Modern Japanese Literature

by Donald Keene

  Then one of the boys said abruptly, “I heard you took Kishu in to live with you?”

  “Yes, I did,” Gen answered without a glance.

  “Everybody is wondering what you’re doing taking in a beggar boy like that and keeping him with you. What’s the matter? Were you lonely living alone?”

  “Yes.”

  “You could have easily found some nice child around here without taking him.”

  “That’s true,” said the old woman, looking up into Gen’s face, but he looked away troubled and silent.

  Gray smoke was rising quietly up from the hills in the west and glowing in the last of the evening sunlight.

  “Kishu has no parents or brothers or home. I am an old man with no wife or child. If I take him as my son, he will take me as his father. Isn’t that better for both of us?”

  The people in the boat were surprised; they had never heard him talk this way before.

  “Gen, how everything changes . . .” the old woman said. “It seems just like yesterday that I used to see your wife standing on the shore with the baby in her arms. How old would your boy have been now?”

  “Perhaps a year or two older than Kishu.”

  “It’s hard to guess how old that Kishu is, he’s so dirty!”

  The laughter lasted for a while.

  “I don’t know either. He said he is sixteen or seventeen. Nobody knows exactly, except maybe his mother. . . . But don’t you feel sorry for him?” Gen said, looking at the child the old couple had with them.

  “If a real feeling of love grows up between Gen and Kishu, then Gen’s old age may be much happier. It would be nice to have him always there when Gen comes back in the evening,” the old man said half-seriously.

  “Sure, I think it would be fine,” said Gen, full of pleasure.

  “Aren’t you planning to take Kishu to the play?” said one of the young men, less interested in teasing Gen than in seeing the sisters smile; but they smiled only a little, so as not to hurt Gen’s feelings.

  “That would be interesting!” the old woman said and banged the boat.

  “I don’t see any reason to take my boy to something like The Tragedy of Awa no Jurobei and have him cry,” said Gen seriously.

  “What do you mean ’my boy’?” said the old woman, pretending. “Your boy drowned over there, I heard,” she added, pointing. Everyone looked at the place.

  “Kishu, I mean,” said Gen. Anger, shame, and joy filled his mind. Then only joy. Suddenly he began to sing and to row more stoutly than ever before. Neither the sea nor the mountains had heard that voice long since. It, too, spread out like a water ring over the sea at evening calm, touched shore, and echoed back faintly, faintly from thirty years ago.

  Then the two girls got off at the island; the young men lay down on their backs and covered up with a blanket. In a low voice the old couple went on talking again about family and business; they gave some cakes to their grandchild.

  Before the boat got back, the sun had already gone down behind the hills. The cooking smoke from evening meals lay over the village and along the shore. Old Gen was thinking that there was somebody waiting for him: Kishu might be drowsing in front of the fire. His stubbornness might soften. . . . Had he finished his supper or waited? When Gen had offered to teach him to row Kishu had seemed quite pleased. Surely even Kishu in time would be stout and healthy. How nice it would be to hear Kishu singing some of his songs. It might be that Kishu, too, would row his boat with just one girl in the moonlight.

  When at last old Gen’s boat reached the pier, he rolled up the straw mat and carried it under his arm and his oar on his back toward home.

  “Son, I’m back,” he called and put his oar in its usual place and went in. There was no light inside.

  “What’s the matter? I’m back. Kishu, where’s the light? Kishu!” There was no answer.

  “Kishu! Kishu!” a cricket repeated faintly.

  Gen took a match from his pocket and lit it. No one was there, and the match burned out. Gloomy and cold the air came up from under the floor. He lit a small lantern and looked all about, calling and calling hoarsely, but the ash in the fireplace was white and cold; there was no sign of Kishu’s supper. At last Gen lit his big boat lantern and left.

  He asked at the blacksmith’s. No one had seen Kishu. Finally, however, out on the edge of town on an old farm road with pine trees planted along it, he saw the figure of Kishu walking along with his hands in his pockets, his body bent forward.

  “Kishu?” old Gen said, putting his hand on Kishu’s shoulder. “Where are you going like this?” he went on in a tone of both relief and sorrow. Kishu looked back without surprise. “Kishu, don’t you feel cold? Let’s go back.” Gen took his hand and they started back home; he explained he was sorry to be so late and he was sorry it was so lonely for Kishu at home.

  Once they were back, Gen lit the fire and took out some food from the cupboard and fed Kishu. When Kishu finished his meal, Gen made his bed and covered him up with a blanket. He himself sat by the fire for a long, long time without moving, while the wood burned lower and lower. On his face, which had been exposed for fifty years to the sea winds, the faint reflections of the last flames moved. And the shining thing was probably a tear.

  Next morning Gen got up early and fixed breakfast, but he himself ate little, saying he felt sick and thirsty. After a while he took Kishu’s hand and put it to his forehead and asked him to tell if he had any fever. Then Gen decided he had caught a cold and went back to bed.

  “Tomorrow I will be all right. Come over here, Kishu, and we can talk. I will tell you some interesting stories,” but he talked to him as though to a child, this story and that. Had Kishu ever seen a real live shark? At last he asked, “Don’t you miss your modier?” but Kishu did not understand him.

  “You can stay here as long as you want to. Please think of me as your father. I will take you to the play tomorrow. It’s Awa no Jurobei and then you can understand family love.”

  With that old Gen began to tell the plot of the play, which he had once seen, years ago. He sang a song from the play and wept to himself, the story was so sad. Kishu, however, seemed to be making nothing of it at all.

  “Well, maybe it is hard for you to get the idea from just hearing the story, but tomorrow you’ll see . . .” and finally Gen slept for a while from fatigue at his own recitation. Then he seemed to wake and to look about for Kishu; instead, he found a beggarwoman who said Kishu was her son. She seemed to change into Gen’s own mother, telling him to look at a stage dazzlingly lit with many candles, but he only took cakes, wondering why his mother wept with her eyelids flushed. At last he fell asleep with his small head on his mother’s knees. After a long while it seemed his dream was interrupted, as if his mother were shaking him. Old Gen raised his head on the pillow and stared around. It was hard to separate dream and reality.

  “Kishu!” Kishu was gone.

  Throwing off his blanket, Gen stood up suddenly, but his head was pounding. In a moment he sank back dizzily into his bed and pulled the covers up over his head.

  That day the wind came up gradually, beginning in the morning. None of the harbor people wanted to go to town and no one in town wanted to go to the island. Thus the whole day passed; no one called at old Gen’s for his boat. By evening the sea had become so much heavier that people began to think the pier might be destroyed.

  Early in the morning of the following day, with the earliest light of dawn many of the harbor people came down to the pier with their lanterns and raincoats. Fortunately the pier was safe, but when they looked around and it was a little lighter they noticed a boat that had been driven up on the rocks and wrecked.

  “Whose boat is that?” said the owner of one of the shops.

  “It’s Gen’s, I’m almost sure,” said one of the younger fellows. The men looked at each other without speaking for a while.

  “Someone ought to tell him. . . .”

  “All right, I will,” said the s
ame young fellow and started off at a run. He had not gone very far, however, before he noticed something strange hanging from the pine tree by the road. At first he thought it might be something blown there by the storm, but when he looked more closely it was a man. In fact, it was old Gen, dead, who had hanged himself there.

  Kishu is much the same Kishu, taken for granted by the people of the town as a regular fixture of Saeki, and given as before to wandering the old city in the middle of the night like some ghost escaped from his grave. When somebody told him that old Gen had hanged himself, Kishu merely gave a vacant stare.

  TRANSLATED BY SAM HOUSTON BROCK

  MODERN HAIKU : I

  Haru no hi ya

  hito nanimo senu

  komura kana

  A day of spring:

  a hamlet where not anyone

  is doing anything.

  Hibari-ha to

  kaeru-ha to uta no

  giron kana

  On how to sing

  the frog school and the skylark school

  are arguing!

  Kaerimireba

  yukiaishi hito

  kasumikeri

  Backward I gaze

  but the one I met and passed

  is lost in haze!

  Miyashiro ya

  niwabi ni tōki

  ukinedori

  A shrine:—here, keeping

  far from garden lights, float

  wild birds, sleeping.

  Kimi matsu yo

  mata kogarashi no

  ame ni naru

  Night—and once again

  the while I wait for you cold wind

  turns into rain.

  Wasureorishi

  hachi ni hana saku

  haru hi kana

  A long forgotten thing:

  a pot where now a flower blooms—

  this day of spring!

  Medieval Scene

  Jōityi

  omote no furanu

  fubuki kana

  Eleven of them go—

  horsemen who do not turn their heads

  through the whirling snow.

  Kangetsu ya

  sekitō no kage

  matsu no kage

  Cold is the moonshine:

  shadow of a stone pagoda

  shadow of a pine.

  Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902)

  Kaze ni kike

  izure ga saki ni

  chiru konoha

  The winds that blow—

  ask them, which leaf on the tree

  will be next to go.

  Natsume Sōseki (1867-1916)

  Hebi nigete

  ware wo mishi me no

  kusa ni nokoru

  A snake! . . . and it passes—

  but eyes that had glared at me

  stay in the grasses.

  Ame harete

  shibaraku bara no

  nioi kana

  Clearing after showers—

  and for a little while the scent

  of hawthorn flowers.

  Akikaze ya

  ganchū no mono

  mina haiku

  The winds of fall—

  and the things one looks upon

  are haiku, all!

  Takahama Kyoshi (born 1874)

  TRANSLATED BY HAROLD G. HENDERSON

  BOTCHAN

  by Natsume Sōseki (1867-1916)

  Natsume Sōseki is usually considered to have been the greatest novelist of the Meiji period, and he is also famous for his poetry in Chinese, his haiku, and his literary criticism. Before embarking on his career as a novelist in 1905, Natsume had been Professor of English Literature at Tokyo University; and the influence of English novels, particularly those of Meredith, was strong in some of his early works. Gradually, however, his novels acquired a philosophic tone which owed more to the East than to the West.

  Botchan, published in 1906, was probably Natsume’s most popular novel. It deals mainly with the experiences a Tokyo-bred young man has as a teacher in a country school on the island of Shikoku. The title is hard to translate: it is a familiar form of address for boys, something like “sonny” What follows is the first chapter of the novel.

  •

  From childhood I have suffered because of the reckless nature I inherited from my parents. When I was in elementary school I jumped out of the second story of the school building and lost the use of my legs for a week. Some people might ask why I did such a thing. I had no very profound reason. I was looking out of the second-floor window of the new schoolhouse when one of my classmates said as a joke that, for all my boasting, he bet I could not jump to the ground. He called me a coward. When the janitor carried me home on his back, my father looked at me sternly and said he did not think much of anyone who dislocated his back just by jumping from the second floor. I said next time I would show him I could do it without getting hurt.

  One of my relatives gave me a penknife. I was showing some of my friends how nicely the blade would shine in the sun, when one of them said that the blade would shine all right, but it did not look as though it would cut. I replied that it would cut anything. He said that if that was so he would like to see me cut my finger. I said that a finger was no problem, and cut slantwise across the nail of my right thumb. Fortunately the knife was small and the bone hard, so that I still have the thumb, but the scar will remain until I die.

  About twenty paces east of our yard there was a small vegetable garden on some high ground, and in the middle was a chestnut tree. This tree was more important to me than life. When the chestnuts were ripe, I would go out back as soon as I got up, pick up the ones that had fallen, and eat them at school. The west side of the vegetable garden adjoined the garden of the Yamashiroya Pawnshop. The son of the pawnshop-owner was thirteen or fourteen and a coward. But all the same, he would climb over the lattice fence and steal our chestnuts. One evening I hid behind the gate and caught him. When he realized that escape was cut off, he came flying at me. He was two years older than I and, coward though he was, very strong. He aimed his flat head at my chest and began pushing as hard as he could. Then his head slipped and went into the sleeve of my kimono. I could not use my hand because of his head, so I began waving my arm around wildly. His head wobbled back and forth with the sleeve until finally, unable to stand this any longer, he bit my arm. That hurt. I pushed him up against the fence, tripped him with my foot, and knocked him over. The yard of the pawnshop was about six feet lower than our vegetable garden, and as he fell he did a somersault, breaking down the fence, and landing with a grunt. In so doing he tore the sleeve off my kimono. When my mother went to the pawnshop that night to apologize, she got the sleeve back.

  I got into a lot more trouble. The carpenter’s son, the fishmonger’s boy, and I once ruined a neighbor’s carrots. The shoots were just coming up, and he had spread straw all over them. We held a wrestling match on the straw that lasted half a day, and all the new shoots were trampled down into the ground. Another time I caused a storm of complaint by stopping up a well that watered Mr. Furu-kawa’s rice fields. The well consisted of a big bamboo pipe sunk deep into the ground from which the water bubbled up and flowed into the fields. At the time I did not understand how wells worked, so I stuffed the pipe full of stones and sticks, and when I had made sure that no more water came out of it, I went home. While I was eating supper, Mr. Furukawa came to our house, very excited and red in the face. I think my father settled by paying him some money.

  My father had no use for me, and my mother generally favored my elder brother, who was disgustingly pale and liked to play theatre, especially if he could take the part of a female impersonator. “This boy,” my father used to say whenever he saw me, “will never amount to anything.” And my mother agreed. “He is so rowdy,” she would say,“I worry about his future.” They had reason to worry. I have never amounted to anything, as you can see. I have managed to stay out of jail and that is about all.

  A few days before my mother died, I was turning somersau
lts in the kitchen and hit my side against the stove. It was very painful. My mother became angry and said she did not want to look at the likes of me, so I went to stay with some relatives. After a while I heard that she had died. I certainly did not think she would die so suddenly. If I’d known she was that sick, I thought when I returned home, I would have behaved better. My brother, in his usual way, said that I had been mean to Mother, and that that was why she had died so soon. I was mortified, and hit him in the face.

  When my mother died there were only my father, my brother, and myself. My father never did anything. Whenever he met anyone, he always told him that he—the other person—was no damn good. I still don’t know what my father found no damn good in other people. He was a peculiar father. My brother planned to become a businessman and studied English diligently. He was sly and effeminate and we were on poor terms; about once every ten days we had a quarrel. One day when we were playing chess he managed by foul means to maneuver me into a bad situation and then began to laugh. I got angry and hit him on the forehead with one of the chessmen I had in my hand. I cut his forehead a little and it began to bleed. He went and told my father, who said he was going to disinherit me.

  At the time I thought that I could do nothing about it, and I had resigned myself to being disinherited, when Kiyo, who had been our maid for over ten years, tearfully apologized to my father for my behavior and finally managed to appease him. In spite of this I was not afraid of my father. I felt sorry instead that Kiyo had had to do such a thing. Kiyo, I had heard, came from a good family, but had lost everything at the time of the Restoration, and was finally reduced to working as a servant. By this time she was well on in years. This old woman, for what reason I do not know, was always extremely good to me. My father found me too much to handle and the neighborhood despised me as an incorrigible roughneck; even my mother, a few days before her death, lost all patience with me; but this old woman continued to treat me with extravagant kindness. I had resigned myself to the fact that I did not have a lovable nature, and if I was treated like a block of wood I did not think it particularly strange. What puzzled me was Kiyo’s attentiveness. At times when there was no one else in the kitchen she would tell me that I had a fine, upright nature, but I never knew just what she meant. If I really had such a fine nature, other people besides Kiyo ought to treat me better, I thought. So whenever she said anything of the sort to me, I told her it was all flattery, and I did not like flattery. “That proves what a fine nature you have,” she would say, gazing happily at my face. She had quite arbitrarily built up an image of me in which she took great pride. It made me feel uneasy.