Modern Japanese Literature

by Donald Keene

  After my mother’s death Kiyo paid even greater attention to me. I often wondered why she was so partial to me, and thought how much better off she would be if she weren’t, but her kindnesses continued. Sometimes she bought me cakes and biscuits with her own money. On cold winter nights she would suddenly appear, when I was already in bed, with a bowl of hot gruel made of buckwheat flour that she had bought without telling anyone. And she not only gave me things to eat, but socks, pencils, and notebooks too. Once, though this was a good deal later, she even lent me three yen. I had not asked her to lend me the money. She simply brought it to my room, saying she thought I might be a little hard up for spending money. Of course I told her I did not need the money, but she insisted, and I finally accepted. I was very happy to have the money and put it into a purse and the purse into the breast of my kimono. But when I went to the toilet the purse fell down the hole. I emerged unhappily from the toilet and told Kiyo what had happened. She rushed to fetch a bamboo pole and said she would fish it out for me. In a little while I heard the sound of water splashing at the well. I went out to find her busily washing the purse, which dangled by its string from the end of the pole. When we opened it and removed the bills, they had turned brownish and the designs had faded. Kiyo dried them over the stove. “I think they are all right now,” she said. When I complained that they smelled, she asked for them back and promised to exchange them. Somewhere, by some artifice, she changed the bills and brought back three yen in silver. I have forgotten how I spent the three yen. I assured her that I would return the money soon but I never did. Now, even though I would like to pay her back ten times the amount, it is no longer possible.

  Kiyo gave me presents only when my father and brother were not around. This fact irritated me, for there was nothing I hated so much as enjoying something in secret. My brother and I, of course, were on bad terms, but I still did not like receiving cakes and colored pencils from Kiyo behind his back. Once I asked her why she only gave presents to me and never to my brother. She looked quite unconcerned, and replied that she saw no harm in it because my father bought things for my brother. This was rather unfair. My father was an obstinate man but he never stooped to favoritism. Yet it must have seemed that way to Kiyo, I suppose, because she was so fond of me. Although she may have been of good birth, she was quite without education, and nothing could be done to change her. Her partiality for me was really frightening. She was convinced that I was going to be a great success when I grew up. Likewise she had decided that my brother, who grew paler and paler over his books, would never amount to anything. You can do nothing with such a woman. Kiyo believed that anyone she was fond of was destined to be great, and anyone she disliked would surely come to a bad end. At the time I had no particular ambitions, but Kiyo kept saying that I would become this or that, until I began to feel that perhaps I would become famous after all. When I think of it now, it all seems so silly. Once I asked her exactly what sort of person she thought I would become, but she had no definite ideas. “I am sure that you will ride around in your own rickshaw and have a house with a fine big entrance,” she said.

  Kiyo’s great wish was to live with me when I had become independent and had my own home. Again and again she would beg me to be sure to save a room for her. I somehow felt that I would one day have my own house, and I let the matter go with a reassurance that there would always be a place for her. But she had a very lively imagination, and would plan just how she would like things. “Do you think the suburbs would be nice, or would you prefer a house in the city? I hope you will have a swing in the garden. One Western-style room will be plenty, I think.” At the time I had no desire for any kind of house, whether Western or Japanese, and I told her so. Then she praised me for having so few desires and being pure in heart. Whatever I said to Kiyo, she would praise me.

  After the death of my mother I lived this way for five or six years: scolded by my father, fighting with my brother, receiving cakes and praise from Kiyo. I was quite content with things as they were, for I had no special ambitions. Other boys, I suppose, led about the same sort of lives. But Kiyo kept telling me that I was unfortunate and to be pitied, and I began to think that perhaps she was right. I suffered no real hardships. I was only annoyed that my father would not give me any spending money.

  In January of the sixth year after my mother’s death, my father died of a stroke. In March of the same year I was graduated from the middle school I had been attending, and in June my brother graduated from commercial school. He took a job with the Kyushu branch of a firm and had to leave Tokyo, but I was to stay there in order to continue my schooling. He suggested that he sell the house and dispose of the property before he left to take his position. I replied that whatever he wished to do would be all right with me. I certainly had no intention of becoming dependent on him. Any help that he gave me was sure to result in a quarrel, so it was natural that he should make such a suggestion. I felt that I would rather make a living by delivering milk than accept his half-hearted assistance and be under obligation to him. My brother called in a furniture dealer and disposed of the odds and ends that had accumulated in our family over the generations. Through the offices of a middleman he sold the house and lot to a wealthy family. I think he got a good price for them, though I know nothing of the details. A month before the sale I found lodgings elsewhere. I debated what to do next. Kiyo was very unhappy to see the house where she had lived for ten years pass into someone else’s hands, but she was powerless to do anything about it, since the house was not hers. “If you were only a little older you could inherit the house,” she said to me earnestly. If I could inherit the house when I was older I should have been able to inherit the house then. The old woman knew nothing of the law, and supposed that it was merely a matter of age that prevented me from acquiring my brother’s house.

  My brother and I could go our own ways without any trouble, but there was still the problem of where Kiyo was to go. My brother was of course in no position to take her with him—in any case she would not have had the slightest wish to trail along after him all the way to Kyushu—and I was living in a tiny room which I might have to vacate at any moment. There seemed to be nothing I could do. I asked Kiyo if she felt like working for someone else. She finally decided that she would stay at her cousin’s house until I got married. Her cousin was a clerk in the law court; he was fairly well off, and had several times asked Kiyo to live in his home. She had always answered that she would rather stay in a place she was accustomed to, even if it meant being a maid. However, she seemed to prefer living with her cousin to taking a position with a strange family and having the trouble of getting used to new ways. But she advised me to get a house and a wife as soon as possible so that she could come and look after me. She liked me better than her cousin, I suppose.

  Two days before he left for Kyushu, my brother came to see me and gave me six hundred yen. He told me that I might use the money to start in business or continue my schooling, as I pleased, but that from now on I was on my own. I could not help admiring the way he did it. I didn’t absolutely need his six hundred yen, but the unaccustomed candor of his action impressed me, and I accepted the money with thanks. Then he gave me fifty yen to hand to Kiyo, which I promised to do. Two days later we parted at the Shimbashi Station, and I have never seen him since.

  I lay in bed thinking of how to use the six hundred yen. Any kind of business would require a lot of trouble, and I did not think I could make a success of it. Anyway, I could hardly open much of a business with six hundred yen. Even if I did, with my lack of education I would certainly suffer in the long run. It was better to forget about using the money as capital, and think of it instead as money for my education. If I used only two hundred a year, I could study for three years, and in three years of hard study I could surely learn something. I decided that I would enter a school somewhere. I had never been fond of study of any kind. I was particularly bad in languages and literature; I could not understand one line out
of twenty of poetry in the new style. But since I was sure to dislike whatever I studied, it did not make much difference what kind of school I entered. One day, as it happened, I was passing a school of physics when I noticed an advertisement calling for new students. I took this as a kind of stroke of fate, and went in to ask for a prospectus. I immediately filled out an entrance application. Now that I think of it, I imagine this mistake can also be attributed to my inherited recklessness.

  For three years I worked at my studies about as hard as the average student, but I had no great aptitude, and it would have been easier to find my place in the class by counting from the bottom than from the top. Strangely enough, I managed to graduate at the end of the three years. This rather startled me, but having no cause to complain, I meekly accepted my degree.

  Eight days after graduation the director of the school asked to see me. I went to his office wondering what he wanted. A middle school in Shikoku needed a mathematics teacher. The salary was forty yen a month. The director had sent for me to find out whether I would like to go. I had been studying for three years, but, to tell the truth, the thought of becoming a teacher, or of going off to the country, had never occurred to me. On the other hand, I had no other plan in mind, so when I heard the details I answered immediately that I would go. Again the curse of congenital recklessness.

  Once I had accepted the position I had no choice but to go. For three years I had lived in my little room without having to listen to any complaints, without quarreling with anyone. It had been a comparatively carefree period of my life. But now the time had come when I must leave my room. I had been out of Tokyo only once in my life, when I went with some school friends on a picnic to Kamakura. Now it was no nearby Kamakura that I was going to but a really distant place. On the map it was only a dot on the seacoast, about the size of a pin point. It could hardly be a desirable place. I had no idea what sort of town it was or what sort of people lived there, but that didn’t bother me. I would not worry about it—I would simply go. Of course leaving was somewhat of a nuisance.

  I had gone to see Kiyo from time to time after we sold our house. Her cousin turned out to be an unusually nice person, and if he happened to be at home when I was there he would go out of his way to be kind to me. In my presence Kiyo would tell her cousin all about my good qualities. She announced that as soon as I graduated from school I was going to buy a house and go to work for the government. She made such decisions and pronouncements quite on her own while I sat in helpless embarrassment. I had this experience more than once: to my horror she even went so far as to tell stories about how I used to wet the bed when I was little. Kiyo was an old-fashioned woman, and she conceived of our relationship as a feudal one between lord and retainer. If I was her master, she decided, I must also be her cousin’s master. This was rather hard on the cousin.

  My position was definitely settled now, and a few days before the time to leave I went to see Kiyo. She was in bed with a cold, but when I arrived she quickly got up. “When are you getting your house, botchan?” she asked. One had only to graduate, she supposed, to have the money suddenly appear in one’s pocket. It seemed more absurd than ever, if I were really such a great man, for her to keep on calling me botchan as if I were a child. I told her simply that, for the time being, I would have no house. When I added that I was going to the country, she looked utterly dejected, and kept straightening the strands of gray hair that had come out of place. I felt terribly sorry for her, and to cheer her up I said that I would be back very soon, certainly by summer vacation of next year. She still had a strange look on her face, so I asked her, “What shall I bring you for a present? What would you like?”

  “I would like to eat some Echigo sugar cakes,” she said. I had never heard of Echigo sugar cakes. To begin with, Echigo Province lies in an entirely different direction.

  “I don’t think they have any sugar cakes where I am going,” I said.

  “Then which way are you going?” she asked.

  “Westward,” I answered.

  “This side of Hakone,” she asked, “or beyond?” I did not know how to explain.

  On the day of my departure she came in the morning and helped me with things. She put into my canvas bag some toothpaste, a toothbrush, and a towel that she had bought at a shop on the way. I told her that I did not need them, but she was insistent. We rode to the station in rickshaws and went up to the platform. When I had boarded the train she looked intently at my face.

  “I may not see you again. Be sure to take good care of yourself,” she said in a small voice. Her eyes were full of tears. I was not crying but I would have been with just a bit more. When the train finally got under way, I thought that everything would be all right now. I put my head out of the window and looked back. She was still standing there. She looked very small.

  TRANSLATED BY BURTON WATSON

  THE BROKEN COMMANDMENT

  [Hakai, Chapter VII, 1906] by Shimazaki Tōson (1872-1943)

  Shimazaki Tōson, whose first fame came as a poet, was also a major novelist. The Broken Commandment, a pioneer Japanese problem novel, was published before the author had turned to the autobiographical fiction which was to be typical of him. It is the story of Ushimatsu, who at his father’s command has concealed the fact that he is a member of the pariah eta class. The father’s death, described here, comes at a time when circumstances are conspiring to make Ushimatsu reveal the secret of his birth. He eventually does, and emigrates to America. (For a further summary of this novel see Keene, Japanese Literature, pp. 99-101.)

  •

  He would never forget the loneliness of that trip. He had been home two summers before, but this time, as he followed the river toward Nezu, it was as though he had become a different person. A little over two years, not a long time when he thought of it; but in those years violent changes had begun in his life. Some people may move naturally and gradually away from the world, not knowing when exactly the change came; but for Ushimatsu the spiritual unheaval was violent and profound.

  There was no need here to hold himself in. He could breathe the dry air freely, he could give himself up to sorrow at his ill-starred birth and to astonishment at the changes in his life. The water, stirred to a yellow-green, flowing noiselessly toward the distant sea, the leafless willow branches seemed to cower over the bank—ah, the mountain river was just as it had always been.

  Now and then he passed a party of mountain travelers. Some had the faces of the ruined and slunk by like famished dogs. Others, barefoot with dirty kimonos pulled about them, might have been looking for work. A sunburned father and son, bells in hand and voices raised in a sad canticle, had chosen the rigors of the pilgrim’s way. A group of wandering performers in battered sunshades—they too seemed to be fleeing the world—would play a love tune as the mood took them and beg a penny along the way. Ushimatsu stared at them all, comparing them with himself. How he envied even them, free to wander as they would.

  But presently he began to feel as though he too were moving into a freer world. Warmed by the brilliant sunlight, he walked the ash-colored earth of the old north country road, now up a hill, now past a mulberry patch, now and again through a town with its houses lining the road. He was sweating heavily, his throat was dry, his feet and ankles were gray with dust; and yet, strangely, he felt his spirits reviving. The branches of the persimmons bent low under their loads of yellow jewels, burrs hung from the chestnut trees, beans were swelling in their pods, and here and there the sprouting winter barley showed through the stubble in the fields. Songs of farmers near and far, birds—it was the “little June,” the Indian summer of the mountains. Peaks towered clear in the distance, and volcanic smoke rose blue from the deep-shadowed valleys between. . . .

  The mountains in the dying light of the evening changed from red to purple, purple to brown, and as the hills and the moors grew dark the shadows crept up from valley to valley, and the last sunlight shone from the peaks. In a corner of the sky wavered a brown cl
oud tinged with gold, the smoke from Mt. Asama it must have been.

  His happiness, if such it was, did not last. He came to the edge of a wild valley, and there, strung out over the face of the mountain beyond, white walls and earthen walls in the evening sun, dark spots, possibly persimmons, between the roofs of the mountain houses—ah, it was Nezu. Even the songs of the farmers on their way home from work added to his agitation. As he thought of his father’s life, how he had left the hamlet of outcasts at Komoro and come to this obscure mountain village to live out his days, the twi light scenery quite lost its charm. It was dark when he reached Nezu.