The Wild Geese

by Ogai Mori

  “It sounds all right,” said Okada. “But what will you do until then?”

  “I'll wander around here. You two go wherever you wish. If all three of us stay, it'll attract attention.”

  “Then let's go once around the pond,” I suggested to Okada.

  He agreed, and we started out.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  OKADA and I crossed the end of Hanazono-cho and went toward the stone steps leading to the Toshogu Shrine. For some time we walked in silence.

  “Poor bird,” said Okada, as if speaking to himself.

  Without any logical connection the woman of Muenzaka came into my mind.

  “You see,” Okada said, this time to me, “I only meant to throw in their direction.”

  “I know,” I said, still thinking of the woman.

  After some time I added: “But it'll be interesting to see how Ishihara intends to get the bird.”

  “Yes,” said Okada, walking on and thinking of something. Perhaps the wild goose occupied his thoughts.

  As we turned south at the foot of the stone steps, we went on towards the Benten Shrine, but the death of the bird had depressed us and had broken our talk into fragments.

  Passing before the entrance of the shrine, Okada suddenly said: “I almost forgot what I wanted to tell you.” It seemed as though it were an effort for him to turn his thoughts in another direction.

  His news startled me. He had planned to tell me in my room that night, but he had gone out at my invitation. And then it had occurred to him to reveal it at the restaurant, but since that now seemed unlikely, he had decided to explain it during our walk. It was this.

  “I'm going abroad before graduation. I've already got my passport from the Foreign Ministry. And I've sent in the notice that I'm giving up graduating. You know the German professor who's been studying endemic diseases in the Orient. Well, he employed me under the arrangement that he would give me four thousand marks for the trip to Germany and back, along with two hundred marks each month. He was looking for a student who could read Chinese and also speak German. Professor Baelz had recommended me, so I went and took the examination. I had to translate several passages from classical Chinese medical books into German, but I passed. And I got the contract right then.”

  The Leipzig University professor would take Okada and help him pass his doctoral examinations. Okada had received permission to use as his graduation thesis the medical literature of the Orient to be translated by him for the doctor.

  “I'm moving from the Kamijo tomorrow to the doctor's house at Tsukiji. I'll pack the books he's collected in China and Japan. Then I'll help him on a research project in Kyushu. And from there we take a Massageries Maritimes ship.”

  I paused often in our walk to say how surprised I was and to praise Okada's determination, but I was under the impression that we had gone very slowly as we spoke. Yet when he finished, I looked at my watch and found that only ten minutes had passed since we left Ishihara. And we had already walked two-thirds of the way around the pond and were coming to the end of Ike-no-hata Street.

  “It's too soon to go on ahead,” I said.

  “Let's have a bowl of noodles,” Okada suggested.

  “All right,” I said at once, and we retraced our steps to the restaurant.

  While eating, Okada said: “It's too bad I have to give up graduation when I'm so near to it. But if I missed this chance, I'd never be able to go to Europe. I doubt if I could ever get abroad at government expense.”

  “Well, it's too good an opportunity to miss. Who cares about graduating? If you get a doctor's certificate in Europe, it's certainly no disadvantage. And even if you don't, it won't matter much.”

  “That's what I've been thinking. Going abroad will give me better qualifications—it's my one concession to the way of the world.”

  “Are you ready to go? I suppose you've been quite busy with preparations.”

  “No, I'm going in these clothes. The doctor told me that Western suits made by Japanese tailors won't do in Europe.”

  “I can imagine. I once remember reading that the editor of the Kagetsu Shinshi went aboard at Yokohama with no preparations at all.”

  “I read that article too. According to it, he didn't even let his family know he was leaving. But I wrote a long letter to my parents.”

  “How I envy you! You'll have the professor, and you'll never feel inconvenienced on your trip. I can't even imagine what it will be like.”

  “Neither can I. But yesterday I did visit Professor Shokei Shibata. He's taken an interest in me. And when I told him, he gave me a guidebook he had written.”

  “Oh? I didn't know he'd even written one.”

  “He wrote it all right, but it's not for sale. He told me he had it printed to give to country bumpkins!”

  As we talked on in this way, I suddenly realized that we had only five minutes before our appointment. We hurried out of the restaurant and went to meet Ishihara, who was waiting for us. The pond was in darkness, and only the Benten Shrine's red color was visible in the gathering haze.

  Ishihara, who had been looking for us, brought us to the edge of the water and said: “It's all right now. All the other geese have shifted their positions. I'll start now. You two stand here and give me directions. Look. About six yards from here you see a broken lotus stem falling to the right. Now in line with that is another stem lower than that one and falling to the left. I have to make my way along that line. Now, if you see me get off even a bit, shout out to me either ‘right' or ‘left' and put me straight.”

  “We understand,” said Okada. “We've studied the principle of parallax! But isn't the water too deep for you?”

  “Not enough to go over my head,” Ishihara said, taking off his clothes.

  When he stepped into the pond, the muddy water was just above his knees. Raising one leg at a item and planting each alternately, he plodded on like a heron. The water was deeper in certain areas than in others.

  Soon Ishihara passed the two stems of lotus, and presently Okada directed him to the right, whereupon Ishihara went a little in that direction. “Left!” Okada shouted next, for Ishihara had gone too far over.

  Suddenly Ishihara stopped short, stooped, and at once began to retrace his steps. And by the time he had passed the farther lotus stem, we could see the game hanging from his right hand.

  He reached the edge of the water, the mud staining his legs only to the middle of his thighs. The prize was an uncommonly large bird. After Ishihara had washed carelessly, he dressed quickly. Few passersby ever came to this section of the pond, and no one had appeared during the time Ishihara was in the water and had come back.

  “How should we carry it?” I asked.

  Putting on his hakama , Ishihara said: “How about Okada's putting it under his cloak? It's bigger than ours. And I'll have the bird cooked at my lodging!”

  He lived in a rented room of a private family. Apparently his landlady's only virtue was her wickedness, and we could stop her from telling what we had done by giving her a piece of the goose. The house was somewhere in the back part of a winding alley.

  Ishihara briefly explained the course we would take. We could approach his house from two ways. One route lay south through Kiridoshi, the other north through Muenzaka. These two directions formed a circle around the Iwasaki mansion. There was little difference in the distance between them. But that wasn't the present question. It was the police box, and there was one each way.

  We weighed the advantages and disadvantages, and we concluded that we had better not take the more frequented way through Kiridoshi but the less traveled one through Muenzaka. The best procedure was for Okada to carry the goose under his cloak and for the two of us to flank him and make him look less conspicuous.

  Okada seemed resigned; he smiled and took the bird. But in whatever way he carried it, the tail feathers emerged a few inches from the edge of his cloak. In addition, the lower part of Okada's cloak was expanded in a curious way
so that he looked like a circular cone.

  It was up to Ishihara and me to make Okada appear as natural as possible.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  “ALL RIGHT,” Ishihara said, “let's start.” And we set out with Okada between us. From the first, our concern had been the police box at the crossing below Muenzaka. So Ishihara lectured us on our mental attitude in passing the box in question. It was, to sum up what I heard, that we should not waver in our equilibrium of mind; that if we wavered, there would be a gap; and that if there were a gap, it would give the antagonist the advantage.

  “The tiger doesn't eat a drunken man,” Ishihara said, quoting an old Chinese proverb.

  It seemed to me that his speech was nothing more than what his jujitsu master had told him.

  “Do you mean then,” said Okada playfully, “that a policeman's a tiger and we are drunks?”

  “ Silentium !” exclaimed Ishihara.

  We were approaching the corner to go to Muenzaka. As we turned up the slope, we saw a policeman standing at the crossing.

  Ishihara, who was close to Okada's left side, said suddenly: “Do you know the formula for calculating the volume of a cone? What? You don't! It's simple. Since volume is one-third the area of the base times the height, if the base is a circle, you can get it by one-third of the radius squared times pi times the height. And if you remember that pi equals 3.1416, it's the simplest of problems. I know the value of pi up to the eighth decimal. 3.14159265! For all practical purposes, the figures after that are unnecessary.”

  During this speech we passed the crossing. The policeman was in front of his station on the left side of the narrow street we were coming along; stationed there, he was watching a rickshaw running from Kaya-cho towards Nezu. He looked at us for only a moment.

  “Why,” I asked Ishihara, “did you start calculating the volume of a cone?”

  But at the same time I recognized a woman in the middle of the slope looking toward us. My heart felt a strange shock. All the way from the northern end of the pond I had been thinking about her instead of the policeman at his box. I didn't know why, but I imagined she would be waiting for Okada. And I hadn't been wrong. She had come down the slope about two or three houses from her own.

  I was careful not to attract Ishihara's attention, and I looked quickly at the woman and Okada, from one to the other. His delicate coloring was a shade deeper. He brushed the vizor of his cap, pretending to set it right. The woman's face seemed as hard as stone. But her eyes, opened beautifully wide, seemed to contain an infinite wistfulness of parting.

  Ishihara's answer to my question was mere sound in my ears. He had probably said that he thought of the formula because of the shape of Okada's cloak.

  Ishihara had also noticed the woman, but his only comment was “There's a beauty!” And then he continued his speech, adding: “I taught you the secret of the mind's equilibrium. You've not had any training in it, and I was afraid you couldn't carry off our scheme at the critical moment. So I devised a plan to shift your attention. Anything might have done, but I thought of the cone as I just explained it. At any rate, my technique has met with success! Thanks to the formula of a cone, you were able to get beyond the policeman and maintain an unbefangen attitude!”

  The three of us came to a portion of the road turning east along the Iwasaki mansion. In an alley that was not wide enough to accommodate two rickshaws, we were in little danger of being seen. Ishihara left Okada's side and marched before us like a leader.

  I looked back once more, but the woman was no longer in sight.

  We stayed at Ishihara's until late that night. It might be said that we were forced to keep Ishihara company while he drank a great deal of saké and ate the flesh of the goose. And since Okada said nothing about his trip abroad, I had to hold back my desire to discuss it at length. Instead, I was forced to listen to their personal experiences in the regatta.

  When we returned to the Kamijo, I went to bed at once. I was drunk and tired, so I couldn't talk to Okada. And when I came back from the university the next day, I found that he had already gone.

  Just as great events happen because of a peg, a dish of boiled mackerel at a Kamijo supper prevented Otama and Okada from ever meeting each other. This is not all of that story. But the events beyond it are outside the present narrative.

  Now that I have written this, I have counted on my fingers and discovered that thirty-five years have passed since then. I learned half the story during my close association with Okada. And I learned the other half from Otama, with whom I accidentally became acquainted after Okada had left the country.

  In the same way that one receives an image through a stereoscope, the two pictures set together under the lens, I created this story by comparing and combining what I knew earlier and what I heard later.

  Some of my readers may ask: “How did you get to know Otama? And when did you hear the story from her?”

  But as I said before, the answers to those questions are beyond the scope of my story. It is unnecessary to say that I lack the requisites that would qualify me to be Otama's lover; still, let me warn my readers that it is best not to indulge in fruitless speculation.

  TUTTLE CLASSICS