Blue Bamboo: Tales by Dazai Osamu (10 page)

After explaining everything to his parents, who stared at him with mouths agape, he finally convinced them to accept what had happened and to close their mouths. That night, leaving only a note that said “Gone on a journey,” he left the house abruptly. A full moon hung in the sky. The outline of the moon looked a bit blurred, but it wasn’t because of mist; it was because his eyes were so narrow.

Ambling aimlessly along, Taro reflected upon the riddle of good looks. Why should a face that would have been handsome long ago seem so ridiculous now? It just didn’t make sense. What was wrong with the way he looked? This was an awfully difficult riddle, however, and though Taro pondered it as he passed through the woods outside the neighboring village, as he made his way to the castle town, and even as he crossed the border out of Tsugaru, he was still nowhere near coming up with an answer.

Incidentally, it’s said that the secret to Taro’s wizardry involved leaning languidly against a pillar or fence with folded arms and muttering the incantation, “What a bore, what a bore, what a bore,” again and again, hundreds of times, until he entered a state of egolessness.

J
IROBEI THE
F
IGHTER

Once upon a time, in the town of Mishima, a stopover point on the Tokaido Road, there lived a man by the name of Shikamaya Ippei. Ippei’s family had been in the business of brewing saké since his great-grandfather’s generation. It’s said that saké reflects the personality of the brewer, and Ippei’s saké, which was called Waterwheel, was crystal clear and extremely dry. Ippei had fourteen children—six boys and eight girls. The eldest son was rather slow when it came to understanding the ways of the world, as a result of which he did just as Ippei told him and put the family business before all other things in life. Though he had no confidence in his own ideas, the eldest son would occasionally hazard an opinion in his father’s presence. His courage would fail him even as he spoke, however, and he’d end up retracting his own argument, saying things like: “At least, such would appear to be the case, but then again, one can only conclude that this line of thought is riddled with misconceptions, and I’m sure it’s quite wrong, but what do you think, Father? It somehow seems to me I’ve got it all wrong.” To which Ippei would issue a terse reply: “You’ve got it all wrong.”

Matters were a bit different for the second son, Jirobei. There was in his nature a tendency to display a taste for fairness and justice—not the “fairness and justice” that politicians are forever carrying on about, but fairness and justice in the true, original sense of the words. As a consequence, the people of Mishima regarded him as a troublemaker and kept their distance.

Jirobei disliked what is known as the tradesman spirit. The world, he maintained, wasn’t an abacus. Convinced that the only things of true worth were those without any monetary value whatsoever, he spent most of his days drinking. He refused to drink the saké his family brewed, however, having seen with his own eyes the excessive profit they turned on the stuff. In fact, if he discovered that he’d inadvertently drained a cup of Waterwheel, he would promptly stick a finger down his throat and force it back up. Day after day Jirobei wandered about the town drinking, but his father, Ippei, never reproached him for it. Ippei was a clearheaded fellow, and it pleased him that at least one of his many children had turned out to be a ne’er-do-well: it lent color to the group. He was also the head of the Mishima fire brigade, an honorary post to which he hoped one day to have Jirobei succeed him. Farsighted man that he was, Ippei held that if his son were to continue to gallivant about like a wild horse, it would only help him to accumulate the qualifications required of the future head of the fire brigade, and he turned a blind eye to his second son’s scandalous behavior.

In the summer of his twenty-second year, Jirobei decided that, come what may, he was going to make himself into a formidable fighter. There was a reason for this.

On August 15 every year a festival was held at the Great Shrine of Mishima, and tens of thousands of people—not only the townsfolk, but residents of the surrounding mountains and nearby fishing villages—would gather there, all with colorful festival fans stuck in their sashes. For longer than anyone could remember, it had always rained on the day of the festival. Mishima people have a taste for flamboyance, however, and would stand in the rain flapping their fans, drenched to the skin and clenching their teeth to endure the cold as they watched the wheeled dancing platforms and floats passing by and marveled at the fireworks display.

The day of the festival the year Jirobei turned twenty-two dawned fair and sunny. A single black-eared kite flitted about above the town, lifting its voice in song, and the people who came to the shrine to worship offered thanks first to the god of the shrine and then to the kite and the clear blue sky. It was a little past noon when black clouds suddenly billowed up on the northeastern horizon, and in a matter of seconds a shadow had fallen over Mishima and a moist, heavy wind was crawling and swirling through the streets. Moments later, as if summoned by that wind, large drops of water began to spill from the heavens, and finally the rain, unable to contain itself any longer, poured down in a great torrent.

Jirobei was drinking saké in a shop across from the gate of the Great Shrine, watching the girls outside running for shelter with little mincing steps, when suddenly he rose up in his seat. He had spotted someone he knew—the daughter of the calligraphy teacher who lived across the street from him. Dressed in a heavy red kimono with a floral pattern, she ran five or six steps, slowed to a walk, ran five or six steps, then slowed to a walk again. Jirobei dashed outside, parting the shop-curtain that hung at the entrance, and spoke to the girl, saying: “Let me get you an umbrella. You don’t want to ruin that nice kimono.” The girl stopped and slowly twisted her slender neck to look at him. When she saw who it was, a blush spread over her soft white cheeks. “Wait one second,” Jirobei said and, ducking back inside, bullied the shopkeeper into lending him a rough, oil-paper umbrella. Ha, calligraphy teacher’s daughter! No doubt your old man, your old lady, and you yourself think I’m a good-for-nothing, a drunk, a rogue, and a scoundrel. Well, you’ve got another think coming. I’m the sort of man who, if I feel sorry for somebody, I’ll see to it that they get an umbrella, like this, or anything else they might need. How does that grab you? Jirobei was inwardly shouting this challenge as he headed back to the street. When he flipped the shop-curtain aside again, however, the girl was gone; there was nothing but the rain, pouring down even harder now, and a stream of people shoving and jostling one another as they ran past. A chorus of catcalls—
Woo! Woo!
—came from inside the shop, where six or seven local toughs were drinking. Jirobei stood there dangling the umbrella in his right hand and thinking: When you find yourself looking ridiculous, reasoning isn’t worth a damn. If a man offends you, strike him down. If a horse offends you, strike it down. That’s the way to be, he told himself. And from that day on, for the next three years, Jirobei stealthily trained in the art of fighting.

What fighting requires, first and foremost, is courage. Jirobei cultivated his with saké. He was drinking more than ever now. His eyes grew as cold and cloudy as those of a dead fish, and his forehead developed three greasy furrows, which only added to the brazen insolence of his features. His movements became ponderous and deliberate, so that just to lift his pipe to his lips for a single puff he would swing his arm around from behind in a great, sweeping, slow-motion arc. As far as appearances went, at least, he seemed a man with nerves of steel.

Next was the manner of speaking. He decided to speak in a fathomless kind of murmur. Before fighting, of course, it’s customary to recite some sort of cocky, clever-sounding threat, and Jirobei agonized over his choice of words. Clichés rang hollow; at length he settled upon something original: “Aren’t you making a bit of a mistake? Or perhaps you’re joking. You’d look awfully funny with the tip of your nose all purple and swollen. It would take a hundred days to return to normal. I do think you’re making a mistake.” In order to be able to deliver these lines smoothly at any given moment, he recited them thirty times each night after going to bed. And as he recited the words, he remembered to refrain from sneering or glaring any more than necessary—maintaining, if anything, a hint of a smile on his lips.

Now he was ready to begin the actual training. Jirobei was opposed to carrying weapons. Winning a fight with weapons didn’t make you a man; if he couldn’t gain victory with his bare hands, it just wouldn’t feel right. He began his research with the study of how to form a fist. It occurred to him that leaving the thumb outside the fist, unprotected, could result in a sprain. After experimenting with various methods, he tucked his thumb inside and covered it with the knuckles of the other four fingers. This made for a wonderfully hard fist, and when he struck himself on the kneecap with it his hand didn’t hurt at all; he felt such pain in his knee, however, that he nearly keeled over. This was a tremendous breakthrough. Next, he set out to make the skin of his knuckles as thick and hard as possible. Each morning when he awoke he clenched his fist in the manner he’d discovered and punched the hardwood tobacco tray next to his pillow. Walking about the streets of the town, he lashed out at all the stone walls and wooden fences he passed. He pounded the table at the shop where he drank, and pummeled the cast-iron hearth in his house. He spent a year on this stage of the training, and by the time his tobacco tray was falling to pieces, all the walls and fences in sight were riddled with holes of various sizes, the table at the drinking shop had developed an enormous crack, and the hearth in his house was covered with an almost fashionable pattern of dents and bumps, Jirobei was finally sure of the hardness of his fists. He had also discovered during this stage of the training the secret to throwing a punch. Punching straight out, piston-like, was about three times as effective as swinging from the side, he found. And it was about four times as effective if you rotated your arm one hundred eighty degrees as you punched. The fist would dig into your opponent’s body like the tip of a screw.

The following year he trained in the pine forest behind his house, the site of the former Kokubun Temple. There he punched at an old, dried tree stump that was shaped like a man and stood about five-and-a-half feet tall. Having pelted his own body with blows from head to foot, he had ascertained that the most painful spots were the solar plexus and the space between the eyebrows. He’d also contemplated experimenting with the area that is traditionally said to be the most sensitive and vital spot on a man’s body, but eventually ruled out low blows as being beneath a man of his dignity. He knew that the shins, too, were quite vulnerable to pain, but kicking was the only feasible means of attacking the shins, and Jirobei shrank from the thought of using his feet in a fight; such tactics struck him as cowardly and underhanded. No, he would concentrate exclusively on the solar plexus and the space between the eyes. With a long knife he carved on the stump triangular marks that corresponded to these targets and punched away at them day after day. “Aren’t you making a bit of a mistake? Or perhaps you’re joking. You’d look awfully funny with the tip of your nose all purple and swollen. It would take a hundred days to return to normal. I do think you’re making a mistake...” Then, suddenly, a shot between the eyes! A left to the solar plexus!

After a year of this training, the triangular marks on the stump were buried at the bottoms of two round depressions as deep as tea bowls. Jirobei took stock. Now I can hit the spot every time, he told himself—a hundred shots, a hundred bull’s-eyes. But that’s no reason to relax. My opponent won’t be standing still, like this stump. He’ll be moving... It was then that Jirobei’s eye was caught by the waterwheels that stood at virtually every bend in the road. Dozens of full-bodied, limpid streams, fed by the snows melting on Mount Fuji, babbled past the foundations and under the verandas and through the gardens of Mishima’s houses, and every night, on his way home from drinking, Jirobei would subjugate one of the slow-turning, moss-covered waterwheels that harnessed these streams, whacking away, one by one, at the sixteen revolving blades. At first it was hard to find the range, and he didn’t do much damage, but soon the sight of immobile waterwheels dangling their broken blades became common about the town.

Jirobei bathed himself frequently in the cold waters of the streams. Sometimes he dived to the bottom and crouched there, motionless. He was taking into consideration the possibility of accidentally slipping and falling into the water during a fight. It could happen, what with streams crisscrossing the entire town. As an added precaution he tied his cotton bellyband an extra inch tighter to guard against letting excessive amounts of saké into his stomach, knowing that if he got too drunk, his legs might unexpectedly fail him.

Three years had passed. Thrice the festival at the Great Shrine had come and gone. The training was complete. Jirobei looked more stolid and imposing than ever and was so muscle-bound that it took him a full minute just to turn his head to the left or right.

Relatives, being tied by blood, are quick to notice changes in one another. Ippei knew that Jirobei was up to something. He had no idea exactly what sort of training his son was engaged in, but he sensed that he’d become a man to be reckoned with. Setting in motion the scheme he’d cherished for so long, he arranged for Jirobei to be named his successor in the honorary post as head of the fire brigade. Jirobei, by virtue of his unaccountably grave and commanding demeanor, immediately earned the trust and allegiance of the fire fighters; they called him “Chief’ and treated him with the utmost respect, the sad upshot of which was that opportunities to challenge someone to a fight simply never presented themselves. Jirobei was disconsolate to think that at this rate he might go to his grave without ever having partaken in a brawl. Each night his arms, bulging with the muscles he’d acquired through his rigorous training, itched maddeningly, and he scratched at them in a wretched frame of mind. Finally, out of sheer deviltry and desperation, and in hopes of creating an occasion to display his powers, he had his entire back tattooed. The tattoo was of a blood-red rose some six inches across, around which were gathered five long, slender, mackerel-like fish that poked at the petals with pointed bills and were themselves encircled by a pattern of rippling blue wavelets that lapped at Jirobei’s ribs and spilled over onto his chest. So impressive was this tattoo that, far from exposing Jirobei to the insults and provocative comments he was prepared for, it merely served to spread his fame up and down the Tokaido Road, and soon he was a hero not only to the firefighters but to all the ruffians and layabouts in town. Now his prospects for a fight were nil, and it was more than he could bear.

But then, just when he’d all but given up hope, a ray of light appeared. There was in Mishima at that time a wealthy saké brewer named Jinshuya Joroku, the Shikamayas’ greatest rival and competitor. Joroku’s saké was cloyingly sweet and darkish in color, and he himself was no exception to the rule that a brewer resembles his saké. A blackguard and an incorrigible womanizer, he was unsatisfied with the four mistresses he already had and was doing all he could think of to increase the number to five. It so happened that the arrow of his desire described an arc that passed over the Shikamaya home and pierced the grass-thatched roof of the calligraphy teacher’s modest abode across the way. The calligraphy teacher didn’t give in easily to Joroku’s demands concerning his daughter. Such was his despair on hearing them, in fact, that he twice attempted hara-kiri and would have succeeded had he not been discovered and restrained by members of his household. Jirobei, having caught wind of this unjust state of affairs, awaited his chance, his muscles squirming and itching for action.