Early Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology, 1600–1900

by Shirane, Haruo, ed.

  “Whatever. I won’t leave until you give it to me.”

  “Give what?”

  “The money.”

  “And who’s going to make me give it?”

  “I am. Listen, my job is getting what others can’t get. I was hired especially to collect from twenty-seven hard-core cases. Look at my book here. I’ve already collected from twenty-six, and I’m not going back without collecting from all twenty-seven. By the way, the lumber you used to remodel your house—until you pay, it belongs to the lumberyard. If you’re not going to pay for it, I’ll have to take it back with me.” The young man picked up a large mallet and went to the front gate, where he began knocking out one of the gateposts.

  The owner ran out to the gate shouting, “You won’t get away with this!”

  “You know,” the young man said, “your approach to extortion is really out of date. You don’t know the slightest thing about advanced methods. Taking back gatepost lumber is the latest thing in bill collecting.”

  At that, the owner realized there was nothing more he could do to threaten the young man. He promptly apologized to him and paid back the full amount.

  “You’ve paid what you owed,” the young man told him, “so I don’t have any right to say this, but your method of evading payment is awfully old. You’re quite an extortionist, and it just doesn’t seem right. Allow me to make a few suggestions. First you talk over everything with your wife, and then you and she begin fighting at around noon on the last day of the year, before the collectors arrive. Your wife changes into street clothes and says, ‘There’s no reason I have to stay in this house forever. But if I go, two, maybe three, people are going to end up dead. Is that all right with you? Do you understand how serious this is? Listen, you. Are you absolutely sure you want me to get out? You don’t even need to tell me, you know. I’ll be out of here before you can tell me anything—and happy to be gone!’ Then you say, ‘Please, please understand. I need all the money we have to pay back my debts. I want people to speak kindly of me when I’m dead, after all. We live only once, but our reputations live forever. I have exactly one choice. I’ll clear my debts and then kill myself. Today’s my last day on earth. It has to be done. Still, just thinking about it makes me very angry!’ Then you take some papers, any old papers, and rip them up one by one as if they were extremely important documents. When the collectors see that, even the most hardened veteran isn’t going to stay long.”

  “In all these years,” the owner exclaimed, “that plan never even occurred to me. Thanks to you,” and then he turned to his wife, “we’re going to use it to get us through the last day of the year next year just fine, aren’t we?” Then he turned back to the young man. “You haven’t lived many years, but you’re wiser than we are. And your wisdom’s gotten us through the end of the year. Won’t you please celebrate the coming new year with us for a moment? It’s not much, just a token of our gratitude.”

  The couple plucked the headless cock and served a delicious broth to the young man, and then they exchanged cups of saké. The young bill collector had already left by the time the man exclaimed to his wife, “Why should we wait until next year? It’s still early, and every year the toughest collectors come late.”

  The two promptly invented an argument, and they managed to fend off every collector who came that night. Eventually they became famous as the Brawlers of Ōmiya Street.178

  His Dream Form Is Gold Coins (3:3)

  “Never forget about business,” advised one very rich man, “even in your dreams.” The things people think about always appear in their dreams, whether they’re happy or sad. So there’s something sleazy about dreaming of picking up money someone else has dropped. And even if you actually went out and looked, you wouldn’t find anything. Nobody drops coins any more. People regard money as life itself and take the greatest care with it. Not a single copper coin reaches the ground when crowds gather at Buddhist temples and toss offerings into collection boxes on those special days when prayers are supposed to have a thousand times their normal effect. And the ground is bare even on the day after the big Tenma Festival179 in Osaka. Money, it seems, only appears after you’ve worked for it.

  Just south of Kyoto in Fushimi, there was a poor man who slighted his trade and spent his time thinking of ways to get rich all at once. He couldn’t forget a sight he’d seen once in Suruga-chō180 when he was living in Edo. There, in one moneychanger’s shop, he’d seen stacks of unwrapped coins rising up like a small mountain. Now he lay on his cheap paper bedding obsessed with the desire to have that heap of coins to get him through the end of the year. In his mind he once more saw stack after stack of freshly reminted coins rising up from the buckskin mat in the shop—so many coins he was sure they must have been the size of his own body when he was lying down.

  At dawn on the thirty-first of the Twelfth Month, the last day of the year, the man’s wife woke first, worrying about how her family would manage to get through the day. As she tried to think of ways they might come up with some money, she happened to look over at the sunlight falling onto the floor through the eastern window. There, in its rays, rose a heap of gold coins.

  It had actually happened! She decided it must be a gift from heaven. Elated, she called to her sleeping husband again and again. “What is it?” he finally answered. As he spoke, the coins disappeared. The woman was filled with remorse for what she’d done, and she explained to her husband what had happened.

  “It must have been the gold coins I saw when I was living in Edo,” her husband said. “Even now, all I can think about is having that money. My desire must have taken the shape of those coins for a while. Actually, just now I was beginning to think bad thoughts, and my bad soul overcame my good soul. I was thinking, well, if it were the only way out of this poverty, I’d be willing to make money by ringing the Bell of Eternal Torment at Sayo-no-Nakayama. I’d do it, even though I knew I’d have to go to hell for it later and could never get reborn in the Pure Land. For rich people this world is paradise, but for poor people it’s already hell. Unlike hell, though, in this world we poor people don’t even have enough firewood under our cauldrons! I was lying there half asleep thinking what an awful year this was when I saw two demons, one black and one white, coming to meet me in a roaring, fiery chariot. They took me all the way to the edge of the other world and were showing me along the border of hell.”

  When the woman heard this, she grew even sadder. “No one lives to be one hundred,” she said firmly, admonishing her husband. “It’s just plain foolish to waste your time with that ridiculous wish. As long as we don’t change our feelings for each other, I’m sure we’ll have happy new years in the future. I understand your deep disappointment as a man at not being able to support me and our daughter, but if we don’t do something, all three of us are going to starve. We’re in luck, though. Luckily, there’s a job opening for a live-in servant I can take. We have only one child, and this will also be good for her future. While I’m away, if you’ll take care of her and raise her, I’m sure we’ll all have better times in the future. It would be cruel to give her away to someone else. Please, I beg you.” Tears were running down her face.

  The man, his pride hurt, was unable to reply or even look into his wife’s face. While he was sitting there with his eyes closed, a woman from Sumizome-chō in Fushimi, an employment agent, arrived together with a wealthy retired woman in her sixties and began talking with his wife.

  “As I said yesterday,” the agent began, “you have good breasts, so you’ll receive your whole year’s salary of eleven and a quarter ounces of silver in advance. And you’ll get new clothes quarterly. Most wet nurses get to change their robes only twice a year, you know. You should feel grateful. Those big women who work in the kitchen get only four and a quarter ounces for six months, plus they have to weave cloth at night. It’s all because of your breasts. You should realize that. If you don’t want the job, I’ve found another woman in northern Kyō-machi who can do it. It has to
be settled today. I’m not coming back here again.”

  “I’m only doing this to help my family get by,” the woman said cheerfully. “Do you really think I’ll be able to take care of their baby boy properly? If it’s a job I can really do, then I accept the offer.”

  “Then we’d better go over to the house right away,” the agent answered, without bothering to speak to the woman’s husband. The agent borrowed a brush and inkstone from a neighbor and wrote out a formal one-year contract for the woman. Then she paid the full amount in silver.

  “Oh, I might as well do this now as later. It’s the standard rate,” the agent said, taking back the package, which was marked “Thirty-seven Silver Coins: Eleven and a Quarter Ounces.” Carefully she measured out her commission, exactly 10 percent. “Well now, wet nurse, we must be going. Come along just as you are.”

  Tears came to the man’s eyes, and his wife’s face was red and swollen from crying. “Goodbye, Oman,” she said to her daughter. “Mommy’s going to her new employer’s nice mansion. She’ll come back soon, on the sixteenth of the First Month.181 We’ll be together then.” She asked the neighbors on both sides to look after a few things, and then she started crying again.

  An employment agent leads a prospective employer and her parlor maid into the earthen space at the entrance to the couple’s home. Behind them are three earthen ovens and cooking utensils. In the living room, the wife sits and holds her daughter while her husband, covered with gold coins representing his desire and his wife’s dream, sits with his feet under a foot warmer.

  “Children can grow up without parents,” the agent said brusquely. “Even if you try to beat them to death, the ones that aren’t going to die won’t. And good day to you, sir.” Then the agent turned and began to leave.

  The retired woman, the wife’s new employer, looked back once more at the baby. She understood well how many sorrows there were in the world. “My motherless grandson certainly deserves pity,” she said, “but that little girl, how pitiful she’s going to be without her own mother’s milk.”

  “If the girl dies,” the agent said, without caring in the least that the child’s mother was listening, “then she’s just fated to die, that’s all. If you want to blame something, blame money.” She hurried the other two women out of the house.

  As evening deepened on the last day of the year, the man began to feel he had no reason to go on living. First I get a big inheritance, he told himself, and then I lose it all because of my bad attitude and my stupid mental calculations. I even had to run away from Edo.182 Fushimi’s a run-down place, but thanks to my wife, I’ve been able to settle down here. Everything that’s happened has been because of her love. Even if all we had was some nice tea to celebrate with, we could still have a wonderful New Year’s just being together and making love. And over there. What’s that on the end of the shelf? How sweet of her! She’s bought two pairs of special chopsticks for us to eat New Year’s food with. I certainly won’t need both. The man broke one pair in two and fed it into the fire under the pan he was heating.

  It grew late, but the baby refused to stop crying, and women from next door dropped by to help. They taught the man how to boil rice flour into gruel, mix it with sweet barley syrup, and then boil the whole mixture. Then they showed him how to feed it to the baby through a bamboo tube with silk tied around the end that was the same size as her mother’s nipple.

  “Am I imagining things,” one woman asked, “or has her little chin grown thinner just today?”

  The man was tending the fire with a pair of tongs. “This just isn’t going to work,” he said, angry at himself. Suddenly he hurled the tongs onto the dirt floor of the kitchen.

  “I sympathize with you,” another woman said. “Your wife is lucky, though. The son of the old woman who hired her likes pretty women, so he’ll treat her well.”

  “Treat her very, very well,” the first woman said. “She looks a lot like his own wife who just died.”

  “Actually,” the second woman said, “when you look at your wife from behind, with that attractive way she has, yes, she looks exactly like the dead woman.”

  “The money’s still all there,” the man declared abruptly. “I haven’t touched it. After hearing what you’ve said, I’d rather starve to death than take it!” He ran out of the house and came back later with his wife. They were still crying when the year changed.

  Holy Man Heitarō (5:3)

  Buddhism has long been considered by monks and believers alike to be a means of making a living. This continues to be true today. Every year, for example, on the last night of winter, sermons are given at True Pure Land sect temples to recount the life of the pious disciple Heitarō183 and retell the story of his vision of Saint Shinran, the sect’s founder. Men and women of all ages go to the temples in great numbers to hear these sermons, which are never new but are always felt to be worth listening to.

  In 1673 the last night of winter happened to fall on the last night of the year, as happens every so often.184 The calls of year-end bill collectors competed with the voices of beggars singing purifying charms in doorways on the last night of winter, and the sharp sounds of merchants tapping on their scales with mallets, weighing out the silver they owed, clashed with the clattering of dried beans thrown in every direction to ward off bad fortune as spring approached. There was something uncanny about it all, as if a demon had been tied up and was struggling to get loose somewhere out in the dark. People felt vaguely but distinctly nervous about what might happen.

  The sound of the large drum in one True Pure Land temple reverberated far and wide. The monks lit lanterns in front of the buddha image in the main hall and waited for believers to arrive, but when the great bell boomed out at seven-thirty, only three believers could be seen. The head monk led the early evening services, and after he had finished he sat silently for a while, pondering what was happening out in the world.

  “Well,” he finally said, “tonight people have to finish off the year’s business. Everybody seems to be too busy to come worship. But all the old women out there who’ve already left their household duties to their children and grandchildren, they have enough time. Nothing should be keeping them home tonight. When they die and Amida Buddha comes for them in that boat of his, none of them are going to say they’re too busy then to get on board and ride to the Pure Land paradise! How foolish humans are. How pitiful and shortsighted.

  “There’s no use giving a sermon to only three of you. Temples are devoted to the buddhas, but we also have to make mental calculations, you know. Your offerings won’t even cover the cost of the lamp oil. No matter how hard I flapped my mouth, it would be a complete loss. Please take back your offerings and carry them home with you. Each of you came here even though you were very worried about trying to make ends meet. And you don’t even belong to the temple. I’m impressed beyond words at the sincerity of your belief. You’ve come all the way here when you must be so very, very busy! Amida Buddha won’t forget your devotion. He’ll make sure it gets written down in the golden ledger of good deeds consulted by Enma, the judge of souls.185 It will be calculated in your favor once you get to the other world, no doubt about it. Never, never think your offerings were in vain. Amida is merciful above all else. That’s the absolute truth. Trust me.”

  One of the visitors, an old woman, was crying. “After hearing your precious words,” she told the monk, “I feel ashamed from the bottom of my heart. I didn’t come here tonight out of any deep belief. I came because my only son is lazy and careless about his work. He’s always being hounded by bill collectors, you know. Until now he’s managed to escape the collectors on all the settlement days by making up stories, but at the end the year they get very serious. He just couldn’t think up a good enough story.

  “So he asked me to make a short pilgrimage to a True Pure Land temple. ‘I’ll shout and wail that I can’t find my aged mother,’ he said. ‘Then I’ll ask the neighbors to help me look for you. We’ll walk around all
night banging on drums and gongs, and by the time the sun comes up the collectors will be gone. Pretending someone’s lost is an old technique,’ he bragged, ‘but I’ll be the first one ever to escape my creditors by going around shouting for someone to bring back my elderly mother.’

  “And that’s just what that son of mine’s done. He claims it’s all right because neighbors have to help out one another in emergencies, no matter how much of an imposition it is. But my son’s deceiving them and causing them a frightful amount of trouble. It’s a great sin.”

  Moved by the old woman’s confession, another visitor spoke. “I’m from Ise Province,” he said. “You know, the way husbands and wives meet is the strangest thing in the whole world. I have no relatives at all in Osaka, but an Ise traveling priest who has a lot of customers here for his amulets hired me to be his porter. I was amazed to see all the business going on in this city, and I judged it would pretty easy for me to make enough to feed myself and have a wife and a child, too. Luckily for me, a salesman I knew who used to sell Osaka goods in the countryside around Nara died. He left behind a two-year-old son, and his wife had a fair complexion and was strong and energetic. Well, we decided to live and work together. I was counting on the boy to take care of me when I got older, so I took the woman’s last name and entered her family as her husband.186 I didn’t know very much about the area around Nara, though. Or about being a traveling salesman! In less than six months I’d used up all the little money we had. Around the beginning of the Twelfth Month, I realized I really ought to find a new line of business.