Early Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology, 1600–1900

by Shirane, Haruo, ed.

  About two hours later Fuji-ichi asked, “Has anyone taken in the cakes which arrived just now?”

  “The woman gave them to me and left long ago,” said the clerk.

  “Useless fellow!” cried Fuji-ichi. “I expect people in my service to have more sense! Don’t you realize that you took them in before they had cooled off?”

  He weighed them again, and to everyone’s astonishment, their weight had decreased. Not one of the cakes had been eaten, and the clerk stood gazing at them in open-mouthed amazement.

  It was the early summer of the following year. The local people from the neighborhood of Tōji temple, in southern Kyoto, had gathered the first crop of eggplants in wicker baskets and brought them to town for sale. “Eat young eggplants and live seventy-five days longer” goes the saying; they are very popular. The price was fixed at two zeni for one eggplant or three zeni for two, which meant that everybody bought two. But Fuji-ichi bought only one, at two zeni, because—as he said—“With the one zeni now in pocket I can buy any number of larger ones when the crop is fully grown.” That was the way he kept his wits about him, and he seldom made a mistake.

  In an empty space in his grounds he planted an assortment of useful trees and flowers such as willow, holly, laurel, peach, iris, and bead beans. This he did as an education for his only daughter. Morning glories started to grow of their own accord along the reed fence, but Fuji-ichi said that if it was a question of beauty, such short-lived things were a loss, and in their place he planted runner beans, whose flowers he thought an equally fine sight. Nothing delighted him more than watching over his daughter. When the young girl grew into womanhood, he had a marriage screen constructed for her, and (since he considered that one decorated with views of Kyoto would make her restless to visit the places she had not yet seen and that illustrations of The Tale of Genji or The Tales of Ise might engender frivolous thoughts) he had the screen painted with busy scenes of the silver and copper mines at Tada, in Settsu Province. He composed instructional verses160 on the subject of economy and made his daughter recite them aloud. Instead of sending her to a girls’ temple school, he taught her how to write himself, and by the time he had reached the end of his syllabus, he had made her the most finished and accomplished girl in Kyoto. Imitating her father in his thrifty ways, after the age of eight she no longer spilled ink on her sleeves, no longer played with dolls at the Doll Festival, or joined in the dancing at the Bon Festival.161 Every day she combed her own hair and bound it in a simple bun. She never sought others’ help in her private affairs. She mastered the art of stretching silk padding and learned to fit it perfectly to the length and breadth of each garment. Since young girls can do all this if properly disciplined, it is a mistake to let them do as they please.

  Women (right) deliver rice cakes to Fuji-ichi’s shop. A young clerk (upper right) measures cakes on a scale. Various vendors—a fishmonger, a kitchenware merchant, and an herb seller—approach Fuji-ichi’s shop, followed by a man carrying a bag of coins (far right). Inside the shop, Fuji-ichi (upper left) is looking through his account book, placed next to a box labeled Daikoku-chō (God of Wealth Account Book). His assistants are weighing silver pieces and making calculations on an abacus. Masked beggars (sekizoro), who wear paper hoods and visit households at the end of year, are dancing on the earthen floor and chanting New Year’s blessings (lower left).

  Once, on the evening of the seventh day of the New Year, some neighbors asked permission to send their sons to Fuji-ichi’s house to seek advice on how to become millionaires. Lighting the lamp in the sitting room, Fuji-ichi sat down his daughter to wait, asking her to let him know when she heard a noise at the private door from the street. The young girl, doing as she was told with charming grace, first carefully lowered the wick in the lamp. Then, when she heard the voices of the visitors, she raised the wick again and retired to the scullery. By the time the three guests had seated themselves, the grinding of an earthenware mortar could be heard from the kitchen, and the sound fell with pleasant promise on their ears. They speculated on what was in store for them.

  “Pickled whaleskin soup?” hazarded the first.

  “No. As this is our first visit of the year, it ought to be rice-dumpling gruel,” said the second.

  The third listened carefully for some time and at last confidently announced that it was noodle soup. Visitors always go through this amusing performance. Fuji-ichi then entered and talked to the three of them about the requisites for success.

  “Why is today called the Day of the Seven Herbs?”162 one asked him.

  “That was the beginning of economy in the age of the gods: it was to teach us the ingredients of a cheap stew.”

  “Why do we leave a salted bream hanging before the god of the kitchen range until the Sixth Month?”163 asked another.

  “That is so that when you look at it at mealtimes you may get the feeling of having eaten fish without actually doing so.”

  Finally he was asked the reason for using thick chopsticks at New Year.

  “It is so that when they become soiled they can be scraped white again, and in this way one pair will last the whole year. They also signify the two divine pillars of the state, Izanagi and Izanami.”

  “As a general rule,” concluded Fuji-ichi, “give the closest attention to even the smallest details. Well now, you have kindly talked with me from early evening, and it is high time that refreshments were served. But not providing refreshments is one way of becoming a millionaire. The noise of the mortar that you heard when you first arrived was the pounding of starch for the covers of the account book.”

  A Feather in Daikoku’s Cap (2:3)

  One for his bales of rice,

  Two for his two-floor mansion,

  Three for his store-sheds, three floors high. . . .164

  So ran the Daikoku dancers’ song, and if you looked for someone to fit it, in Kyoto there was the wealthy merchant called Daikokuya. When Gojō Bridge was being changed from wood to stone,165 he purchased the third plank from the western end and had it carved into a likeness of the god Daikoku, praying that by spending his life, as this plank had done, in useful service beneath the feet of customers, he might attain to great wealth. In faith there is profit,166 and his household steadily grew more prosperous. He called himself Daikokuya Shinbei, and the name was known to all.

  He had three sons, all safely reared to manhood and all gifted with intelligence. The old man, delighted at such good fortune, was passing his declining years in great satisfaction and getting ready for retirement when the eldest son, Shinroku, suddenly started to spend recklessly, visiting the brothel quarters again and again with no account of the expense. After half a year, the clerks discovered that 170 kanme of the money recorded in their cashbooks had disappeared. When it became clear, however, that Shinroku could never repay the money, they worked secretly together in his behalf and, by falsifying the prices of goods being held in stock, managed to get him safely through the next reckoning day in the Seventh Month. But for all their earnest pleas that he should live less extravagantly in the future, he took no notice, and at the last reckoning for the year the cash was short again—by 230 kanme. A fox with his tail exposed, Shinroku could play his tricks no more, and he sought refuge with a friend who lived by the Inari Fox Shrine at Fushimi, south of Kyoto. His father, a straitlaced old man, was furious, and no amount of pleading softened his temper. Summoning the neighborhood group to come to his house in formal dress, he publicly disowned his son and abandoned him to his own devices. When a father dissociates himself in this way from his own son, it is for no trifling misdemeanor. Shinroku was now in sorry straits: it was impossible for him to remain in the vicinity, even in his present refuge, but if he was to leave and make for Edo he must have money, and at the moment he had not even the price of a pair of sandals for the journey.

  “Was there ever a more unhappy case than mine?” he moaned. But self-pity did nothing to mend his fortune.

  It was on the evening
of the twenty-eighth of the Twelfth Month, soon after Shinroku had entered the bathtub in his lodgings, that someone shouted the dread alarm of his father’s approach. Terrified, Shinroku leaped from the tub, hastily draped a padded kimono about his dripping body, and fled into the street. He held his sash in one hand but had somehow forgotten to retrieve his underwear—and now that Shinroku was eager at last to get ready for the walk to Edo, the absence of his loincloth was truly unfortunate.

  It was not until the twenty-ninth that he finally set out. The skies were overcast, and as he passed Fuji-no-mori, south of Kyoto, the snow that had long threatened began to fall and settle on the pines. Shinroku was hatless, and icy drops oozed past his collar. By sundown, his spirits still further depressed by the booming of temple bells, he was gazing with longing at the steaming tea urns in the cozy rest houses of Ōkamedani and Kanshuji. A sip of tea, he felt, was the very thing to ward off this bitter cold. Having no money, however, he bided his time until he noticed a house before which the palanquins from Fushimi or Ōtsu were drawing up with particular frequency. It was jammed tight with customers, and in the general confusion he quenched his thirst free of charge, and as he left he took the opportunity to appropriate a straw cape that someone had momentarily laid aside. After this initiation into the art of thieving he proceeded along the road toward the village of Ono. There, beneath the branches of a desolate, leafless persimmon tree, he came across a group of children bewailing some misfortune.

  “What a shame!” he heard one say. “Poor old Benkei’s dead!”

  Stretched on the ground before them was a huge black dog, the size of a carter’s ox. Shinroku went up to the children and persuaded them to let him have the carcass. Wrapping it in the straw cape he had stolen, he carried it with him as far as the foot of Otowa hill and there addressed some laborers who were digging in the fields.

  “This dog,” said Shinroku, “should make a wonderful cure for nervous indigestion. For more than three years I’ve fed him on every variety of drug, and now I intend to burn him into black medicinal ash.”167

  “Well, that’s something we should all profit from!” exclaimed the laborers, and fetching brushwood and withered bamboo grass from around them, they produced their tinder wallets and started a fire.

  Shinroku gave a little of the ash to each of them, flung the remainder across his shoulders, and set off again. Crying “Burned wolf powder!” mimicking the curious local dialect, he proceeded to hawk his wares along the road. Passing the Osaka barrier gate, where “people come and people go, both those you know and those you know not,”168 he persuaded all and sundry to stop and buy. Even peddlers of needles and hawkers of writing brushes, who had long experience themselves in swindling travelers, were taken in by him, and between Oiwake and Hatchō he sold 580 zeni’ worth of ash.

  Shinroku is chased out of the bathtub by his enraged father, who is waving a long stick. The surprised landlady (upper right), wearing a cotton cap (unagi-wata, or eel cap), and her two attendants are attempting to bring the old man back to his senses. A clerk (left) follows Shinroku with his clothes.

  What a pity, he told himself, never to have realized until now what a born genius he was! If he had used his wits like this in Kyoto, no wearisome walk to Edo would ever have been necessary. Laughing at the thought and at the same time on the verge of tears, he pressed on across the long bridge at Seta and steeled himself to think only of what lay eastward. He passed New Year’s Day at a lodging house in Kusatsu, where even as he refreshed himself on the local Uba cakes, he caught a glimpse of Mirror Mountain and wept again for Kyoto and the old familiar mirror cakes of home. But soon, like those first blossoms on Cherry Hill, buds of hope were stirring in his breast, and then, as he sensed the fragrance and the color of his full-flowering youth, he knew that he was ready and able to work, and he laughed at the weak-kneed, ancient god of poverty behind him struggling to keep pace. At Oiso, even the age-old shrine was young with the spirit of spring, its trees white with sacred festoons, and the moon above, so sad in autumn, shone bright with promise for the future. Doubts lay demolished like the old barrier gates he passed at Fuwa, and day in, day out, he trudged onward. Taking the Mino Road to Owari, and hawking his powder around every town and village on the Tōkaidō, the Eastern Seaboard Highway, at last, on the sixty-second day after leaving Kyoto, he arrived at Shinagawa.

  Now that he not only had supported himself all this way but also had made an overall profit of 2,300 zeni, he threw the unsold remains of the black powder into the waves by the shore and hurried on toward Edo. But it grew dark and as he had nowhere in Edo to stay, he passed the night before the gate of the Tōkai-ji temple at Shinagawa. Beneath its shelter a number of outcasts were lying, stretched out under their straw capes. It was spring, but the wind from the sea was strong, and the roar of the waves kept him from closing his eyes until midnight. The others were recounting their life stories, and lying awake, he listened to them. Although all of them were beggars now, it seemed that none was so by inheritance. One was from the village of Tatsuta in Yamato and had formerly been a small brewer of saké, supporting a family of six or seven in tolerable comfort. However, when the money he had been steadily putting by amounted to one hundred koban, he decided that getting rich by running a local business was a slow process, and—disregarding all that his relations and friends said to dissuade him—he abandoned his shop and came down to Edo. Following his own foolhardy impulses, he rented a shop from a fishmonger in Gofuku-chō and started a business alongside all the high-class saké stores. He could not, however, compete with the products of Kōnoike, Itami, and Ikeda, or with the cedar-barreled saké of the long-established, powerful Nara breweries,169 and when the capital with which he had started his shop had dwindled to nothing, he took the straw matting from a sixteen-gallon tub of saké to serve as a coat and took to the road as a beggar.

  “I thought I should go back to Tatsuta in embroidered scarlet silks, but now I’d go back if I had even so much as a new cotton kimono,” he wailed. “It just shows that you should never abandon a business you’re used to.”

  But words were useless. Although the time of wisdom had come, it was too late.

  Another of the outcasts was from Sakai, to the south of Osaka, in Izumi Province. A master of a thousand arts, he had come to Edo in high hopes, swollen with conceit. In calligraphy he had been granted lessons by Hirano Chūan.170 In tea he had drunk at the stream of Kanamori Sōwa. Chinese verse and prose composition he had learned under Gensei of Fukakusa, and for linked verse and haikai he had been a pupil of Nishiyama Sōin. In nō drama he had mastered the dramatic style of Kobatake and the drum technique of Shōda Yoemon. Mornings he had listened to Itō Genkichi expounding on the classics, evenings he had practiced kickball under Lord Asukai; during the afternoon he had joined in Gensai’s chess classes; and at night he had learned koto fingering from Yatsuhashi Kengyō and blowing the flute as a pupil of Sōsan. In jōruri recital he learned the style of Uji Kadayū, and in dancing he was the equal of Yamatoya no Jinbei. In the art of love he had been trained by the great Shimabara courtesan Takahashi, and in revels with boy actors he had copied to perfection the mannerisms of Suzuki Heihachi. Under the guidance of the professional entertainers in both the Shimabara and the unlicensed quarter he had developed into a pleasure seeker of exquisite refinement. If there was anything that man could do he had sought out a specialist in it and had copied his technique, and he now proudly regarded himself as one qualified to succeed in any task to which he might turn his hand. But these years of rigorous training proved of little use in the immediate business of earning a living, and he soon regretted that he had never used an abacus and had no knowledge of the scales. At a loss in samurai households, useless as a merchant’s apprentice, his services were scorned by all. Reduced to his present plight, he had cause to reconsider his opinion of himself, and he cursed the parents who had taught him the arts but omitted any instruction in the elements of earning a living.

  A third begg
ar was Edo born and bred, like his father before him. Although he had once owned a large mansion and grounds in Tōri-chō, drawing a regular income of six hundred koban per annum from house rents, he had no conception of the meaning of the simple word “economy,” and before long he had sold everything except the walls and roof of his house. Left without a means of support, he abandoned society and his home and took to the life of a beggar—an outcast in practice, even if not registered as one with Kuruma Zenshichi’s guild.171

  Listening to each of these life stories, different though they were from one another, Shinroku felt that all were very like his own, and his sympathy was aroused. He moved nearer to where the others were lying.

  “I too am from Kyoto,” he said and added, concealing nothing of his disgrace, ‘I have been disowned by my father and was going to Edo to try my luck—but listening to your stories has disheartened me.

  “Was there no way of excusing yourself?” the beggars exclaimed. “Had you no aunt to intercede for you? You would have been far better advised never to have come to Edo.”

  “That is past, and I cannot retrace my steps. It is advice for the future that I require. It surprises me that men so shrewd as each of you should be reduced to such distress. Surely you could have made a living of some sort, no matter what trade you chose.”