting prayers before Father’s funerary tablet, I can imagine what she was feeling, and I become unbearably sad. Mother has died, but it doesn’t feel that way to me. As long as I live, Mother lives too, I feel. “Please show me that you are a filial son. Let me take joy in you from the heart. Just as you were willing to throw away your life for your bride, now throw away your life for me.” Mother is always whispering these words in my ear. Unless I die, Mother will never be happy.

My brother’s last letter goes on at more length, but having quoted this much, I feel sure that our mother’s unhappiness has become clear enough. And even after my brother’s death, I have the feeling that Mother is still alive. I feel sorry for my brother, of course, but even more sorry for Mother. I am sure she will go on living in my heart forever.

Translators’ Afterword

T

he stories translated here come from the first decade of Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s long career, which extended from 1910 to 1965. Each is in a different mode: “Longing” (Haha o kouru ki, 1918) is characterized by romantic lyricism, “Sorrows of a Heretic” (Itansha no kanashimi, 1916–1917) by gritty realism, and “The Story of an Unhappy Mother” (Fukō na haha no hanashi, 1921) by moral and psychological ambiguity in a dramatic narrative. We’ve chosen these stories for two reasons. First, we find them compelling examples of Tanizaki’s narrative mastery, even though he wrote them during what some critics have called—misleadingly, in our view— a slump in his career. They exemplify the author’s attitude toward his craft: a fascination with the ways in which a story can be told, a concern for what he referred to as narrative architecture, and a love of language. Second, all three stories focus on the family, and especially on the changing roles and relationships of a son (a child in the first story, a university student in the second, an adult in the third) and a mother figure, a theme to which Tanizaki returned again and again. Representative

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treatments of this theme from later in his career include “Arrowroot” (Yoshino kuzu, 1931), Captain Shigemoto’s Mother (Shōshō Shigemoto no haha, 1949) and “The Bridge of Dreams” (Yume no ukihashi, 1959). In the second and third stories in this collection, and in later works such as The Makioka Sisters (Sasameyuki, 1943–1948), Tanizaki was also concerned with the challenges that a rapidly changing society presented for traditional Confucian concepts of the family. “Longing” is one extended dream, as the narratorprotagonist reveals at the end of the story when he awakens, weeping. The mood is romantic-fantastical, in contrast to the realism of “Sorrows of a Heretic” and the convoluted drama of “The Story of an Unhappy Mother.” Tanizaki’s mother, Seki, died in May 1917, of a heart attack preceded by a long bout of St. Anthony’s fire. Tanizaki was at Ikaho hot springs working on a commissioned article for a magazine when the telegram came. He hurried back to Tokyo; but, arriving too late to attend at his mother’s deathbed, he saw her face again only in death, pale and serenely beautiful. He must have felt considerable regret and even guilt at having been absent at such a time, especially since he was engaged at Ikaho not only in writing but also in enjoying the company of his sister-in-law, Seiko, a girl in her mid-teens who was much more to Tanizaki’s taste than her staid, conventional elder sister Chiyoko, still married to Tanizaki at that point. Moreover, if we believe that there is something quasiautobiographical in “Sorrows of a Heretic,” he must also have felt regret at his harshness toward his mother during his university years, as described in that unusually realistic novella.

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The fact that the work is dedicated to the memory of his mother reinforces our sense that the author, by now in his early thirties, felt a need for expiation. Let us briefly examine some elements in “Longing,” in which guilt is replaced by an intense longing for the now absent figure of the mother. The little boy who is the protagonist of the dream (though hardly the narrator, given the vocabulary and style used) is in search of his mother, or of a motherlike nurse. He recalls how the latter used to hold him to her breast and lull him to sleep with her repetitious singsong, “Tempura kuitai, tempura kuitai,” based on the samisen melody they both heard being played by a wandering musician passing through Nihombashi on his way to the pleasure quarters. As he listens, the little boy delights in pressing his hands against his nurse’s breasts and playing with her nipples: Freudian infantile sexuality incarnate, with oral gratification in the form of delicious food foregrounded. Food and sensuality are often paired in Tanizaki’s writings, as for example in “The Gourmet Club” (Bishoku kurabu, 1919), where descriptions of Chinese cuisine segue into sensual and finally sexual images. As the boy walks along, the scenery changes: it is sometimes beautiful but often menacing as well. Parallel to the line of pine trees (matsu works in Japanese as “pine” does in English as a kind of serious pun), modern telegraph poles give off a loud hum. Weird whisperings accompanied by glimpses of light-and-dark things moving nearby turn out to be withered lotus leaves on the surface of an old pond, blown by the wind, brushing against one another, and showing now their surfaces, now their undersides. There are many such Poe-like

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touches, as natural phenomena seem to threaten the little traveler. The moon sheds a cold, eerie light on the pathway, the sands of the beach, the ocean with its waves, and indeed the whole scene, creating shadows. In a sinister touch, the roots of trees growing near the road now seem to be serpents slithering their way onto the wandering boy’s path. The imagery in this michiyuki (or “going-along-the-way” piece) is overwhelmingly traditional: the pine groves and scenes along the shore, for example, remind the narrator of such places as “Miho, or Tago Bay; the coast of Suminoe, or Akashi beach,” famed in classical literature. But there are occasional intrusions of modern technology: an arc light that illuminates with cold clarity its surroundings, the succession of telegraph poles, and the recollection of a view glimpsed from a railway train. In a dramatic scene, interrupting the lyricism of the narrative, the boy finds a house standing in the midst of the wilderness; and he hopes his mother and father might be there, waiting for him. Instead, there is an “anti-mother”—an irritable crone who insults the boy, denies him any food, and drives him off. The dialogue in this scene is realistic and colloquial. The protagonist speaks like the little boy he is represented as being, and the old woman is appropriately harsh and witchlike. Is she a Jungian shadow mother? A demoness in contrast to the goddess- or Madonna-like longed-for mother? At any rate, the boy’s search is not yet at an end. He sees a female figure walking some distance ahead of him, playing the samisen. That instrument and the woman’s kimono and sedge hat are of course elements of traditional

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culture. He follows, fixated on the soles of her sandaled feet, which reveal themselves as she walks gracefully along. Those feet are white and very clean-looking—one would like to lick them, in fact, our precocious fetishist thinks to himself. (This is a reminder that the terms of the description are very much those of the mature Tanizaki, and not of a little boy.) Above all, he must see her face, which he does, bit by bit. When he gains full sight of her, he addresses the figure as “Elder Sister,” a term of some intimacy. She begins to weep and urges the little boy to join in. Finally she reveals that she is in fact his mother, and takes him in her arms. The boy clings to her ecstatically, but that excitement wakes him from his dream to the world of actuality. He is, in reality, a man of thirty-two, with his mother two years dead. The pillow on which he has been resting his head in sleep that night is damp with his tears— a final classical literary touch. The whole story has been a dream, an unconscious escape from the awful reality of his mother’s death. Although the “longing” of the title is primarily for the absent mother (indeed, the original title could be translated as “A Record of Longing for My Mother”), there is also clearly a nostalgia for the classical past; and the novella’s epigraph is taken from the eighth-century poetic anthology the Man’yōshū. The poem itself references yearning for the past: “Does it long for the past—the bird that cries, passing over the sacred spring, where the ever-green yuzuruha grow?” There is also nostalgia for mid-Meiji Japan of the late 1880s and ’90s, when Jun’ichirō was a boy. In his last decade, Tanizaki wrote Childhood Years (Yōshō jidai, 1955–56), a memoir

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of  childhood, which graphically, poetically, amusingly, and sometimes shockingly describes the Tokyo, and especially the Nihombashi area, of late nineteenth-century Japan, in which the child Jun’ichirō was raised. The same Meiji atmosphere pervades the memorable early short story “The Children” (Shōnen, 1911). Tanizaki completed “Sorrows of a Heretic” in 1916, but his editors delayed its publication for almost a year, worrying that government censors would ban the story for its unedifying portrayal of a dysfunctional family, and particularly for the protagonist’s “heresy” of rebelling against Confucian teachings on filial duty and fraternal love. The extent to which Confucianism had become ingrained in Japanese society is suggested by Shōzaburō’s referring to a passage from the Analects (“a dying man’s words are good”) as merely “an old saying.” The Mamuro family also embodies the disorienting changes and dislocations of their times and society, the last years of the Meiji period (1868–1912) in the Tokyo lowlands. The father is a “head clerk,” the quintessential Edo merchant-class occupation; the mother, raised in a wealthy merchant family, doesn’t even know how to cook rice. The fact that their names are never given—they remain “the father” and “the mother” throughout— reinforces their emblematic roles. In contrast, their son, Shōzaburō, is a student at Tokyo Imperial University, whose graduates were expected to carry on the construction of the new, industrial Japan. Though the Mamuros are proud to be “pure children of Edo” (Edokko—native-born participants in the energetic merchant class of Edo, now Tokyo), this distinction is less significant than it used to be, and their recent poverty has

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pushed them down on the social ladder. As a child, Shōzaburō idolized the medieval heroes Yoshitsune and Masashige, but now he considers their exploits and the chronicles that narrate them to be irrelevant to his life. He and his parents enjoy Edo-period performing arts, but now they listen to them on a gramophone. Shōzaburō is familiar with both classical Chinese poetry and Western philosophy; he likes Western treats like beer and beef. The alienation between traditionally minded parents and a university-educated, future-oriented son, unforgettably depicted in Natsume Sōseki’s 1914 novel Kokoro, appears in “Sorrows of a Heretic” at almost the same moment in Japanese history. Shōzaburō’s “heresy” is a sign and a product of the times. “Sorrows of a Heretic” appears to be set in the spring and summer of 1910 or 1911. Tanizaki wrote in 1917 that it “takes as its subject a period seven or eight years ago when our family fortunes had fallen to their lowest point.” Shōzaburō makes his literary debut during the period of literary naturalism’s dominance, which faded around 1910; and Tanizaki’s own debut came in the autumn of 1910, with the publication of “The Tattooer” (Shisei) and other short works. The author’s sister Sono died in June 1911, and it was in November 1911 that Nagai Kafū published a laudatory review that launched Tanizaki’s career. Family life was very much on the author’s mind when he wrote the story: he had married in 1915, and his daughter was born in the following year, suddenly forcing upon him responsibility for supporting his own family. His mother died shortly before the publication of “Sorrows of a Heretic.” Tanizaki wrote in a 1917 preface: “At least with regard to the four family members who appear here (putting aside the

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peripheral characters), I have portrayed honestly and unreservedly, to the extent possible and justifiable, matters that struck my heart as facts at the time. In this sense, this story is my only confessional work.” Some readers have taken Tanizaki’s words literally and seen the story as an accurate portrayal of the author and his family, while others deny that the story is autobiographical. The truth probably lies in between: both parallels and discrepancies exist between the picture of “four family members” and Tanizaki and his family. While he was a university student, like Shōzaburō, Tanizaki did live in a tenement with his parents and siblings. (He was expelled from the university in July 1911 for failing to pay his fees.) He quarreled with his father, lost a sister (Sono) to tuberculosis, drank his parents’ cooking sake, and lived beyond his means. The most conspicuous departure from the real family is that Jun’ichirō actually had seven siblings, at least three of whom were still living with him and their parents in 1910– 1911: Sono and two brothers, Seiji and Shūhei. Limiting the fictional family to four members sharpens the focus of the story. The depictions of the parents and O-tomi in “Sorrows of a Heretic” ring true and appear to be more-or-less accurate portraits of Tanizaki Kuragorō, Seki, and Sono. The portrayal of Shōzaburō, however, is a self-debasing caricature of the author. As Satō Haruo said of him, Tanizaki pretended, both in his fiction and among his friends, to be worse than he really was. In the words of Tanizaki Shūhei, Shōzaburō is presented with “humorous bombast.” He implausibly proclaims himself a genius with almost miraculous powers of intellect and creativity, accuses himself of “moral insanity,” considers himself

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capable of any crime, and treats his dying sister cruelly. He will remind some readers of the tormented narrator of Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground. In contrast, the young Jun’ichirō described by his sister Ise in her memoir is gentle and indulgent, though he resembles Shōzaburō superficially: “Even though my eldest brother [Jun’ichirō] had a large room all to himself, books and sheets of manuscript paper were scattered everywhere on the desk and floor, so that there was no place to step. He would lie casually in the midst of all this and sleep late into the morning. It was my job to wake him. ‘Big Brother! Get up,’ I’d say, pinching his nose and tugging at his legs. At night, I’d dangle from his back and shake him while he was writing. . . . He was never cross with me and never scolded me; he was a kind, good brother.” Shūhei described “Sorrows of a Heretic” as his brother’s “only work of realistic fiction.” The story is unusual among Tanizaki’s works in depicting a poor family living in desperate circumstances (“Longing,” too, alludes to the decline of their fortunes); most characters in his other fictional worlds are as comfortable as Shōzaburō dreams of being. Indeed, some elements of the story, such as stark depictions of illness and the effects of poverty, resemble the sort of material favored by Japanese naturalist writers. It’s ironic that Tanizaki, who rebelled against the dominance of the naturalists as a young aestheticist writer at the time of his debut, should have adopted the other camp’s methods and atmosphere in this story. Illness is a recurring theme in Tanizaki’s fiction, however, figuring most notably in The Makioka Sisters and Diary of a Mad Old Man (Fūten rōjin nikki, 1963).

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By means of dreams and fantasies, Shōzaburō is sometimes able to escape momentarily from the ugliness around him. In the last paragraph, we learn that his nightmares, transformed into publishable stories, have enabled him finally to effect a real escape from poverty. The same was true of Tanizaki himself: his success as a writer lifted him from poverty, and many of his works seem to have originated in dreams and daydreams. He demonstrated the process of incorporating dreams into fiction in the late story “Manganese Dioxide Dreams” (Kasanka mangansui no yume, 1955). In his final, 1955 revision, Tanizaki deleted the last paragraph of “Sorrows of a Heretic.” The lines have been translated here so that readers can decide for themselves whether the story is better with them or without them. Although images of woman-as-mother are frequent and overwhelmingly positive in Tanizaki’s works, there are occasionally negative ones. The self-pitying mother in “Sorrows of a Heretic,” for example, becomes a sympathetic figure only at the end. In “The Story of an Unhappy Mother,” a radical change in personality on the part of the mother/mother-inlaw leads to the shocking events that dominate the last part of the story. A freak boating accident occurs. In the subsequent confusion, the eldest son manages to save his wife but does not know what has become of his mother. That hardy old lady has survived, however, and has made it to shore with the help of a stranger. Forever after, the formerly vivacious, life-loving old woman is emotionally withdrawn from her family and looks at her eldest son in particular with a deathin-life gaze. In her view, he has chosen his wife over his own mother. This choice would fly in the face of Confucian

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morality, in which duty to parents comes first and a daughterin-law must always be subservient to her mother-in-law. Moreover, it goes against the Buddhist view that the obligations of a child to its parents are of unparalleled weight. The Western reader may take a very different view. If a choice must be made between one’s wife and one’s mother, the former ought to win, in the traditional Western view. We are told in Genesis, “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife; and they shall be one flesh.” This injunction is quoted almost word for word in St. Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians. Thus, the relative importance of the relationships is reversed for the West. Moreover, the same choice would likely be made by more “progressive” people, now in the name of individual freedom and self-fulfillment. In either case, the motherin-law would come out the loser. But Mother in the Tanizaki story was born and reared in late nineteenth-century Japan, when traditional values still held great sway. Her son’s values are, of course, rather different; but even he does not openly defy his mother. Instead, he shrewdly engineers “her choice” of a bride for him precisely to suit himself. Mother is not, therefore, entirely to be blamed for her resentful emotional reaction to what happened in the sea that night. She is influenced by the traditional hierarchical values with which she was raised, combined with a highly developed sense of her own importance and extreme feelings of fragility in the face of danger of any kind. These factors lead her to carry her resentment of her son too far, show it much too clearly, and maintain it year after year, thereby destroying the

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peace of mind of herself, her eldest son, her second son, and the whole family. She goes to her grave “an unhappy mother,” having warded off the attentions of her children at her very deathbed. Even after death, she seems to linger as a ghostly presence in the household, and this eventually leads her eldest son to despairing suicide. His account of the affair is discovered by the surviving younger son, who is in turn distressed and depressed by the knowledge of what has happened. The incident at sea is a catastrophe that marks the great turning point in the story. The narrator keeps invoking a malevolent “fate”; but it was Mother who insisted on their returning by boat rather than a more conventional train or rickshaw. This is just one of many examples, some comically depicted, of her insistence on having her own way. Here, ironically, it leads to the accident that tragically changes the life of mother, eldest son, daughter-in-law, and second son as well. What happened in the sea that night is crucial for our understanding of the story and our evaluation of the principals. Yet it is not completely clear what actually did occur. The elder brother gives two accounts of what happened, the first minimizing the catastrophe and giving himself the benefit of every doubt. His younger brother immediately senses something odd about this version of things and suspects the reality is different, and darker. This younger brother is the principal narrator of the entire story, close enough to have observed everything and yet not centrally involved. He does not have any obvious motives for deceiving us, but there are ambiguities, ambivalences, and throwaway lines that should catch our attention. At first he takes the side of his brother, but by the end of the story, having

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read the latter’s suicide note, he shifts: “I feel sorry for my brother, of course, but even more sorry for Mother.” He offers an alternative title for his tale in the very first line: “—or the story of an unhappy mother-in-law would do as well.” This may call attention to the contrast between the apparently happy, life-loving, though very self-centered mother of the first half and the resentful, punitive, destructive mother-inlaw of the second half of the narrative. Having galvanized the reader by asserting early in his account that “in a sense . . . it was my brother who killed my mother, and . . . it was my mother who killed my brother,” he then insists that the reader should not judge either mother or son too harshly. By the story’s end, it is clear that he is undergoing some kind of mental breakdown and feels ineluctably drawn into the domestic tragedy that has already engulfed his mother and his brother. Do we feel we can uncritically accept his account? After returning to their home in Tokyo, Mother goes on passively punishing her formerly favored eldest son and his wife, until her death four or five years later. Precisely one year after that, the eldest son commits suicide, leaving two suicide notes, one to his siblings, to which we are privy. The note makes it plain that the son suspects he must have brushed his own mother’s desperate hands aside in the darkness and confusion of that night, pushing her deeper into the sea as he sought to save his wife. It is this act (knowing or unknowing, it is hard to judge) that causes resentful despair on the part of Mother and a guilt that can only be expiated by death on the part of the son. Looking at the mother for a moment, we see, as in classical tragedy, a tragic flaw (hamartia) combined with the force

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of circumstance (“fate”) resulting in a terrible outcome for the two principals, and probably for the narrator as well. The tragic flaw is, of course, Mother’s extreme self-centeredness. Tanizaki at first depicts this as a comical quirk, as when a mild bout of indigestion seems to balloon into a life-or-death illness, requiring a doctor’s attendance and the filial attentions of all her children— or else. But it is this sense of her own fragility and an obsessive fear of death that causes her extreme reaction to the accident at sea and its aftermath. She withdraws from life after the accident, taking no pleasure in the round of family events and spending much time before the Buddhist altar where her dead husband is enshrined. She now represents “death-in-life.” Her elder son comes to see her as a continuing, resentful, even vengeful presence after her actual death. She becomes a modern version of the “angry ghosts” that make their appearance in Shinto-Buddhist folklore and in classical Japanese literature. But just as we might want to doubt the erratic account of the younger son, so we might see the older son’s confessional suicide note as the product of a fully deranged mind, and therefore doubt its truth. At the story’s end, we are left with a stunned and depressed narrator who states, “I am sure Mother will go on living in my heart forever.” Thus, the (possibly imaginary) curse will continue to do its work. In the three stories in this collection, then, we have a lyricalromantic evocation of a dream quest for the absent mother; a hyper-realistic account of a son, mother, and family dealing with poverty, illness, and death, relieved by the protagonist’s occasional daydreams and fantasies; and a domestic tragedy centering on the transformation of a flawed but seemingly

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happy mother into a resentful, punishing one, in life and death. In these three stories, Tanizaki rings the changes on one of his favorite themes: the relation of mother and son. In the latter two stories, the focus broadens to include the entire nuclear family: father and younger sister in “Sorrows of a Heretic” and children of both sexes and a daughter-in-law in “The Story of an Unhappy Mother.” The stories can thus be seen as having a kind of universality of theme, in addition to the highly characteristic Tanizaki emphasis on the motherson relationship. “Sorrows of a Heretic” and “The Story of an Unhappy Mother” appear in English translation here for the first time. McCarthy translated substantial portions of “Longing” in his Ph.D. dissertation (Harvard University, 1975) in the course of a discussion of images of the mother in Tanizaki’s early works, and a full translation by Edward Fowler appeared in Monumenta Nipponica (35:4, 1980). McCarthy’s present translations are based on the texts in Tanizaki Jun’ichirō zenshū (Chūō Kōron Shinsha, vols. 6 and 8, 2015). Chambers’s translation is based on the text in Tanizaki Jun’ichirō zenshū (Chūō Kōronsha, vol.  4, 1966). He also referred to the text and Hashimoto Yoshiichirō’s meticulous notes in Nihon kindai bungaku taikei 30 (Kadokawa, 1971). Hashimoto based the text in that volume on the 1955 Zenshū, which was revised by Tanizaki himself. P. MCC. AND A. H. C.

Acknowledgments

The translators would like to thank Christine Dunbar, Leslie Kriesel, and the entire team at Columbia University Press for their kind, courteous, and effective work in enhancing this volume of Tanizaki’s works in translation.

Weatherhead Books on Asia Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University

Literature David Der- wei Wang, Editor Ye Zhaoyan, Nanjing 1937: A Love Story, translated by Michael Berry (2003) Oda Makoto, The Breaking Jewel, translated by Donald Keene (2003) Han Shaogong, A Dictionary of Maqiao, translated by Julia Lovell (2003) Takahashi Takako, Lonely Woman, translated by Maryellen Toman Mori (2004) Chen Ran, A Private Life, translated by John Howard-Gibbon (2004) Eileen Chang, Written on Water, translated by Andrew F. Jones (2004) Writing Women in Modern China: The Revolutionary Years, 1936 -1976, edited by Amy D. Dooling (2005) Han Bangqing, The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai, first translated by Eileen Chang, revised and edited by Eva Hung (2005) Loud Sparrows: Contemporary Chinese Short-Shorts, translated and edited by Aili Mu, Julie Chiu, and Howard Goldblatt (2006) Hiratsuka Raichō, In the Beginning, Woman Was the Sun, translated by Teruko Craig (2006) Zhu Wen, I Love Dollars and Other Stories of China, translated by Julia Lovell (2007) Kim Sowŏl, Azaleas: A Book of Poems, translated by David McCann (2007) Wang Anyi, The Song of Everlasting Sorrow: A Novel of Shanghai, translated by Michael Berry with Susan Chan Egan (2008) Ch’oe Yun, There a Petal Silently Falls: Three Stories by Ch’oe Yun, translated by Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton (2008) Inoue Yasushi, The Blue Wolf: A Novel of the Life of Chinggis Khan, translated by Joshua A. Fogel (2009) Anonymous, Courtesans and Opium: Romantic Illusions of the Fool of Yangzhou, translated by Patrick Hanan (2009) Cao Naiqian, There’s Nothing I Can Do When I Think of You Late at Night, translated by John Balcom (2009) Park Wan-suh, Who Ate Up All the Shinga? An Autobiographical Novel, translated by Yu Young-nan and Stephen J. Epstein (2009) Yi T’aejun, Eastern Sentiments, translated by Janet Poole (2009) Hwang Sunwŏn, Lost Souls: Stories, translated by Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton (2009) Kim Sŏk-pŏm, The Curious Tale of Mandogi’s Ghost, translated by Cindi Textor (2010) The Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Drama, edited by Xiaomei Chen (2011) Qian Zhongshu, Humans, Beasts, and Ghosts: Stories and Essays, edited by Christopher G. Rea, translated by Dennis T. Hu, Nathan K. Mao, Yiran Mao, Christopher G. Rea, and Philip F. Williams (2011) Dung Kai-cheung, Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City, translated by Dung Kai-cheung, Anders Hansson, and Bonnie S. McDougall (2012)

O Chŏnghŭi, River of Fire and Other Stories, translated by Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton (2012) Endō Shūsaku, Kiku’s Prayer: A Novel, translated by Van Gessel (2013) Li Rui, Trees Without Wind: A Novel, translated by John Balcom (2013) Abe Kōbō, The Frontier Within: Essays by Abe Kōbō, edited, translated, and with an introduction by Richard F. Calichman (2013) Zhu Wen, The Matchmaker, the Apprentice, and the Football Fan: More Stories of China, translated by Julia Lovell (2013) The Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Drama, Abridged Edition, edited by Xiaomei Chen (2013) Natsume Sōseki, Light and Dark, translated by John Nathan (2013) Seirai Yūichi, Ground Zero, Nagasaki: Stories, translated by Paul Warham (2015) Hideo Furukawa, Horses, Horses, in the End the Light Remains Pure: A Tale That Begins with Fukushima, translated by Doug Slaymaker with Akiko Takenaka (2016) Abe Kōbō, Beasts Head for Home: A Novel, translated by Richard F. Calichman (2017) Yi Mun-yol, Meeting with My Brother: A Novella, translated by Heinz Insu Fenkl with Yoosup Chang (2017) Ch’ae Manshik, Sunset: A Ch’ae Manshik Reader, edited and translated by Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton (2017) Tanizaki Jun’ichiro, In Black and White: A Novel, translated by Phyllis I. Lyons (2018) Yi T’aejun, Dust and Other Stories, translated by Janet Poole (2018) Tsering Döndrup, The Handsome Monk and Other Stories, translated by Christopher Peacock (2019) Kimura Yūsuke, Sacred Cesium Ground and Isa’s Deluge: Two Novellas of Japan’s 3/11 Disaster, translated by Doug Slaymaker (2019) Wang Anyi, Fu Ping: A Novel, translated by Howard Goldblatt (2019) Paek Nam-nyong, Friend: A Novel from North Korea, translated by Immanuel Kim (2020) Endō Shūsaku, Sachiko: A Novel, translated by Van Gessel (2020)

History, Society, and Culture Carol Gluck, Editor Takeuchi Yoshimi, What Is Modernity? Writings of Takeuchi Yoshimi, edited and translated, with an introduction, by Richard F. Calichman (2005) Contemporary Japanese Thought, edited and translated by Richard F. Calichman (2005) Overcoming Modernity, edited and translated by Richard F. Calichman (2008) Natsume Sōseki, Theory of Literature and Other Critical Writings, edited and translated by Michael Bourdaghs, Atsuko Ueda, and Joseph A. Murphy (2009) Kojin Karatani, History and Repetition, edited by Seiji M. Lippit (2012) The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory, edited by Lydia H. Liu, Rebecca E. Karl, and Dorothy Ko (2013) Yoshiaki Yoshimi, Grassroots Fascism: The War Experience of the Japanese People, translated by Ethan Mark (2015)