Modern Japanese Literature

by Donald Keene

  Overtaking him, along the brown road, came a line of wagons loaded with army provisions. Some were drawn by donkeys, some by mules, and he listened to the strident shouts of their Chinese drivers—whoa, whoa, wheel—and to the cracking of the long whips, as they flashed in the evening sun. The road was so deeply pitted that the carts moved forward in a series of uneasy lurches, like ships crashing into waves. He felt weak. His breathing was as difficult as ever. He could go no farther like this. He started running after the wagons to ask for a lift.

  The canteen went clank-clank. It jarred horribly. The odds and ends in his pack and the rounds in his ammunition pouches clattered noisily up and down. At times the butt of his rifle struck against his thigh, and he almost leapt in agony.

  “Hi! Hi!”

  They could not hear him.

  “Hi! Hi!”

  He put his body’s whole strength behind his shouts. They had heard, of course, but not one of them turned to look. They must have guessed that there was no money in it. Momentarily he slackened his pace, but he ran forward again, and this time managed to draw level with the last wagon in the line.

  The load of rice bales towered above him like a mountain. He saw the Chinaman glance behind. It was a plump, unpleasant face—but he gave the man no chance to say yes or no. He jumped on, and, gasping painfully for breath, settled himself among the bales. The Chinaman urged on his mules, seemingly resigned to suffer the intrusion. The wagon bumped and lurched on its way.

  His head reeled, and heaven and earth seemed to revolve about him. His chest was aching, his forehead throbbing. He was going to be sick. A sense of uneasiness and foreboding invaded every corner of his being with fearful insistence. And at the same time, while the dreadful lurching started again, all kinds of voices whispered inside his head and close around his ears. He had experienced similar bouts before, but none of them had been as bad as this.

  They must have left the open plain and entered a village. A greenness of thick shady willows waved above him. The rays of the evening sun, piercing the greenness, clearly revealed each tiny leaf. He saw low shapeless roofs, and as he passed they seemed to be quivering as though shaken by a violent earthquake. Suddenly he realized that the cart had stopped.

  They were on a stretch of road shaded by willows. He counted five carts, drawn up close one behind the other.

  Someone grasped him by the shoulder.

  It was a Japanese, a corporal.

  “You there, what are you up to?”

  He raised his aching body.

  “What are you doing, riding on this cart?”

  It was too much trouble to explain things. He had even lost the will to speak.

  “You can’t ride up there. Even if it was allowed, the load’s already too heavy. You’re from the Eighteenth Regiment, aren’t you?”

  He nodded in agreement.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I was in the hospital until yesterday.”

  “Are you better now?”

  He nodded again, but without any particular meaning.

  “It’s hard luck your being sick, but you’ve got to get off this cart. We’re in a hurry. The fighting’s started at Liaoyang.”

  “Liaoyang!” The single word was enough to set his nerves on edge again. “Has it started already?”

  “Can’t you hear those guns?”

  Some time back he had imagined that a kind of rumbling noise had begun over beyond the horizon, but he had told himself it could hardly be Liaoyang yet.

  “Has Anshan fallen?”

  “We took it the day before yesterday. Looks as if they’ll put up some resistance this side of Liaoyang. It started at six this evening they say.”

  Yes, there was a faint, distant rumbling, and if you listened carefully there could be no mistake. They were guns. The old disagreeable noises moved through the air above his head. The infantry was attacking, weaving through the thick of it. Blood was flowing. As the thoughts flashed through his mind he experienced a strange mixture of panic and attraction. His comrades were in that battle. They were shedding their blood for the Japanese Empire.

  He pictured the horrors of the battlefield and the scenes of triumph. But here, twenty miles away, here on the Manchurian plain all was at peace, only a sad autumn breeze blowing beneath the evening sun. The tide of great armies had swept over these villages and their peace was as if it had never been disturbed.

  “It’ll be a big battle, I suppose?”

  “Certainly will.”

  “Not over in a day?”

  “Of course not.”

  The corporal was speaking eagerly to him now, as one soldier to another, while the distant booming of the guns sounded in their ears. The drivers of the five heavily loaded wagons and the foremen of the Chinese coolies were squatting in a circle, jabbering noisily among themselves. The rays of the evening sun shone aslant the donkeys’ long ears, and at times the air was rent with piercing brays. Over among the willows stood a row of five or six white-walled Chinese country houses, and in their gardens he could see tall pagoda trees. There were wells, too, and sheds. An old woman with bound feet hobbled by laboriously. Behind, visible through the leaves of the willows, was the vast empty plain. The corporal was pointing to a chain of brown hills. Beyond them rose a purple-tinged mountain. That was where the guns were firing.

  The five wagons moved off.

  He was left behind, alone again. He had been told that the next army supply depot was at Hsin-t’ai-tzu. That was another three miles, but there was nowhere to stay the night unless he reached there.

  He made up his mind to go on, and he started walking again.

  He moved with the utmost difficulty, he was so dog-tired, but somehow even walking was a relief after that wagon. The pain in his stomach was no better, but there was no sense in worrying about that now.

  Again the same brown road ahead, the same fields of cane on either side, the same evening sunshine. The same train, even, was passing by on the track. This time it was returning, on the downgrade, and traveling at considerable speed. A train with a locomotive could not have traveled faster, and it made him giddy to watch the cars flashing in and out of the cuttings. The Japanese flag was fluttering on the last car, and he watched it appear and disappear a hundred times amid the cane fields. When it disappeared for a last time, only the noise of the train was left, and mingled with it, the insistent rumble of distant gunfire.

  On the road itself there was not a village in sight, but to the west, discernible among gloomy clusters of willow trees, were the occasional brown or white shapes of cottages. There was no sign of inhabitants, but from the cottages rose thin threads of bluish smoke, lonely and cheerless.

  The evening shadows had grown to great lengths. Those of the tall canes were darkening the whole breadth of the road, and had already begun to climb the canes opposite. Even the shadows of small weeds by the roadside were stretching enormous distances. In contrast, the hills to the east were now so sharply illuminated that they seemed to float in the air. With its indescribable strength of shadows the loneliness of evening came pressing in upon him.

  He came to a break in the canes. Suddenly he saw his own shadow before him, amazingly long. The rifle on his shoulder was moving across the grass far out in the fields. He was stricken with a sense of his isolation.

  Insects were singing in the grass. Their cries were strangely unlike those to which he had listened in the fields around his home. This foreignness, coupled with the immensity of the plain, sent a stab of pain through him. The flow of recollections, checked for more than an hour, came suddenly flooding in again.

  The face of his mother, his wife, his brother, the faces of women he had known, passed before him in rapid succession as though they were pictures on a revolving paper lantern. The old house in the village, the warm security of his life at home, a fleeting image of himself—so very young he looked—setting out for Tokyo to earn his living. Tokyo. He saw the busy streets at night, the flower-shops
, the magazine booths, the rows of newly published books, and—around the corner—the crowded vaudeville theatres and the reception houses: he heard the strumming of samisens, and the forced laughter of the women. Those were good times. The girl he liked best was in a house in Naka-chō, and he had gone there often. She had a round, winsome face, and even now he remembered her with affection. As the eldest son of a prosperous country household he had never known the lack of money, and life had been a series of pleasant experiences. His friends of those days had all gone out into the world now. Only a little while back he had run across one of them, an army captain of the Sixth Division. The fellow had a very high opinion of himself now.

  Nothing was more cruel, he thought, than the narrow discipline of army life. But today, oddly enough, the thought roused in him none of the usual spirit of rebellion, not even a sense of martyrdom. He was gripped with fear. When he set out for the war he had dedicated himself body and soul to the service of his country and the Emperor. He had made a fine speech on the theme at his old school in the village. “I have no wish to return alive,” he had said. He was in the prime of spirits and health, at that time. He had made that speech, but, of course, he had never expected to die. Beneath it all had been nothing but dreams of victory and glory. Now, for the first time, he was experiencing an uneasiness on the score of death. He really felt that it was possible that he might not, after all, return alive, and the thought filled him with terror. There was this sickness, this beriberi—and even if he recovered, the war itself was nothing but a vast prison from which, no matter how he struggled and craved for freedom, there was no escape. He recalled some words which his comrade who had been killed had once used to him.

  “There’s no way out of this hole. We have to be ready to die, and we have to put a good face on it.”

  And how on earth could he—a prey to fatigue, sickness, and fear—expect to escape from this dreadful inferno? Desertion? He would try even that if it were any good. The undying disgrace to his name would be bad enough, of course, but on top of that, on the dawn after his recapture, there was still the firing squad. The end was death again. But what were his prospects if he pressed on? He must become a man of the battlefields. A man of the battlefields must be resigned to annihilation. For the first time he marveled at his stupidity in leaving the hospital. It would have been so easy to have had himself invalided to the rear. ...

  It was too late now, he was trapped, there was no road of escape. Negative despair invaded his whole being, pressing upon him with irresistible strength. The will to walk was gone. Tears flowed uncontrollably. If there are any gods in this life, help me, help me! Show me a way out! I shall bear every trial with patience after this! I shall do any amount of fine deeds! If I promise you anything I shall never go back on it!

  He raised his voice, shouting and sobbing.

  His breast heaved. He cried like a baby, the tears streaming down his cheeks. The thought that his body might perish was agonizing. In his breast, until this moment, passions of patriotism had often blazed. On the deck of the transport ship, joining with the others in the military songs, his imagination had been fired by notions of heroic death. If an enemy warship were to appear, he had thought, and sink their ship with a shot ... if he were destined to be a corpse drifting among the weeds on the sea bottom, he would be proud to die in such a way. At the battle of Chin Chou, crouching low amid the death-dealing rattle of machine guns, he had gone bravely forward. Though there were times when he had been horrified at the bloodshed, the suffering of his comrades, he had felt that it was all for the motherland, all for honor. But the blood of his comrades was not his blood. Face to face with his own death the bravest soldier panicked.

  His legs were heavy and weary. He felt sick. The thirty-mile journey—two days on the road, and a bitterly cold night in the open—had certainly played havoc with his already disordered system. The dysentery was gone, but the mild beriberi had become acute. He knew what that might mean ... paralysis of the heart. He shuddered at the thought. Was there no way of escape at all? He wept aloud as he walked, his nerves on edge, his body shaking, his legs racked with cramp.

  The plain was at peace. Now that the huge red sun was about to sink beneath the horizon one half of the sky was gold, the other a dark, deep blue. A speck of cloud, like a bird whose wings were tipped with gold, drifted across the sky. The shadows of the cane merged with the general shadow, and across the vast plain blew the autumn wind. Only a few minutes ago the guns from Liaoyang had been rumbling steadily and distinctly, but now they too had dwindled imperceptibly to silence.

  Two privates were running up behind him.

  They continued past for a dozen yards or so. Then one turned and started back.

  He pulled himself together. He was ashamed to be seen like this, weeping aloud.

  “Hi! What’s the trouble?”

  “Beriberi.”

  “That’s hard luck. Is it bad?”

  “It’s pretty painful.”

  “You are in a mess. If beriberi affects your heart it’s no joke. How far are you going?”

  “My unit’s over beyond Anshan, I think.”

  “You can’t get that far today.”

  “I suppose not.”

  “Come along with us as far as Hsin-t’ai-tzu. We’ll get a doctor to look at you.”

  “Is it a long way?”

  “Just over there. You see that hill? This side of it there’s the railroad. Where you see the flag flying, that’s the Hsin-t’ai-tzu depot.”

  His spirits revived. He walked along behind the two of them. They were sorry for him, and they carried his rifle and pack. As they walked in front they talked of the day’s fighting at Liaoyang.

  “Plenty of reserves moving up, aren’t there?”

  “We’re too few to attack. The enemy positions are pretty strong, I’m told.”

  “Do you think we’ll win?”

  “We’re in for it if we lose.”

  “If only we could cut behind them for once.”

  “We’ll do it properly this time. You’ll see.”

  He listened intently to what they said. The guns opened up again in the distance.

  The supply depot at Hsin-t’ai-tzu was a scene of tremendous activity and confusion. A regiment of the reserve had arrived, and in the shadow of the buildings above the railroad, alongside the stacks of provisions, were rows and rows of soldiers’ caps, rifles, and swords. Five barrack buildings, formerly occupied by the enemy railway guard, flanked the rails. A flag fluttered above the building which now served as the supply depot headquarters, and there the confusion was at its worst. Soldiers were gathered outside it in a dense throng, and in and out, in endless succession, hurried officers with long swords hanging at their sides. Fires were lit beneath the depot’s three large rice caldrons, and clouds of smoke curled upwards into the evening sky. In one the rice was already cooked, and the mess sergeant, bellowing commands at his subordinates, was supervising a hasty distribution of rations to the assembled soldiers. But since these three caldrons were obviously insufficient to meet the requirements of a whole regiment, the majority had been issued with a ration of hulled rice in their mess kits and were scattering to various parts of the field to prepare their suppers for themselves. The neighborhood was soon dotted with the flames of hundreds of cane fires.

  Near one of the barrack buildings men were settling down to the nightlong labor of loading ammunition boxes on to freight trains bound for the front. Infantrymen and railway troops moved to and fro among the freight cars in feverish, ceaseless activity. A single noncommissioned officer directed their movements, issuing rapid words of command from a perch high on the load of a car.

  The day was over, but the war went on. From beyond the dark saddle-shaped mountain of Anshan the sound of guns persisted.

  Now that he had arrived he made inquiries about a doctor. But there was something incongruous about asking for a doctor here. This was no time or place for people to stop and concern themsel
ves over the life or death of a single soldier. He managed, thanks to the efforts of his two friends, to get himself a small portion of boiled rice. That was all. We can’t do much more now. Just wait a little longer. As soon as this regiment moves on we’ll find the doctor and bring him to you. Take things easy and get a rest. If you go straight along the road from here, three or four hundred yards at most, you’ll see a big house. You’ll recognize it without any trouble—there’s a sake stall in the entrance. Go right inside and get some sleep ... that was all they could suggest.

  He was sick to death of walking. He took back his rifle and pack, but when he placed them across his shoulders he almost collapsed beneath the weight. But it was impossible to give up here. If he were going to die, he must die in privacy. Yes, privacy ... anywhere would do. He longed to enter some quiet place and sleep, and rest.

  The dark road went on and on. Here and there he passed groups of soldiers. His mind returned suddenly to the barracks at Toyohashi. He had slipped away to a quiet bar and had drunk solidly. In his drunkenness he had struck a sergeant. They gave him a spell in detention. This really was a long road. There was no sign of anything resembling the house they had described. Three or four hundred yards, they had said. He must have come a thousand yards already. Perhaps he’d missed it. He turned and looked back—in the supply depot he could see the gleam of lamps and watchfires, and dark groups of soldiers moving uncertainly, as though they had lost their way. The shouts of the men at work on the ammunition trains reached him through the night air with startling clarity.

  It was secluded here. Not a soul around. Suddenly he felt horribly sick. Even if there was no house to hide himself in, he thought, was a good place to die; and he sank to the ground in exhaus Strangely enough he no longer felt as dejected and miserable as b fore. No memories came back from the past. The shimmering light of the stars shone into his eyes. He raised his head and glanced casually around.

  He was surprised to see that a little way before him, somehow unnoticed till now, was a solitary Western-style house. Inside a lamp was burning, and he could see a round, red paper lantern hanging in the doorway. He heard voices.