by Nagai Kafu
I wanted to ask him a question, but he stopped me by raising his hand and continued.
“It’s almost silly to brag about my parent’s reputation in a place like this, but in fact my father does seem to have been highly respected by others, just as people said, and our house was always like a private school, with seven, eight, or even more student-servants. You may have come across my father’s name in some book. Anyway, from early on, I don’t recall exactly when, I would be told by our student-servants or neighbors that my father was a great scholar, but I didn’t know why it was so, or how great he was, so naturally I believed that I too would become a scholar when I grew up. But, I think it was from about the time that I was to enter higher primary school, I became very poor in math and almost had to repeat the same grade, and my teacher said to me: ‘Your father, as the world knows, is a great scholar of law. Unless you study hard, not only you but your father’s reputation will suffer.’ A warning was sent from the school to my house, so upon returning home, I was scolded by my mother and then admonished by my father and told to stay up till ten o’clock every night to study my lessons diligently.
“In my innocent child’s mind, I came to the realization that I was no good at studying and felt awfully distressed, and for a week or two afterward, I couldn’t even bear to be seen by our student-servants. . . . I didn’t go out much but remained in my room, staying up till late studying as Father had told me, but in no time I began to be terribly worried about the future; although I was still a child, I wondered if I would ever become a great man like my father, no matter how hard I studied. Such worries . . . apprehension about the future, you can say that was the worm that afflicted my spirit. As I advanced from primary to secondary school, academic work became more and more difficult. In contrast, my father’s reputation and status continued to rise. . . . Former student-servants who used to be my father’s doormen become university graduates and come back to pay their respects. I just feel so small and insignificant. But some of our student-servants and relatives still say that I shall inherit Father’s household and also become a great legal scholar like him, making me feel that perhaps I have an obligation to become one, even that I would like to do so. . . . . The more I thought about these matters, the more I worried about my ability, and even as my father’s admonitions sunk deeply into me, I grew desperate . . . saying to myself, without any particular reason, that I was no good.
“Of course, this is a mere child’s thinking without any understanding of the world, and as you grow older you are bound to become bolder. Still, what you sense as a child will stay with you for the rest of your life. It was the same with me; even now, in America, where I was sent after I was expelled from the higher school I had worked so hard to get into and became a little desperate . . . whenever I receive a letter from my father, I have a strange sensation that I am being supported so generously by him but that I really have no ability to succeed in scholarship. Even when I know I can accomplish something without difficulty, I always give up because of such ‘imagination.’
“Can you believe it, it was exactly in the middle of such desperation that suddenly I felt greatly relieved, perhaps because I was receiving no money from home and so, in a sense, my connection with them was being severed—relieved because I no longer had an obligation to succeed by all means and return home loaded with honors. Now it was up to me whether to live or die. Even if I died, I began feeling, it didn’t matter because I no longer had a parent to grieve over me.”
Tired from talking, he fell silent for a while.
“That’s why you put up with housework as a dishwasher?”
“That’s right. I did receive money shortly, but it was too late. Two weeks’ work washing dishes at the back of the dining room thoroughly corrupted me. I don’t know if you’ve had the same experience, but it’s a carefree life. Of course, in the beginning it was hard work since I wasn’t accustomed to it, and I even felt sorry for myself and confused, but it’s never a very complicated job. All you have to do is carry dishes around like a waiter while the family is eating in the dining room, there’s nothing to it. After your employers have finished their meal, you wash the dishes and then go downstairs to the kitchen to eat at the wooden table with the old hag of a cook and the maid; but beware of circumstances. It’s uncanny that washing dishes like that makes you behave like a dishwasher. Besides waiting on the table three times a day, morning, noon, and evening, I also had to clean the living room and the dining room, so I was physically exhausted, and when I had no work to do, I would just doze off. Gradually I stopped using my mind, like thinking or worrying about things. . . . Instead, it is amazing how your appetite for flesh and food increases. Nothing beats the taste of supper after a day’s work. After you eat all you can, you begin to feel like just dozing off, and in no time you are fooling around with the maid sitting nearby. You want to hold her hand, even tickle her, and she pushes you away, which is all great fun. But even though the maid is angry at you, she also begins to feel something’s wrong with her unless she is teased. It’s not a matter of falling in love, or anything like that. The maid and the male servant . . . it’s inevitable that they will come together.”
The day was gradually breaking. As electric lights faded one after another, so, apparently, had the women from show places disappeared, and as the whole area grew steadily lighter, somehow everything was becoming even quieter. . . . All one heard was the sound of waves lapping against the beach.
“So, my destiny was all sealed. On one hand, I am more embarrassed than ever about facing my father and am really stricken with a bad conscience, but on the other, I am enjoying this sort of animal-like existence more and more. In other words, the more I agonize, the deeper I fall, and so in the winter I work as a waiter in this house or that, and in summertime, when families evacuate their city dwellings and travel to their resorts to avoid the heat, I knock about from one place to another like this every year.”
“But what are you going to do eventually?”
“What am I . . . going to do, what will happen to me?” His face showed he was worried, but he shouted, “No, no. I’m doing these stupid things so I won’t have to worry about such matters. I work, drink, eat, and buy women so I won’t have any brain power left to think about my own future. I just try to use my body like a beast.”
He walked away briskly, leaving me behind, apparently because he could no longer bear his agony.
A flash of morning sun began gleaming above the tall tower of a show house. . . . Oh, what a beautiful light. Unconsciously I knelt before the light, feeling as if I had been rescued from an evil den to which I had been confined all night.
(May 1907)
Two Days in Chicago
March 16—this is the day I have set aside to go to Chicago.
People are saying that it has been unseasonably warm; most of the snow that accumulated last year has melted away after a rain that has fallen for two or three days. The sky is still overcast, but the town, which has awakened from its long winter’s sleep, has a completely different look. The low sleighs that used to glide over the snow have turned into large-wheeled carriages, and the drivers’ forbidding fur coats have been transformed into lightweight raincoats. Young boys and girls who, in tasseled knitted caps, had been skating on ice now run up and down the rain-soaked cement sidewalks, clacking the heels of their new shoes. One need not be a child to leap with joy in anticipation of the soon-to-come spring, as one notices the appearance of dark and moist soil in people’s gardens or orchards, as well as of the green grass after it had been buried under the snow for a winter.
To catch the 9:30 A.M. train, I hastily packed my small traveling bag, hopped onto a streetcar at an intersection at the outskirts of town, and headed for the Michigan Central [sic] station downtown.
I am told that it is exactly one hundred miles between Kalamazoo and Chicago, and that we shall arrive in exactly four hours. Immediately after the train leaves the town of Kalamazoo, it runs through r
olling, undulating hills where trees are sparse, and along apple orchards blackened by winter’s blight so that, passing scenery like the white-spotted patches created by the leftover snow in scattered pockets across the hills or the water from melted snow pushing down rotten fences of meadows and gushing out of the banks of tiny brooks, I am often reminded of the landscape described in Russian novels.
Once the train reaches Indiana, dirty little towns with numerous factories increase in number, and after a while we reach the edge of Lake Michigan. But a dense fog from the cloudy sky is covering the surface of the lake completely, and all one can see are huge chunks of ice floating near the shore and countless seagulls flying above; I wonder if the Arctic Ocean is like this, since I haven’t seen it.
Running along the lake, the train soon entered the city of Chicago and arrived at the Illinois Central station. I left the platform and climbed up the stairs and, as it was about half past one in the afternoon, I proceeded to the waiting room and entered a restaurant at one of its corners.
Inside, the restaurant is divided into two sections, of which one is called a “lunch counter” and is somewhat like a Japanese tavern. It is for quick meals to be consumed while standing, whereas the other is a regular dining room with white linen-covered tables and chairs. The former was crowded, with virtually no empty space, since it was both speedy and economical; it was strange to see pretty, considerably well-dressed ladies among the unceremonious male customers.
After finishing my meal, I went down a broad flight of steps to the street, but, being a stranger to this city, I had no idea which way I should proceed to find the house of the friend I was to visit.
As there were carriages at the foot of the stone stairway, with drivers waiting for their customers, I waved at one of them and asked him as he came closer, “How much would it be to go near the University of Chicago?”
“Two dollars,” he replied.
I knew it was fairly far away but still thought this was a bit outrageous, so, accustomed to doing shameless things while abroad, I returned to the station and asked one of the employees there, who told me kindly, “The best way is to exit the station and catch a train there that goes across town and then get off at Fifty-fifth Street.” So I paid an additional ten cents for the ticket and waited on the platform for the train.
Soon a three-car train arrived; when it stopped the doors opened without any help from station employees, and as soon as it started moving, they again closed automatically. In the cars there were few female passengers but many men who looked like tradesmen. As I was planning to visit a friend of mine living in the vicinity of the University of Chicago, I turned to the young man sitting next to me and asked how I could get to a certain street where my friend was staying . . . whereupon he gave me detailed directions as if I were a child and even pulled out a map from his pocket notebook.
As I thanked him profusely, doffing my hat Japanese style, the man said, apparently taken aback at my excessive formality, “You don’t have to thank me, we’d all have problems in a foreign country.” Maybe in America men don’t take off their hats when greeting each other. He continued, “Actually I am a foreigner too, a Dutchman. I’ve been in this country for some ten years. . . . How about you? Do you like America?”
“Do you?” I asked in return, to which he answered, smiling, “The best place in the world is really the land of your birth. . . . Don’t you think?”
He told me he was a sales clerk at a certain store and was about to boast about his homeland when the train reached the station where I was to get off, so, thanking him again, I got out of the car and went out to the street.
The gaslight at the intersection reads FIFTY-FIFTH STREET. My destination is Fifty-eighth Street, so I just have to walk three blocks. It is so easy to find one’s way, even in a new place, because one of the most convenient things about American streets is that they are numbered consecutively or named in alphabetical order. Building numbers too are arranged in such a way that, for instance, if odd numbers are on the right-hand side of the street, even numbers will be on the other side, so that the situation familiar to Tokyo residents who cannot find a street number even in their own city simply does not exist.
I walked leisurely, feeling at ease. The winter clouds that earlier had covered the sky for a long time were moving in layers, gradually revealing blue skies and an agreeable sunlight. Since the melting snow had turned the streets into marshes, I picked my way along the relatively dry sidewalks. The weather must have been rather abnormal, for it felt like a balmy day in May; sweat started pouring down my forehead, and my overcoat, which had felt comfortable till this morning, became terribly cumbersome.
Soon I found the address of my destination among a row of three-storied rooming houses all of the same stone. This area didn’t look like part of the bustling city of Chicago, and only a few people were on the streets; on one side of the area there was a grassy open space (I later learned that it was called “Midway” and had been part of an international exposition some ten years earlier, after which it had been converted into a park) and beyond this space to the far right, the gray-colored University of Chicago could be sighted, while on the left two or three skyscrapers, quite probably hotel buildings, blended harmoniously with the clouds busily moving back and forth after the rainfall and strangely drew my attention. So I just gazed at the landscape for a while and stood at the door of the house that I was about to visit without ringing the doorbell.
I then heard a young woman’s voice from the second-floor window, which I could not make out, but soon there was a clattering of someone coming down the stairway, and the front door opened.
“Aren’t you Mr. N—?”
She was a slightly built young woman of perhaps seventeen or eighteen, her blond hair loosely swept back from her forehead, wearing a white waist jacket and a navy-blue skirt. She had a most lovely round face, with almost artificially charming dimples at the corners of her mouth, and she said in a bright, innocent, candid, and gentle voice characteristic of American maidens, “James hasn’t come back from work yet, but he has been looking forward to your visit for some time. Do come in.”
She took my hand and led me to the living room.
A sofa, an armchair, a desk, a framed lithograph, and a well-worn piano were about all the decoration there was in the room, as if that were enough to prevent it from looking forlorn. I was surprised by its lack of splendor, which I had expected to find in a Chicago home. The master of that house is a judge, and the person entertaining me is his only daughter, Stella, who is engaged to my friend James whom I came to know in Michigan.
Yes, indeed, how often has James told me about this young woman! And how many times has he shown me her beautiful picture, which he always carries with him, pasted to the back of his pocket watch. James’s parents live in Michigan, and so we became good friends while he was back home some time ago. He is a graduate of an electrical engineering school in Boston and, since becoming an engineer at the Edison Company of Chicago, has been a boarder at the young woman’s house. He was good at the piano since his student days, while Stella, the daughter, enjoys playing the violin, and so they have often played together after dinner, each evening drawing them closer together in mutual affection, and eventually they became engaged. I have already heard from James that it was when they played Schumann’s “Träumerei” together that for the first time they swore their love from the bottom of their hearts, so I said to her, “I do hope you will play that piece tonight.”
At this she looked quite startled and, lightly pressing her cheek with her supple hand, exclaimed, “The Dream!”; she already appeared overwhelmed by the remembrance of past events and, taking a deep breath, asked me, “Has James told you even such things?”
“Yes, everything. . . .”
“Oh, my,” she laughed with a clear voice like a bell, that of a maiden who, like others in this country, did not keep her emotions under control, and I felt as though I could almost hear the palpitation
of her heart filled with fragrant love.
She suddenly got up from the automatic [sic] chair21 and went briskly to the adjoining room, then immediately returned with a photo album; drawing a chair close to me this time, she opened her album on her lap and said, “These are our pictures. We have taken them every Sunday.”
Pictures they have taken of each other at various parks they have visited together on Sundays are pasted with dates written down. What a wonderful record of memories.
Stella explained where each picture was taken: the lakeside at Jackson Park, the embankment at Michigan Avenue, under some trees at Lincoln Park . . . even as she did so in a hurried manner, her deep green eyes shone with the self-assurance that she was one of the happiest girls in the entire world; certainly nobody would be unmoved by the sight of such honest emotions.
I felt from the bottom of my heart a sincere prayer for Stella’s happiness, but at the same time I could not help envying her good luck at having been born in a free country. Let Japanese scholars steeped in Confucianism consider the situation. They would have labeled her an immodest woman or a nymphomaniac, but in a free country, no cumbersome creed exists that goes against natural human feelings, except for the gospel of love.
