Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories (30 page)

From where he stood, the plaza was beginning to darken. He walked into the open space feeling slightly feverish. The electric lights in the windows of several large office buildings flashed against the clear, faintly silvery sky.

He stood by the sliding screen, looking down at the midwife in her white surgical gown washing the baby. Whenever soap got in its eyes, the baby would wrinkle up its sad little face and let out a loud wail. It looked like a baby rat, and its odor stirred him to these irrepressible thoughts—

He stood in the doorway, watching some grimy Chinese men playing Mahjongg in the moonlight where figs bloomed. Back in his room, he started reading
The Confessions of a Fool
beneath a squat lamp. He had barely read two pages when he caught himself with a sour smile. So—the lies that Strindberg wrote to his lover, the Countess, were hardly different from his own.

He was nearly overwhelmed by peeling Buddhas, heavenly beings, horses and lotus blossoms. Looking up at them, he forgot everything—even his good fortune at having escaped the clutches of the crazy girl.

He was walking down a back street with a friend when a hooded rickshaw came charging in their direction. He was surprised to recognize the passenger as the woman he had been with the night before. Her face seemed to be bathed in moonglow even now, in the daylight. With his friend present, they could not exchange even ordinary greetings.

The country road stank of cow manure in the sun. Mopping his sweat, he struggled up the steep hill. The ripened wheat on either side of the road gave off a pleasant scent.

It was a cast-iron saké bottle. With its finely incised lines, it had managed at some point to teach him the beauty of “form.”

In the big bed he talked with her about many things. Beyond the bedroom window it was raining. The blossoms of the crinum tree had begun to rot in the rain, It seemed. Her face, as always, looked as if it were in moonlight, yet talking with her was not entirely free of boredom. He lay on his stomach, had himself a quiet smoke, and realized he had now been with her for seven years.

The odor was something close to overripe apricots. Catching a hint of it as he walked through the charred ruins, he found himself thinking such thoughts as these:
The smell of corpses rotting in the sun is not as bad as I would have expected
. When he stood before a pond where bodies were piled upon bodies, however, he discovered that the old Chinese expression, “burning the nose,” was no mere sensory exaggeration of grief and horror. What especially moved him was the corpse of a child of twelve or thirteen. He felt something like envy as he looked at it, recalling such expressions as “Those whom the gods love die young.”
²⁰
Both his sister and his half-brother had lost their houses to fire. His sister's husband, though, was on a suspended sentence for perjury.
²¹

He had a quarrel with his half-brother that ended in a physical brawl. True, he was a constant source of pressure for this younger brother, who in turn cost him a good deal of freedom. Relatives were always telling the young man, “be like your brother,” but for him, this was like being bound hand and foot. Locked in each other's grip, they fell near the edge of the veranda. He still remembers the one crape myrtle bush in the garden by the veranda—its load of brilliant red blossoms beneath a sky about to drop its rainy burden.

From the window of Voltaire's house, he found himself looking up toward a high mountain. There was nothing to be seen on the glacier-topped mountain, not even a vulture. There was, however, a short Russian man
²²
doggedly climbing the trail.

You who more than anyone obeyed the Ten Commandments
Are you who more than anyone broke the Ten Commandments.

You who more than anyone loved the masses
Are you who more than anyone despised the masses.

You who more than anyone burned with ideals
Are you who more than anyone knew reality.

You are what our Eastern world has bred—
An electric locomotive that smells of flowering grasses.

At thirty he found himself loving a piece of vacant land. It contained only some moss and scattered bits of brick and tile. To his eyes, however, it was exactly like a Cezanne landscape.

He wanted to live life so intensely that he could die at any moment without regrets. But still, out of deference to his adoptive parents and his aunt, he kept himself in check. This created both light and dark sides to his life. Seeing a comic puppet in a Western tailor's shop made him wonder how close he himself was to such a figure. His self beyond consciousness, however—his “second self”—had long since put such feelings into a story.
²³

He was walking through a field of plume grass with a university student. “You fellows still have a strong will to live, I suppose?”

He met a woman he could grapple with intellectually. He barely extricated himself from the crisis by writing a number of lyric poems, some under the title “Woman of Hokuriku.” These
conveyed a sense of heartbreak as when one knocks away a brilliant coating of snow frozen onto a tree trunk.

Hat of sedge dancing in the wind:
How could it fail to drop into the road?
What need I fear for my name?
For your name alone do I fear.

They were on the balcony of a hotel surrounded by trees in bud. He was drawing pictures to amuse a little boy—the only son of the crazy girl, with whom he had broken off relations seven years earlier.

He was in the corner of a café, chatting with a friend. The friend was eating a baked apple and talking about the recent cold weather when he himself began to sense a certain contradiction in the conversation.

Why do you attack the present social system?

He suffered an onslaught of insomnia. His physical strength began to fade as well. The doctors gave him various diagnoses—gastric hyperacidity, gastric atony, dry pleurisy, neurasthenia, chronic conjunctivitis, brain fatigue…

At thirty-five, he was walking through a pinewood with the spring sun beating down on it. He was recalling, too, the words he had written a few years earlier: “It is unfortunate for the gods that, unlike us, they cannot commit suicide.”

Night closed in again. The rough sea sent up spray in the fading light. Beneath these skies, he married his wife anew. This brought them joy, but there was suffering as well. With them, their three sons watched the lightning over the open sea. His wife, holding one of the boys in her arms, seemed to be fighting back tears.

Taking advantage of his sleeping alone, he tried to hang himself with a sash tied over the window lattice. When he slipped his head into the sash, however, he suddenly became afraid of death. Not that he feared the suffering he would have to experience at the moment of dying. He decided to try it again, using his pocket watch to see how long it would take. This time, everything began to cloud over after a short interval of pain. He was sure that once he got past that, he would enter death. Checking the hands of his watch, he discovered that the pain lasted one minute and twenty-some seconds. It was pitch dark outside the lattices, but the wild clucking of chickens echoed in the darkness.

Divan
was giving him new inner power. This was an “Oriental Goethe” he had not known before. He saw the author standing with quiet confidence on the Other Shore, far beyond good and evil, and he felt an envy close to despair. In his eyes, the poet Goethe was even greater than the poet Christ. For in the heart of the poet Goethe, there bloomed not only the roses of the Acropolis and Golgotha but the rose of Arabia as well. If only he had the least ability to follow in this poet's footsteps!

He felt the suicide of his sister's husband as a terrible blow. Now he was responsible for his sister's family as well. To him at least, his future looked as gloomy as the end of the day. He felt something like a sneer for his own spiritual bankruptcy (he was aware of all of his faults and weak points, every single one of them), but he went on reading one book after another. Even Rousseau's
Confessions
, though, was full of the most heroic lies. And when it came to T
ō
son's
New Life
,
²⁷
he felt he had never met such a cunning hypocrite as that novel's protagonist. The one who truly moved him, though, was François Villon. He found in that poet's many works the “beautiful male.”