Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories (33 page)

Paper scraps lay scattered on the asphalt in the winter sun. Perhaps because of the angle of the light, each scrap looked exactly like a rose petal. I felt that some kind of good will was being directed toward me as I entered the bookstore. The place was neater and cleaner than usual, though I was somewhat bothered by the way a young girl in glasses was talking with one
of the employees. Bringing to mind the paper rose petals on the street, however, I decided to buy
Conversations with Anatole France
and
The Collected Letters of Prosper Mérimée
.
²⁹

With the two books under my arm, I entered a café and decided to wait for my coffee at the innermost table. Sitting opposite me were a couple who appeared to be mother and son. Though younger than I, the son looked almost exactly like me. The two were chatting like lovers, their faces pressed close together. Watching them, I realized that the son, at least, was conscious how much erotic pleasure he was giving his mother. This was a classic case of a kind of attractive force that I knew well. It was a classic case, too, of a kind of will that turns this world of ours into a hell. And yet—

The arrival of my coffee saved me from descending again into the anguish I feared, and started me reading Mérimée. The writer filled his letters with the same kind of pithy aphorisms that lent spark to his novels. Soon these aphorisms helped to steel my nerves. (Being easily influenced by such things was another of my weaknesses.) Draining my cup, I left the café feeling I could handle anything that might come my way.

I walked along looking into display windows. One framer's shop had a portrait of Beethoven hanging there, a typical image of the genius with hair sticking out in all directions. I couldn't help but feel amused by it.

“What happened to you?”

“This? Oh, it's just pinkeye.”

It suddenly occurred to me that this kind of pinkeye had been happening to me over the past fifteen years or so whenever I felt that attractive force, but I said nothing about it to him. He clapped me on the shoulder and started talking about our mutual friends. The conversation was still going when he led me into a café

“It's been years since I last saw you,” he said. “Must've been at the dedication ceremony for the Shu Shunsui stone.”
³⁰

“You're right, the Shu Shun…”

I could not seem to pronounce the name “Shu Shunsui” properly. I found this disconcerting: it was Japanese, after all, not some foreign language. My friend, however, seemed unaware of my difficulty and went on talking—about the novelist K, about the bulldog he had bought, about the poison gas lewisite.

“You haven't been writing much lately, have you? I did read, ‘Death Register,' though. Is it autobiographical?”

“It is,” I said.

“That was kind of a sick piece. Feeling better these days?”

“Same as always, taking pills constantly.”

“I've been having trouble sleeping lately myself.”

“‘Myself'? Why ‘myself'?”

“Well,
you're
supposed to be the big insomniac, aren't you? Better be careful: insomnia can be dangerous.”

Something like a smile formed around his blood-gorged left eye. Before I could answer, I sensed that I would be unable to pronounce the word “insomnia.”
³¹

“Nothing new for the son of a madwoman,” I said instead.

Before ten minutes had gone by, I was out walking down the street again. Now and then the paper scraps on the asphalt could almost be said to look like human faces. I saw a woman with bobbed hair coming in my direction. She looked beautiful at a distance, but close up I could see she had tiny wrinkles and an ugly face. In addition to which, she was obviously pregnant. I found myself averting my gaze and turning into a broad side street. After a few minutes of walking, I felt my hemorrhoids beginning to hurt. A sitz bath was the only way to remedy this kind of pain.
Sitz baths: Beethoven himself used to take them
…

All at once the smell of the sulfur used in sitz baths assaulted my nose. There was, of course, no sulfur to be seen on the street. Recalling the paper rose petals again, I struggled to keep my gait steady.

An hour later I was shut up in my room and seated at the desk, starting a new story. My pen sailed over the manuscript
paper with a speed that I myself found amazing, but it came to a sudden stop after two or three hours as if pinned down by some invisible being. I gave up trying to write, left the desk and started wandering around the room. These were the times when my megalomania was at its most extreme. In my savage joy, I felt as if I had no parents, no wife, no children, just the life that flowed forth from my pen.

Five minutes later, however, I had to take the phone. Despite my repeated attempts to answer, the phone conveyed nothing more to me than some kind of indistinct foreign word pronounced over and over. I seemed to be hearing “more” or “mole.” I finally abandoned the phone and walked around the room again, but the word stuck to me with a strange tenacity.

“Mole…” I didn't like the idea of the animal referred to by this English word, but a few seconds later I recast “mole” as the French word “
la mort
.” “Death”: with that came a new rush of anxiety. Death seemed to be bearing down on me just as it had borne down on my sister's husband. And yet I sensed the presence of something comical within my own anxiety. Before I knew it, I was smiling. Where had this come from? Not even I knew the answer to that. I went to look in the mirror for the first time in quite a while, and stood face-to-face with my own reflection. It, too, was smiling, of course. As I stared at my image, I thought about my second self. Fortunately, I had never seen my second self—what the Germans call a Doppelgänger. The wife of my friend K, however, who had become an American film actor,
³²
had spotted my second self in the lobby of the Imperial Theatre. I recalled my confusion when she suddenly said to me, “Sorry I didn't have a chance to speak with you the other night.” And then there was the time a certain one-legged translator, now dead, saw my second self in a Ginza tobacco shop. Maybe death was coming for my second self rather than for me. And even if it did come for me—

I turned my back on the mirror and returned to the desk by the window.

The square window, framed in volcanic stone, looked out on the withered lawn and a pond. Gazing at this garden scene, I
thought about the notebooks and the unfinished play I had burned in that faraway pinewood.
³³
Then I took up my pen and returned to work on the new story.

One night when there was a strong east wind blowing (for me, a lucky sign), I cut through the basement and out to the street, in search of a certain old man.
³⁵
He lived alone in the attic of a Bible publishing house, where he worked as a handyman and devoted himself to prayers and reading. Beneath the crucifix on his wall we warmed our hands over his hibachi and talked of many things. Why had my mother gone mad? Why had my father's business failed? And why had I been punished? Only he knew the answers to these mysteries, and with a strangely solemn smile he kept me company until all hours of the night. Sometimes, too, he would paint short verbal caricatures of human life. I had to respect this attic-dwelling hermit, but as we spoke I discovered that he, too, was moved by the force of attraction.

“That gardener's daughter I mentioned—she's a pretty thing, and such a sweet girl! She's awfully nice to me.”

“How old is she?”

“Just turned eighteen this year.”

His feeling for the girl may have been fatherly love as far as he was concerned, but I couldn't help noticing the passion in his eyes. And on the yellowing skin of the apple he offered me there appeared the figure of a unicorn. (I often found mythical
animals in the grain of wood or the cracks of a coffee cup.) The unicorn was the same thing as the
kirin
, that was certain. I recalled the time a hostile critic called me “the
kirin
child of the 1910s”
³⁶
and felt that even this attic with its crucifix was no safe haven for me.

“How have you been lately?” he asked.

“Same as always, a bundle of nerves.”

“Drugs are not going to help you, you know. Wouldn't you like to become a believer?”

“If only I could…”

“It's not hard. All you have to do is believe in God, believe in Christ as the son of God, and believe in the miracles that Christ performed.”

“I
can
believe in the devil.”

“Then why not God? If you believe in the shadow, you have to believe in the light as well, don't you think?”

“There's such a thing as darkness without light, you know.”

“Darkness without light?”

I could only fall silent. Like me, he too was walking through darkness, but he believed that if there is darkness there must be light. His logic and mine differed on this one point alone. Yet surely for me it would always be an unbridgeable gulf.

“But there must be light. Miracles prove it. Even now miracles occur every once in a while.”

“Yes, the devil's miracles perhaps…”

“What is all this talk about the devil?”

I felt tempted to tell him what I had experienced over the past year or so, but I was afraid it might go from him to my wife and children and I would end up like my mother in an insane asylum.

“What have you got over there?” I asked.

This sturdy old man turned to look at his aging bookcase with a playful Pan-like expression.

“The complete works of Dostoevsky. Have you read
Crime and Punishment
?”

I had of course become familiar with four or five Dostoevsky novels some ten years earlier. But I found myself moved by the title
Crime and Punishment
which he had just happened (?) to
mention, and so I asked him to lend it to me as I was leaving for my hotel. Again the electric-lit streets full of people were a burden to me, and I would have felt it especially unbearable had I chanced to meet any acquaintances. I slunk along like a thief, choosing only the darkest streets.

Soon I began to notice that I had a pain in my stomach. I knew the only thing to stop it was a glass of whiskey. I found a bar and started in through the door until I saw what a cramped, smoke-filled place it was. A small crowd of young men—probably artists—stood there drinking. They were gathered around a woman, her hair arranged in coils over her ears,
³⁷
who was playing passionately on the mandolin. This was too much for me, and I backed out. It was then that I noticed my shadow rocking from side to side, and I realized that the light shining on me was a sickening red. I came to a halt on the street, but my shadow continued its side-to-side movement. With apprehension, I turned to discover at last the colored glass lantern hanging from the eaves of the bar, swaying slowly in powerful gusts of wind.

“Whiskey? All we have is Black and White, Sir.”

I poured my whiskey into soda water and began sipping it in silence. Next to me were two men in their late twenties or early thirties, newspaper reporters, it seemed. They were conversing in low voices—in French. I kept my back toward them but could feel them looking me over from head to toe. I actually felt their gazes on my flesh, like electrical impulses. They knew my name, that was clear, and they seemed to be talking about me.

“Bien…. très mauvais…. pourquoi?”

“Pourquoi?…. le diable est mort!”

“Oui, oui…. d'enfer
³⁸
….”

I threw a silver coin on the bar (my last one) and fled from this underground chamber. Swept by the night wind, the street helped steady my nerves now that my stomachache had subsided somewhat. Thinking of Raskolnikov, I felt the desire to
confess everything I had done, but that would give rise to a tragedy for others besides me—besides even my immediate family. And it was far from certain whether the desire itself was even genuine. If only my nerves could be as steady as those of ordinary people! But for that to happen I would have to go somewhere—to Madrid, to Rio, to Samarkand…