by Donald Keene
His father had died, not there but at the herdsman’s hut in the West Mouth pasture. While Ushimatsu rested by the fire, his uncle, in that genial, unassertive way of his, talked of the dead man. The fire in the hearth was strong. Ushimatsu’s aunt sniffled as she listened again to the story. His father had died from an accident at his post, so to speak, and not from illness or old age. It had not seemed possible that so experienced a herdsman could make a mistake with cattle. Life is unpredictable, however, and an unfortunate chain of circumstances had begun when a bull was unexpectedly added to the herd. The freedom of the wide pasture and the calls of the cows had set the animal wild, and in the end it had lost all traces of domestication and disappeared into the mountains. Three days, four days passed. Ushimatsu’s father began searching through the tall grass, but found no trace of it.
He had set out again the day before. He always took along his lunch when he planned to go far, but this time for some reason he left without it. He did not come back when he should have. The young herdsman who helped him climbed to the corral to put out salt, and in with the herd gathered happily around was the bull, quite as though it had never been away. Its horns were stained with blood. The shocked herdsman called some passers-by to help tie the animal up—and perhaps because it was already exhausted, it offered little resistance. After a long search he found Ushimatsu’s father moaning in a growth of dwarf bamboo and carried him back to the hut. The wound was beyond treating, but Ushimatsu’s father was still fully conscious when the uncle arrived at the hut. He lived until ten that evening. The wake was to be tonight. Mourners were gathered at the hut now, waiting for Ushimatsu.
“And that is how it was.” His uncle paused and looked at Ushimatsu. “I asked him if he had anything to say. He was in pain but his mind was clear. ‘I’m a herdsman,’ he said, ‘and it’s right I should die working with cattle. There’s nothing much else to say. Ushimatsu, though—everything I’ve done has been for him. I made him give me a promise once. When he comes back tell him not to forget.’“
Ushimatsu listened with bowed head to his father’s last message. His uncle went on. “’And I want to be buried here in the pasture. Don’t have the funeral in Nezu. Have it here if you can. And don’t tell them at Komoro that I’m dead. Please.’ I nodded and said I understood. He lay there smiling up at me, and after a while there were tears in his eyes. He didn’t say anything more.”
Ushimatsu was deeply moved. The desire to be buried in the pasture, the instructions against having the funeral in Nezu and sending word to Komoro, proved that to the end his father had been thinking of him. To the end he had shown the extreme caution that had governed his life, and the intense determination that had kept him from abandoning what he had once set out upon. His sternness with Ushimatsu had gone to the point of cruelty. Indeed Ushimatsu was afraid of his father, even now that he was dead.
Presently Ushimatsu and his uncle set out for the West Mouth pasture. The funeral arrangements were all made. The autopsy was over, the coffin had been bought, and an old priest from a temple in Nezu had already gone up for the wake. Ushimatsu had only to be present. It was a mile and a half over a lonely mountain road to the pasture. The darkness seemed to clutch at their faces, it was impossible to see even their feet. Ushimatsu went ahead, guiding his uncle by the light of a lantern. The path grew narrower as they walked out from the village, dwindling in the end to a faint line of footsteps through the fallen leaves. It was a path Ushimatsu as a boy had often traveled with his father.
The little hut was crowded with people. Light leaked through cracks in the walls, and the priest’s wooden drum, echoing on the mountain air, blended with the murmuring of the brook to make the quiet seem yet more intense. The hut was no more than a shelter to keep off the rain and the dew. Except for travelers who went over the mountain to the hot springs beyond, there were few visitors here from outside. This was the harsh world of the forest ranger, the charcoal-maker, and the herdsman.
Ushimatsu put out the lantern and went into the hut with his uncle. The old priest, the village guildsmen who had come to help, and the farm men and women who had been friends of the dead man greeted Ushimatsu with appropriate words of consolation. Altar candles lighted the night through clouds of incense. The little room seemed cluttered, confused. The rough wooden coffin was draped in a white cloth, and before it stood a newly inscribed memorial tablet, offerings of water and sweets, and bunches of chrysanthemums and anise leaves. A pause came in the prayers. On a signal from the priest the mourners, tears streaming down their faces, went up in turn to take leave of the old herdsman. Ushimatsu, following his uncle, bowed slightly to look down at his father for the last time. In the dim candlelight the face seemed to say that the lonely herdsman’s life was over and there remained but to lie deep in the earth of the pasture. Ushimatsu’s uncle, faithful to the old way of doing things, had provided for the journey to the next world a sunshade and a pair of straw sandals. A knife to ward off devils lay on the lid of the coffin. The praying and the beating of the drum began again, and talk of the dead man, punctuated by artless laughter and the clatter of dishes, was sad and at the same time lively.
So the night passed. There had been those last instructions not to send word to Komoro, and it was seventeen years since the dead man had left the town. No message was sent, no one came from that hamlet of outcasts. Ushimatsu’s uncle was on tenterhooks, even so, lest word somehow reach Komoro that the old “chief” was dead, and an embarrassing mission arrive for the funeral. Ushimatsu’s father had long thought of being buried in the pasture, his uncle said. It might be that a temple funeral would be allowed to pass like any other farm funeral, but there was always a possibility that the body would be turned away. By custom members of the pariah class could not be buried in ordinary cemeteries. For Ushimatsu’s sake his father had endured the privations of life in the mountains, and for Ushimatsu’s sake he had chosen to rest here in the pasture.
The following afternoon the mourners gathered in and around the hut. The owner of the pasture, the dairyman who kept his cattle there, everyone who had heard of the death, came to pay respects. The grave had been dug under a small pine tree atop a hill in the pasture. Presently the time came to commit the body, and the old herdsman was carried from the hut he had known so well. The priest followed the coffin with a pair of mischievous-looking acolytes behind him. Ushimatsu wore straw sandals like his uncle. The women all had white cloths around their heads. There were as many fashions of dress as there were mourners. Some wore formal cloaks, some homespun. The lack of display seemed in keeping with the rough life of the herdsman. There was no order to the procession, no ceremony. There was only the valedictory of honest hearts as the group moved quietly over the pasture.
The service at the hut, too, had been simple, and yet the plain rhythm of drum and bell and the mechanical chanting of the requiem had been a moving elegy to one caught up in memories.
The last of the late-blooming daisies had been trampled to the ground by the gravediggers. When each of the mourners had thrown down a handful of earth, making a little heap, it was shoveled roughly into the grave. It struck the lid of the coffin with a rumble as of an avalanche, sending out a pungent smell to call up thoughts almost unbearable. The grave filled, a mound grew up over it. Ushimatsu watched, sunk in thought, to the end. His uncle too was silent. Do not forget, his father had commanded with his dying words; and now his father was deep under the earth of the pasture.
Somehow they had come through safely. Leaving the owner of the pasture to look after the grave, and the young herdsman to take care of the hut, the mourners started back for the village. Ushimatsu thought of taking along the black cat his father had kept at the hut, but it was cold to his overtures. When he offered food, it refused to eat; when he called, it refused to come. They could hear it mewing forlornly under the veranda. Beast though it was, it seemed to miss its dead master. How would it live, they wondered, what would it find to eat when snow began to fall in
the mountains? “Maybe the poor thing will go wild,” said Ushimatsu’s uncle.
One by one they started back. The young herdsman went along, carrying salt for the cattle, to see them as far as the corral. A wan November sun made the West Mouth pasture seem lonelier than ever. Low pines grew here and there along the way. In the spring the hills were blanketed with mountain azalea, which the cattle refused to eat, but now there was only the withered grass. Everything brought memories to Ushimatsu of his father. He remembered how toward the end of May two years before he had visited his father in this pasture. He remembered that it had been the season when the horns of the cattle were itching and these withered azaleas were blooming in a wild profusion of reds and yellows. He remembered the children gathering spring herbs. He remembered the calls of the mountain doves. He remembered the pleasant breeze that had blown over the lilies of the valley and brought the scent of early summer. He remembered how his father had pointed to the new green on the hills and described the advantages of the West Mouth for grazing. He remembered the stories his father had told, of like animals that herded together, of jousts with horns when a new animal entered the herd, of the sanctions cattle apply to each other, of queens that had ruled the herd.
Ushimatsu’s father had retired to the obscurity of the mountains, but all his life he had burned with a desire for fame and position. Quite unlike his genial brother, he had nursed a smoldering anger: his birth kept him from working his way ahead in the world; very well, he would withdraw to the mountains. And if he could not have the things he wanted for himself, he would have them for his children and his children’s children. Even on the day the sun began coming up in the west that determination at least must not change. Go, fight, make your way in the world—his father’s spirit lived in those words. As Ushimatsu thought over that lonely life, he felt more and more deeply the passion and the hope in the message his father had left behind. Death is mute, and yet it spoke now with the force of a thousand and ten thousand words to make Ushimatsu meditate on his life and destiny.
From the corral he could look back at the work his father had left. Cattle were scattered among the low pines, and in the corral itself were a number of still hornless calves. The young herdsman, mindful of his duties as host, started a fire from dead grass and went about gathering fuel. The mourners who were left had been up all the night before, and their labors today had been strenuous. Several of them half-dozed with the smell of burning leaves in their nostrils.
Ushimatsu’s uncle put out little heaps of salt for the cattle, and Ushimatsu watched with a certain tenderness as he thought how near his father had been to the animals. The herd circled at a distance with quivering noses. A black cow flicked its tail, a white-faced red shook its ears, a brindle calf mooed. Two or three edged a little closer. They would as soon have their salt, but what of this uninvited audience? Ushimatsu’s uncle laughed, Ushimatsu laughed too. With such entertaining companions it might indeed be possible to live in these remote mountains.
Presently they took their leave of the ground where Ushimatsu’s father would rest forever. The high mountains fell away behind them. As they passed the Fuji Shrine Ushimatsu turned back to look again at his father’s grave, but even the corral was out of sight. He could see, beyond that lonely pasture it would be, only a column of smoke trailing off into the sky.
TRANSLATED BY EDWARD SEIDENSTICKER
ONE SOLDIER
[Ippeisotsu, 1908] by Tayama Katai (1871-1930)
Tayama Katai was a pioneer in the movement in Japanese literature which stemmed from European Naturalism. His novel The Quilt (Futon, 1908) was an epoch-making work, describing in powerful and unadorned language the love affair between a married novelist and a young woman who studies under him. One Soldier is also in the naturalistic manner. It is clearly based on Tayama’s own observations during his service with the army in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905. It was at times considered too openly antimilitaristic, and was often reprinted with certain passages deleted.
•
He started walking again.
The rifle was heavy, the pack was heavy, his legs were heavy. His aluminum canteen clanked noisily against his bayonet. The sound jarred horribly on his strained nerves, and he tried first one, and then another and another way of silencing it; but the clanking went on and on. He gave up.
The sickness had not really gone, and he breathed with difficulty. Shivering fits, spasms of heat and icy cold, passed incessantly through his frame. His head burned like fire, and his temples throbbed. What had made him leave the hospital, he wondered? Why—when the army doctor had asked him to stay—why had he left the hospital? He asked the question, but he felt no regrets over his decision. There had been fifteen of them there, sick and wounded, lying on bare boards in a small room, part of a dilapidated house which the retreating enemy had abandoned. For twenty days he had endured the decay and the dirt, the moaning, the oppressive closeness, and the swarms of frightening flies. For food they had had rice-bran porridge with the merest pinch of salt, and he had often known the pangs of hunger. He felt sick even now as he recalled the latrine at the rear of the hospital. The pits were shallow, dug in haste, and the stench struck forcibly at your eyes and nostrils. Flies zoomed around you Dirty, and black as coal.
Anything was better than that. It was better to be here on this broad open plain. You could not imagine how much better. The plains of Manchuria were vast and deserted, endless fields of tall, ripening cane. But the air was fresh and clean. There was sunshine, there were clouds, there were mountains—he became suddenly aware of a dreadful clamor, and he stopped and turned in its direction. It was the same train that he had seen before, still over there on the track. Hundreds of Chinese coolies swarmed about the long, boiler-less, funnel-less monster, pushing frantically, like ants returning home with some gigantic prey.
The rays of the evening sun slanted across the scene, giving it the unreal clarity of a painting.
The noncommissioned officer he had noticed before was still riding on the train. There he was; the one standing aloft on the freight car with the tallest load of rice bales. He shouted to him.
“I’m sick. I can’t walk. Can you give me a lift as far as Anshan?”
The fellow was laughing at him. “This train’s not for soldiers. I don’t know any regulation which says the infantry should ride on trains.”
“I’m sick. Can’t you see I’m sick? It’s beriberi. If I can get to Anshan my unit will be there, I’m certain. Soldiers should help each other, you know. Give me a lift, please!”
He was imploring him, but the fellow would not listen. He only mocked. “Still a private, eh? Time you got yourself some stripes!”
The battles at Chin Chou and Têli-ssu had been won by common soldiers, hadn’t they? Blockhead! Brute!
Suddenly a different train—the train in which he had set out for the war from the barracks at Toyohashi—passed before his mind’s eye. The station was a mass of flags. Cheers resounded—banzai! banzai! Then, without warning, he was gazing into his wife’s face. It was not the tear-stained face which had bade him good-bye at the gate, but a beautiful, smiling face from some moment—he could not remember the time or place exactly—when he had wondered at its loveliness with all his heart. His mother was shaking him by the shoulder now. It was time to get up, she was saying. He would be late for school. Somehow his mind had slipped back to his schooldays. And now the evening sun was glistening on the bald pate of a ship’s captain, in the bay at the back of the house. The captain was scolding a group of children, and one of those children was himself.
These shadows from the past and the painful, unpleasant realities of the present were clearly differentiated in his mind, but only a hairsbreadth separated them. The rifle was heavy, the pack was heavy, his legs were heavy. From the waist down he might have been another man, and he hardly knew whether it was he or someone else walking. The brown road—its parched mud surface deeply pocked and rutted by the boots, straw sandals,
and gun-carriage wheels which had once sunk into it—stretched on and on before him. He had little love left for these Manchurian roads. How far must he go before the road came to an end? How far before he need walk no farther along it? The pebbled roads of his home district, the sandy roads along the seashore, wet after rain ... how he longed for those smooth pleasant surfaces. This was a big broad highway, but there was not a smooth level patch to be seen. After a day’s rain it would be as sticky as wet wall-plaster, and your boots, perhaps even the calves of your legs, would sink halfway into the mud. On the night before the battle at Ta-shih-ch’iao he had trudged in darkness through ten miles of oozy mire. Flecks of it had caked the back of his blouse and even the hair at the back of his head. That was the time when they were detailed to convoy the gun-carriages. The carriages had sunk into the mud and wouldn’t budge an inch, and they had shoved and shoved to get them moving again. If the Third Regiment’s artillery failed to move on ahead and take up their positions there could be no attack. And after working the night through there was that battle the next day. Endless streams of shells, theirs and the enemy’s, passing overhead with a nasty, whining rush. The hot midday sun scorching down from directly above. Past four o’clock they came to close quarters with the enemy infantry. There was the sharp crackle of rifle fire, like beans popping in a frying pan. Now and again a shot had zipped close by his ear. Someone nearby in the line had gasped. He had looked around, startled, and seen the soldier topple forward, blood oozing slowly from a bullet wound in his stomach, glistening red in the warm evening sun. That soldier had been a good sort: cheerful, a nondrinker, at home in any company. After the landing they had gone out together on foraging duties, and they had rounded up pigs together. But that man was gone from the world of the living. It was somehow impossible to think it, but impossible to deny it.
