The Gate

by Sōseki Natsume

  While confined to her bed, Oyone’s eyes and ears kept her acutely aware of each and every step Sōsuke took in the house. Lying faceup on her futon, in her mind’s eye she tied together the miniature tablets of her two dead offspring with the long, invisible thread of her own sad destiny. Following the thread still farther, she saw it dangling down on a wraithlike shadow—the aborted fetus, which never assumed a human form and for which no tablet had been made. Each and every one of the recollected episodes—in Hiroshima, Fukuoka, and Tokyo—was bound by the same immutable fate, whose solemn reign she felt compelled to acknowledge; once she had done so, and once she had realized that she had been molded by this fate into a mother who, over the months and years, was mysteriously doomed to relive the same misfortune again and again, she detected to her dismay a curse being whispered in her ear. Even as her body, lying there on the futon, eagerly submitted to the biological imperative of three weeks’ rest, she was conscious every moment of this whispered curse reverberating on her eardrums. And so it was that this three-week period of repose in fact turned into a protracted, excruciating test of Oyone’s spirit.

  After passing the first two weeks of this confinement with her gaze fixed inward, she reached the point where just lying there stoically became impossible. The day after the visiting nurse departed, Oyone stole out of bed and walked around a bit. But she was not easily distracted from the anxiety that continually gnawed at her. However much she forced her body to move about, her mind refused to budge. Discouraged yet again, she burrowed back under the covers so recently cast aside. At times she shut her eyes very tight, as if to keep the human world at bay.

  Oyone completed the full three weeks of bed rest. When the time was up, her body naturally felt reinvigorated. After removing all traces of her sickbed, she peered into the mirror and detected signs of renewed life about the eyebrows. This was the season for the traditional changing of clothes.[50] Even the forlorn Oyone was by no means insensible to the Japanese predilection for marking the shift from spring to summer with bold, bright adornments. But the momentary stimulation it afforded only served to stir things up deep inside her until they floated to the surface, where they were exposed to the glare of the busy, festive world. This renewed encounter with the outside world incited in her a feeling of inquisitiveness about her own dark past.

  One supernally fine morning, immediately after seeing her husband off to work as usual, Oyone went out. It was already the season for women to carry parasols. As she walked along briskly in the sunlight a few beads of sweat gathered on her forehead. Earlier, when changing into her clothes, her hand had accidentally touched the newest memorial tablet as she opened the bottom drawer of the chest; she now dwelled with each step on that unexpected sensation, until at length she passed through the gate of a certain I Ching divinator.[51]

  Ever since childhood Oyone had entertained the same kinds of superstitions as are found in a majority of otherwise enlightened citizens. At the same time, as is the general rule with such people, on those occasions when she openly invoked one superstitious practice or another it was done in a playful, mocking fashion. It was unprecedented, then, for this sort of belief to have impinged on an innermost part of her being. Seated now face-to-face with the divinator, it was in all seriousness that she tried to ascertain whether Heaven had decreed that she was to bear a child, and if so, whether the child would survive to maturity. The divinator, who looked no different from other fortune-tellers who peddled their services on the street for a coin or two, lined up his six blocks this way and that, shuffled his fifty long sticks, keeping count all the while, then finally, after stroking his goatee portentously and pondering for a moment, studied Oyone’s face closely and pronounced with complete equanimity: “You cannot have any children.”

  Oyone remained silent as she digested these words, considering them from every possible angle. Then, raising her head again, she replied with another question: “Why can’t I?”

  She had assumed that the man would deliberate again before responding, but without hesitating he looked her straight in the eye and replied unequivocally: “You will recall that you behaved unforgivably toward someone in the past. Your sinful behavior has become a curse that will prevent you from ever bringing a child into this world.”

  These words were a stab to her heart. All the way home her head drooped limply, and she had barely been able to raise it that night in front of her husband.

  It was this judgment rendered by the divinator that Oyone had refrained from divulging. When, on this still night, with the dim glow from the lamp he had placed in the alcove about to dissolve in darkness, Sōsuke first heard of this incident from Oyone’s lips, he could not help being perturbed.

  “Really—to concoct such an idiotic errand when your nerves were so shattered to begin with! What was the point of spending good money to hear that sort of nonsense? Did you go back again after that?”

  “Oh, no, never! It’s too frightening.”

  “Well, I’m glad of that, at least. It’s nothing but foolishness,” Sōsuke pronounced as magnanimously as he could, and went to sleep.

  14

  SŌSUKE and Oyone were without question a loving couple. In the six long years they had been together they had not spent so much as half a day feeling strained by the other’s presence, and they had never once engaged in a truly acrimonious quarrel. They went to the draper to buy cloth for their kimonos and to the rice dealer for their rice, but they had very few expectations of the wider world beyond that. Indeed, apart from provisioning their household with everyday necessities, they did little else that acknowledged the existence of society at large. The only absolute need to be fulfilled for each of them was the need for each other; this was not only a necessary but also a sufficient condition for life. They dwelled in the city as though living deep in the mountains.

  In due course their lives began to turn monotonous. In their effort to avoid the stress that comes with living in a complex society, they eventually cut themselves off from access to diverse experiences that such a society affords, and in so doing came to forfeit, in effect, the prerogatives regularly enjoyed by civilized people. Intermittently they themselves recognized that their daily lives lacked variety. While neither felt the slightest hint of dissatisfaction or inadequacy with regard to the other, within the confines of the inner lives that they had created for themselves lurked a muffled protest against something stultifying, something lodged there that would not admit new stimuli. That they nonetheless lived out each and every day with the same stoical spirit was not because they had from the outset lost all interest in the wider world. Rather, it was because the wider world, after having isolated the two of them from all else, persisted in turning a cold shoulder. Blocked from extending themselves outward, they began developing more deeply within themselves. What their life together had lost in breadth it gained in depth. For these six years, instead of engaging in casual interactions with the outside world, they had explored the recesses of each other’s hearts. To the world they continued to appear to be two people. But in their minds they had become part of a single organism that it would be criminal to split apart. Their identities were so merged that the slenderest nerve endings in one of them were entangled with those of the other. They were like two droplets of oil on the surface of a large basinful of water. They had joined not through having repelled the surrounding water but rather through having been propelled by water into converging courses that brought them together in a single sphere.

  United in this fashion, they experienced a harmony and a mutual fulfillment rarely attained in marriage—and concomitantly, a sense of tedium as well. Yet even when under the sway of such languor, they were cognizant of their good fortune. At times this tedium affected their consciousness like a scrim of oblivion, obscuring their love for a spell in a distracted haze. Still and all, no lacerating doubts arose to unsettle their equanimity. For they continued to be just as intimately joined to each other as they were estranged from the soci
ety around them.

  Even as they sustained this remarkably close bond from one day to the next, year after year, they acted in each other’s company as though unaware of anything out of the ordinary about their relationship. From time to time, however, they both made a point of reaffirming the love they felt for each other. This process invariably involved going back to a time prior to their life together—to the inescapable memory of how much, in order to unite themselves in marriage, they had been forced to sacrifice. Such recollections caused them to bow and tremble before the terrible retribution that Nature had proceeded to inflict on them. At the same time they never failed to pay homage to the power of Love. They walked along through life together on the path toward death, lashed by fate each step of the way. Yet the lash’s tip, they realized, had been dipped in a honey-like balm that healed all wounds.

  In his student days, as the scion of a Tokyo family of considerable means, Sōsuke had freely and fully indulged the flamboyant tastes common to his class. In his dress, his mannerisms, and his opinions, he exuded the aura of a bright young man of the modern age, and with head held high sauntered about wherever he pleased. Like his starched white collar, his well-turned cuffs, and the patterned cashmere stockings that showed just below his cuffed trousers, his mind was exquisitely socialized.

  By nature quick-witted, Sōsuke was little inclined to study. Viewing academic pursuits merely as a means of social advancement, he scarcely ever entertained the notion of a scholarly career, which requires something of a retreat from society. In the manner of other ordinary students he simply attended classes and blackened with ink large numbers of notebooks. But once the notebooks had been deposited somewhere at home, he rarely looked them over or made any further notations; even the gaps created by absences from class for the most part went unfilled. Leaving the notebooks piled up neatly on his desk, he would vacate his impeccably tidy study and go out for a stroll. Not a few of his friends envied him this air of a man of leisure. Sōsuke himself took pride in it. His future as reflected in his own eyes shimmered like a rainbow.

  Back then, unlike the present, he had many friends. The plain truth of it was that in his cheerfully callow view all people appeared, more or less interchangeably, as friends. He lightly traversed his youth with optimism intact and without ever managing to learn the true meaning of the word “enemy.”

  “So long as you don’t show up looking glum,” Sōsuke would say to his classmate Yasui, “you’ll be welcome just about anywhere.” And in fact he had never managed to look serious enough to offend anyone.

  “That’s easy for you to say—you’re always so healthy,” Yasui, who was always suffering from one ailment or another, would reply enviously.

  Though originally from the province of Echizen,[52] Yasui had lived in Yokohama so long that his accent and general appearance conformed to those of someone born and bred in Tokyo. He lavished care on his clothes and affected long hair parted straight down the middle. While he and Sōsuke had attended different secondary schools, at the university they often found themselves sitting side by side at lectures, and from time to time would ask each other about material they had missed. Before long these classroom chats grew into a friendship. For Sōsuke, who was still a stranger in Kyoto, it was a boon to have made such a friend at the beginning of the academic year. With Yasui as his guide he drank in like warm saké all the impressions offered by his new surroundings. The two of them made almost nightly forays into the livelier neighborhoods, such as those clustered along the avenues of Sanjō and Shijō. Occasionally they wandered through the Kyogoku quarter. Standing in the middle of a bridge, they would gaze down at the waters of the Kamo River and look up at the moon silently rising over the hills of Higashiyama. The Kyoto moon struck Sōsuke as rounder and larger than the moon of Tokyo.

  When they grew weary of city streets and the crowds they would avail themselves of weekends to visit the outlying areas. Sōsuke delighted in the dense concentrations of brilliant greenery presented by the thickets of great bamboo dotting the landscape, and he marveled at the elegant rows of pines, their trunks, when reflecting the sunlight, seemingly dyed red. One day the two of them climbed up to the Pavilion of Compassion at Senkōji.[53] As they gazed up at a large plaque inscribed by the monk Sokuhi,[54] they heard the splashing of oars plying the stream in the valley floor. It so resembled the call of wild geese that they had to smile. Another time they trekked as far as the Heihachi Teahouse Inn[55] and spent the night there. They ordered from the hostess some unappetizing grilled river fish on skewers and downed them with saké. The hostess wore a light cotton towel around her head in the country style and old-fashioned baggy blue trousers.

  For awhile, immersed in these new sensations, Sōsuke managed to assuage his appetite for life. But in the course of roaming around the old capital and inhaling its venerable scent, at some point it began to seem stale. As the novel effect initially produced on him by the lovely mountains and sparkling waters wore off, he grew dissatisfied. With the warm blood of youth still coursing through his veins, he was unable to discover a verdant oasis that might quench its heat. Nor had he found any sphere of action in which his natural ardor could flare up and consume itself. His racing pulse only caused his whole body to tingle with nervous energy. Languishing there in the inn, arms folded against his chest, Sōsuke surveyed the mountains that stretched out in all directions. “I’m tired of these boring old places,” he said presently.

  With a chuckle, Yasui launched into an anecdote about a friend of his who hailed from a truly remote locale—just to keep things in perspective. The place was Tsuchiyama—the one where “the rain keeps coming down,” as it says in the ballad[56]—and it had been a well-known post station on the old Tokaido Road. From morning to night, according to Yasui’s friend, you could see nothing but mountains all around: It was like living at the bottom of a cone-shaped mortar bowl. As a child, he recalled, whenever the spring rains poured down he had panicked at the prospect of the family’s inn being submerged, seemingly any minute, beneath the water flowing down from the surrounding mountains. It struck Sōsuke that there could be no crueler fate than to live out one’s life stuck at the bottom of this mortar bowl.

  “How can people possibly survive in such a place?” he exclaimed with a look of incredulity.

  With another chuckle, Yasui related a story that this same friend had told him about the most prodigious native son that Tsuchiyama had given to the world: a fellow who had long ago swindled someone out of a strongbox and been crucified for his trouble.[57] Chafing as he was at the constraints of Kyoto life, Sōsuke allowed as how such events were indispensable, perhaps once in a century, to break the monotony.

  At this stage of his life, Sōsuke’s gaze was riveted to the world of the new. Once he had taken in the full cycle of local beauty spots that nature had to offer through the four seasons, he felt no need to visit blossoms here, autumn leaves there, simply for the sake of renewing memories of yesteryear. In his quest to establish a demonstrable record of a life lived to the full, his overwhelming priorities were the present in which he was now engaged and the future that was in the process of unfolding; the receding past was but an illusion, of as little value to him as a vanished dream. He began to cringe at the thought of viewing countless peeling shrines and weathered temples—indeed, at the very prospect of focusing his bright young eyes on history’s faded relics. His sensibility was not yet so desiccated as to lure him down the sleepy byways of antiquity.

  At the end of the school year, Sōsuke and Yasui took leave of each other with promises to meet again soon. Yasui’s plan was first to return to his original home in Fukui Prefecture, then go on to Yokohama; if he were to send Sōsuke a letter to let him know when he had arrived, ideally they could later take the train back to Kyoto, stopping, if time permitted, at Okitsu, where they could make a leisurely tour of Seikenji, the Zen temple, the pine grove on Miho strand, perhaps even Mount Kunō.[58] Pronouncing this an excellent plan, Sōsuke anticipated th
e pleasure of receiving Yasui’s note from Yokohama.

  When Sōsuke had then returned to Tokyo, his father was still in the best of health and Koroku was but a child. After a year’s absence, it actually thrilled him to breathe again the scorching, sooty air of the capital. Gazing down from some eminence on the congeries of roof tiles stretching out for miles in all directions under the blazing sun, he had almost exclaimed aloud: This is Tokyo! At this period in his life, each and every detail of this dizzying panorama assailed his senses with a force that drummed into his head the word “Mag-nif-i-cent!”

  His future was like a tightly closed bud waiting to blossom into a flower as yet unknown to others, whose ultimate form was indeed far from clear even to him. What he could intuit clearly was that “boundless” was the best way to describe what lay ahead. Even in the summer heat, he did not neglect to lay plans for his life after graduation. Although he had not yet decided whether to pursue a career in the civil service or in business, he realized that in either case it would be to his advantage to lay as much groundwork as possible now. His father introduced him personally to some of his acquaintances and provided indirect introductions to others. Sōsuke selected those who might carry particular weight in the future and went to visit these men. One of them had already left the city, ostensibly for a summer resort. Another was simply not at home. Still another man on his list told him to visit his office, saying he was too busy to meet with him at home. Sōsuke arrived at seven in the morning, with the sun still low in the sky, and took the elevator up to the third floor of a red-brick building, only to be confronted to his amazement by the spectacle of seven or eight others waiting there to see the very same man. And yet it somehow excited him to visit new places like this and encounter novel situations that, whether or not his errand proved successful, made him feel as though he were adding to his mental file a type of experience about which he had previously been ignorant.