Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories (27 page)

“Pardon me, Captain. Please go ahead.”

“No, that's all right,” Captain Fujita said with an odd grin.

Awano, a man with a trim moustache, had been talking to Admiral Sasaki. “You know, Horikawa,” he said to Yasukichi, “in Naval protocol, the higher the rank the farther back the position.
You
certainly wouldn't come behind Captain Fujita.” Awano was smiling too, and Yasukichi thought for a moment that he might be joking. But, embarrassingly enough, there was the affable Lieutenant Tanaka far ahead in the procession. A
few quick strides brought Yasukichi up alongside the young officer.

“Lovely day. Have you just joined us?” Tanaka spoke with such good cheer he seemed more a wedding guest than a mourner.

“No, I was back there.” Yasukichi explained his change of place, which brought a hearty laugh from Tanaka that seemed to threaten the dignity of the cortege.

“Is this your first military funeral?”

“No, I was at Lieutenant Shigeno's and Lieutenant Kimura's.”

“Where did you march then?”

“Way behind the Headmaster, of course.”

“Oh, great—that made you an Admiral!”

The procession had entered a poor neighborhood not far from the temple. Yasukichi went on talking with the Lieutenant, but he took careful note of the people who lined the route. Experienced funeral-watchers from childhood, they had developed an uncommon talent for estimating the cost of a procession. The funeral for the father of the mathematics teacher Kiriyama had come this way on the day before summer vacation. Beneath the eaves of one house had stood an old man dressed for the hot weather. Arms bare, shading his eyes with a fan, he cried out, “Aha! Fifteen yen for this one!” Perhaps today, too— but unfortunately there was no roadside talent today. One sight would stay with Yasukichi, however: an
Ō
moto priest with an albino child—his own, it seemed—perched on his shoulders. Yasukichi toyed with the idea of one day writing a story about the townsfolk here. He could call it “Funerals.”
⁴

But Lieutenant Tanaka would not stop wagging his tongue. “I see you have a story out this month—‘Saint Christopher' or something. I saw a review in this morning's
Jiji
—or maybe it was the
Yomiuri
. I'll show it to you later. It's in my coat pocket.”

“That won't be necessary, thanks.”

“You don't write criticism, do you? That's one thing I'd like to try my hand at, maybe write something on Shakespeare's
Hamlet
. You know, the character of Hamlet is really…”

Epiphany for Yasukichi: it was no accident that the world was full of critics.

The cortege finally entered the grounds of the temple, which overlooked the sea. The calm surface of the water shone through the pine trees at the back of the temple grounds. This must have been a tranquil place ordinarily, but now it was swarming with the squad of cadets who had formed the vanguard of the procession. Yasukichi left his new patent-leather shoes at the entrance to the priests' quarters and walked down a long, sunny corridor to the mourners' section in an old chapel with new floor mats.

The mourners were divided into two groups—the family in a row on one side, and the guests facing them. The old gentleman seated nearest the coffin at the head of the family row was probably Lieutenant Honda's father. He had that same vulture like face, but his stark white hair made him look even more ferocious than the son. The young man in university-student uniform seated next to him was certainly Lieutenant Honda's brother. The young lady in the third place was almost too good-looking to be the Lieutenant's sister. Next to her— but no one else in the family had distinguishing characteristics.

At the head of the guests' front row was Admiral Sasaki, and next to him Captain Fujita. It was directly behind the Captain, in the second row of guests, that Yasukichi lowered the seat of his trousers to the mat—not in the formal position on his heels like the Headmaster and the Captain, but cross-legged to keep his legs from going numb.

The sutra chanting began immediately. Just as he liked the old Shinnai style
⁵
of singing, Yasukichi enjoyed the chanting of the different Buddhist sects. But the degeneracy of most Tokyo-area temples was sadly evident in even this most basic discipline. Long ago, it was said, the deities from Kimpusen, Kumano, and Sumiyoshi came to hear the High Priest Do
ō
myo
ō
chanting the sutra in the garden of the Ho
ō
rinji Temple.
⁶
But with the arrival of American civilization, music of such ineffable beauty had departed this polluted world forever. And now the bespectacled chief priest—to say nothing of his four disciples—was reading
off the Daibabon as if it were something he had memorized from a government-approved textbook.

Soon the chanting ended and Admiral Sasaki approached the coffin. It rested in the entrance to this, the main chapel, facing the altar and covered in white figured satin. Before it stood a table decked with artificial lotus blossoms and flickering candles, among which lay cases holding Lieutenant Honda's medals and ribbons. After a bow toward the coffin, Admiral Sasaki opened the formally inscribed text of the eulogy. This, of course, was the literary gem that Yasukichi had composed three days earlier. It contained nothing of which he need feel ashamed. Such sensitivities had been scraped away from him long ago, like the surface of an old razor strop. And yet it was hardly comforting for him to be cast in the role of author of the eulogy in this comedy of a funeral—worse still to have that fact thrust in his face. The Headmaster cleared his throat, and Yasukichi's gaze dropped instantly to his knees.

The Headmaster began to read in subdued tones. Beneath a delicate patina of experience, his voice surged with a pathos beyond description. It was unthinkable that he could be reading another man's text. Yasukichi had to admire his acting ability. The hall was hushed, the mourners still. The Headmaster read on, the sorrow in his voice deepening—“a man of inborn brilliance, affectionate to his brothers and sisters”—when someone in the family group stifled a laugh. Once it started, it grew in volume. Yasukichi felt a rush of horror and strained to see past Captain Fujita's shoulder. But what he had taken for desecrating laughter, he discovered, was in fact the sound of weeping.

It was Lieutenant Honda's sister. Half hidden beneath the swirls of an old-fashioned hairdo, the lovely young girl pressed her face into a silk handkerchief. The brother, too, so stolid-looking a moment ago, was now sniffling and fighting back his tears. The father quietly blew his nose in one tissue after another. Yasukichi's first reaction to this scene was one of surprise. Then came the satisfaction of the playwright who has succeeded in wringing tears from his audience. But in the end
he felt an emotion of far greater magnitude: a bitter self-reproach, a sense of wrongdoing for which there could be no penitence. All unknowing, he had tramped with muddy feet into the sacred recesses of the human heart. Yasukichi hung his head for the first time in the hour-long course of the funeral…. You, Lieutenant Honda's family, could not know that this English instructor even existed. But in Yasukichi's heart a Raskolnikov in clown's costume has been kneeling in the muddy roadway these eight long years, begging your forgiveness.

He had met Captain Fujita as they were leaving the temple. The captain congratulated him on the excellence of his eulogy. Particularly appropriate to the death of Lieutenant Honda, he said, was the phrase “a swift and glorious end, like the shattering of a precious stone.” After the sight of the family in tears, this praise for his use of a military cliché was enough to reduce Yasukichi to despair. But there had been more. The ever-amiable Lieutenant Tanaka took the train with Yasukichi and showed him the
Yomiuri
review of his story by the then-fashionable critic N. After a thorough panning of the piece, N delivered the
coup de grâce
to Yasukichi himself: “The last thing we need in the literary world is the spare-time jottings of a Navy school teacher!”

The eulogy he wrote in less than half an hour evoked that amazing response, while the story he had spent endless evenings polishing by lamplight produced not a fraction of the effect he hoped for. Yasukichi retained the composure to laugh off N's critique, but his current situation was not something he could
dismiss with a laugh. His eulogies worked, his stories failed miserably: it was funny for everyone but Yasukichi himself. When would Fate be kind enough to ring down the curtain on this sad comedy?

Yasukichi glanced up. Pine boughs stretched across the empty sky, and in them hung a copper-colored moon devoid of radiance. As he stood looking at the moon, Yasukichi felt the urge to urinate. The lane was hushed and empty, enclosed on either side by the bamboo fences. Aiming at the base of the right-hand fence, Yasukichi enjoyed a long, lonely pee.

He was still at it when the fence creaked and began to pull away from him. What he had thought to be a section of the fence was in fact a gate. And through it strode a man with a moustache. Unable to stop himself, Yasukichi turned aside as discreetly as he could.

“Oh, no,” the man sighed, as if dismay itself had become a human voice. When he heard this, Yasukichi discovered that the sun was too far down for him to see his own stream.

Then I woke up. The light from the next room was shining into the mosquito net. My wife seemed to be changing the diaper of our seven-month-old baby boy, who was crying the whole time. I turned my back to them and tried to get more sleep.

I heard my wife say, “No, Taka,
²
I don't want you to get sick again.”

“Is something wrong with him?” I asked.

“I think his stomach is a little funny.”

This baby tended to get sick much more often than our older boy; I felt both worried and ready to ignore it as more of the same.

“Have Dr. S
³
look at him tomorrow,” I said.

“I was thinking of calling the doctor now.”

When the baby stopped crying, I went back to a sound sleep.

I still remembered my dream when I woke in the morning. I suspected that “Ens
ō
” was Hirose Ens
ō
, but Kyokus
ō
and Mus
ō
were probably imaginary. Come to think of it, there was a storyteller named Nans
ō
. I thought about these “-s
ō
” names more than I did about the baby's sickness, but that started to change when my wife came home from Dr. S's.

“Another upset stomach, he says. He'll come to look at him later.” She spoke almost angrily, cradling the baby in one arm.

“Fever?”

“Just a little. 37.6. But he didn't have
any
last night.”

I went up to my study and set to work. As usual, I made little progress, not necessarily because of the baby's sickness. Soon a hot, steamy rain began to fall, rustling the trees in the garden. With my half-written story lying on the desk before me, I smoked one cigarette after another.

Dr. S came once before noon and once more in the evening. On his second visit he gave Takashi an enema. Takashi stared hard at the light bulb while this was being done to him. The liquid of the enema soon washed a thin blackish mucus out of him. I felt as if I were looking at his very illness.

“How's he going to do, Doctor?”

“Oh, it's nothing. Just don't stop icing his forehead. And don't hold him too much.”

With that advice, the doctor left.

I continued working into the night and finally got to bed around one in the morning. Coming out of the toilet just before that, I heard a knocking sound in the pitch-dark kitchen.

“Who's there?”

“It's me.” The voice belonged to my mother.

“What are you doing?”

“Cracking ice.”

Embarrassed at my own stupidity, I said, “Why don't you turn the light on?”

“Don't worry. I can do it by touch.”

I ignored this and switched the light on. She looked as if she had just crawled out of bed, her rumpled sleeping gown held closed by a slim sash. No wonder she had wanted the light off: this was no way to be seen, even at home. She was clumsily smashing ice with a hammer. The electric light glinted off the sharp water-washed angles of the smashed ice.

By morning, however, Takashi's fever had climbed to just over 39. Dr. S came before noon and gave him another enema. I helped him with the job, hoping to see less mucus this time. When he withdrew the nozzle, however, much more mucus came with it than the night before.

“So
much
!” my wife exclaimed to no one in particular. The
unseemly loudness of her voice made her seem like a schoolgirl again,
⁴
as if seven years had suddenly dropped off her age. I glanced at Dr. S.

“It's dysentery, isn't it, doctor?”

“No, it isn't dysentery. The children's variety never happens before the infant is weaned.”

Dr. S was surprisingly calm.

After he left, I went back to work. I was writing a story for a special issue of the
Sunday Mainichi
, and the deadline was the next morning. I had little enthusiasm for the piece, but I forced myself to keep my pen moving. Takashi's crying was getting on my nerves, though, and no sooner would he stop than his elder brother Hiroshi would start wailing.

Nor was that the only thing that grated on my nerves. A young man I had never met before arrived in the afternoon to ask for a loan. “I'm a manual laborer, but Mr. C wrote me this letter of introduction to you, so I was hoping you could help me,” he blurted out. I had no more than two or three yen in my purse at the time, so I handed him two books I could spare and told him to turn them into cash. The young man immediately opened the books and examined the publication data. “This one says ‘Not for Sale.' Can you get money for ‘Not for Sale' books?” I felt sorry for myself for having to put up with this, but I simply answered that he should be able to sell it. “Do you think so? All right, then, I guess I'll be going.” Clearly dubious, the young man left without a word of thanks.

Dr. S came again that evening to do an enema. This time the volume of mucus had decreased significantly. “Oh, good, there's so much less,” my mother said as she offered the doctor hot water to wash his hands. Her triumphant look almost suggested that she herself was responsible for the improvement. Not exactly relieved, I nevertheless felt something close to relief. This had to do not only with the amount of mucus but Takashi's color and behavior, which were both normal.

“The fever will probably go down tomorrow,” Dr. S said to my mother as he washed his hands, looking pleased. “Fortunately, he doesn't seem to be needing to throw up, either.”

When I awoke the next morning, my aunt was already awake
in the next room and folding up her mosquito net. I thought I heard her say something about Takashi over the clanking of the net's hardware. “What about Takashi?” I asked, my head still in a fog.

“He's much worse. I think we have to take him to the hospital.”

I sat up in bed. This took me off guard after yesterday's improvement. “Doctor S?”

“He's here now. Hurry up. Get out of bed.” She wore a strangely stiff expression as if hiding her emotions. I went immediately to wash my face. The weather outside looked bad, overcast as usual. Somebody had thrown two gold-banded lilies into the bucket in the bathing room. I felt as if their fragrance and their brown pollen were going to stick to my skin.

In the space of a single night, Takashi's eyes had become sunken. My wife said that when she went to pick him up this morning, his head dropped back and he vomited some kind of white stuff. He was yawning constantly as well, another bad sign. I felt a stab in the heart. At the same time, I felt a wave of revulsion. Dr. S was kneeling by the baby's pillow, mute, a cigarette dangling from his lips. He looked up at me and said, “I have to talk to you.”

I showed him upstairs to my study. We sat on the matted floor, the unlighted hibachi between us. “I don't think it's bad enough to kill him,” he began, “but his whole digestive tract has shut down.” The only thing to do was starve him for a few days. “Probably the most convenient thing would be to put him in the hospital.”

I suspected that Takashi was in much greater danger than Dr. S was saying, that it was probably too late to do anything for him, even in the hospital, but this was no time to start confronting him with such doubts. I asked him to have the baby admitted. “Let's make it U—— Hospital, then,” he said, “it's so close by.” The doctor refused a cup of tea and went off to telephone the hospital. I called my wife to come upstairs. We decided to have my aunt go to the hospital with them.

This was my day to receive visitors. I had four starting first thing in the morning. I was conscious of my wife and aunt
hurriedly preparing for the hospital as I carried on polite conversation with my first visitor. I suddenly became aware of something that felt like a grain of sand on the tip of my tongue. I had recently had a tooth filled and I wondered if some of the cement had broken off. Picking it out, I saw that it was a piece of the actual tooth. This gave me a superstitious twinge, but I went on smoking and trading remarks with my guest about a samisen that was up for sale. It was said to have belonged to the painter H
ō
itsu.
⁵

Next came the young laborer who had called on me the day before. Standing in the entryway, he announced that he had been unable to get more than Â¥1.20 for the books I gave him and started pressing me for another four or five yen. I refused, but he showed no sign of leaving. I finally lost my temper and shouted at him, “I don't have time to stand here listening to this nonsense. Get out!”

“All right, but give me streetcar fare at least. Just fifty sen.”

When he saw that this wasn't going to work either, he slammed the door and retreated through the gate. I promised myself never to respond to any such requests for money in the future.

Before long, my four visitors had become five. The fifth was a young scholar of French literature. As he entered my study, I excused myself and went downstairs to see what the situation was. My aunt was ready to leave, pacing up and down the veranda holding Takashi, whose thick wrap made him look chubby. I pressed my lips against his pale forehead, which was quite hot. His eyelids were twitching as well.

Instead of commenting on this, I asked in a near-whisper, “Did you call the rickshaws?”

“Pardon me? The rickshaws are already here,” she said with unusual formality as if speaking to a stranger.

At that point my wife came out. She had changed her clothes and was carrying a down comforter and a basket. She knelt before me with her hands on the floor mats. “We will be going now,” she announced with strange seriousness.

I suggested she change Takashi into his new hat—a summer hat I had bought him a few days earlier.

“I did that,” she said, peeking into the mirror on the clothes chest and pulling her kimono straight at the neck. I didn't stay to see them off but went back upstairs.

With the new visitor, I talked about George Sand among other things. The canopies of the two rickshaws were visible through the young green leaves of the garden trees. Then suddenly they passed before my eyes, swaying above the fence. “The early nineteenth-century writers—Balzac, Sand—are far superior to the writers of the late nineteenth-century, don't you think?” I remember with absolute clarity the passion with which the young man said this.

The stream of visitors continued into the afternoon. The sun was going down when I finally found the time to go to the hospital. The overcast skies had begun dropping rain. While I was changing into a better kimono, I ordered the maid to put out my rain clogs. Just then the Osaka editor N showed up to collect my manuscript. He wore mud-smeared boots, and his overcoat glittered with rain drops. I received him in the entryway, where I explained to him how the situation had prevented me from writing anything.

He expressed his sympathy and concluded, “I guess I'll have to give up on this one.” I felt as if I had coerced his sympathy. I felt, too, that I had exploited my son's critical condition as an excuse.

N had barely left the front door when my aunt arrived from the hospital. Takashi had thrown up his milk twice, she said. Fortunately, his brain did not seem to have been affected by the illness. She went on to talk about what a nice person the nurse was, that tonight my wife's mother would be staying at the hospital with the baby, and so forth. “As soon as we got Taka there, they gave us a bunch of flowers, supposedly from some Sunday school pupils. I don't know, it was creepy, like for a funeral.” This reminded me of my broken tooth of that morning, but I said nothing.

It was dark by the time I left the house, and a misty rain was falling. As I walked out through the gate, I realized I was wearing fair-weather clogs, not the rain clogs I had asked the maid to put out for me. To make matters worse, the left one's
thong was loose in front. I couldn't help feeling that if the thong snapped my son's life would end, but I was too annoyed to go back and change clogs. Angry at the maid, I walked along with great care to avoid overturning the loose clog.

I got to the hospital after nine. Soaking in water in a wash basin outside Takashi's door were the flowers my aunt had mentioned—five or six lilies and pinks. Inside, the room itself was almost too dark to see faces: someone had put a piece of cloth over the light bulb. Still in their kimono, my wife and her mother were lying on a futon with Takashi between them. He was sound asleep, pillowed on my mother-in-law's arm. When she saw me come in, my wife sat up on her heels and, with a bow, whispered, “Thank you for coming.” Her mother said the same thing to me. They seemed almost cheerful, which took me by surprise. I felt somewhat relieved and knelt down by their pillows. My wife said she was suffering doubly: since she wasn't allowed to give Takashi her milk, she had to listen to him cry for it; and her breasts were so full they hurt. “A rubber nipple doesn't help, either. I finally had to let him suck my tongue.”

“Now he's drinking
my
milk,” my mother-in-law said with a laugh, showing me her withered breasts. “He sucks so
hard
—look how red I am.”

I found myself laughing with her. “But really, he's doing much better than I expected. I figured he'd be done for by now.”

“Taka? Taka's just fine. We're cleaning him out, that's all. His fever will go down tomorrow for sure.”

“Thanks to the Sainted Founder's awesome powers, no doubt,” my wife teased her mother, a believer in the Lotus Sutra.
⁶
Her mother seemed not to hear her, though, as she pursed her lips and blew hard at Takashi's head, probably hoping to bring his fever down that way.