Modern Japanese Literature

by Donald Keene

  The father’s eyes widened. “So, she was just trying to make it sound like a good match—”

  “Of course, he has to keep everything about me a strict secret from his wife,” Otama continued. “He tells her all kinds of lies, so I hardly expect him to speak nothing but the truth to me. I intend to take anything he says with a grain of salt.”

  The old man sat holding the burnt-out pipe he had been smoking, and looked blankly at his daughter. She seemed suddenly to have grown so much older and more serious. “I must be getting back,” she said hurriedly, as though she had just remembered something. “Now that I’ve come and seen that everything is all right, I’ll be visiting you every day. I had hesitated because I thought that I’d better get his permission first, but last night he finaily told me I might come. Now I must run on and see how things are at home.”

  “If you got permission from him to come, why don’t you stay for lunch?” the old man asked.

  “No, I don’t think I should. I’ll come again very soon, Papa. Good-bye!” Otama got up to leave.

  “Come again when you can,” said the old man without rising, “and give my kindest regards to your master.”

  Otama pulled a little purse from her black satin sash, took out a few bills, and gave them to the maid. Then she went out to the gate. She had come intending to bare the bitterness in her breast and share her misfortune with her father, but to her own surprise she now found herself leaving almost in good spirits. With a cheerful face she walked along the edge of the pond. Although the sun, now risen high above Ueno Hill, was beating down fiercely, lighting the vermilion pillars of the Benten Shrine, Otama carried her little foreign-style parasol in her hand without bothering to put it up.

  TRANSLATED BY BURTON WATSON

  A TALE OF THREE WHO WERE BLIND

  [Sannin no Mekura no Hanashi, 1912] by Izumi Kyōka (1873-1939)

  Izumi Kyōka is known as a “romantic” and his best work derives from the erotic and fantastic literature of the Edo period. He is much admired as a stylist.

  •

  “One moment . . . you, sir.”

  At the voice, a chill shot down Sakagami’s back—though not as at a voice he remembered and disliked. From the foot of the hill he had seen them creeping down toward him from Yotsuya, appearing and disappearing, floating up and falling back again, in the mist that huddled in motionless spirals halfway up the slope. He could hardly hear the sound of their feet; and then, as they passed, that voice.

  They were nothing to him, and yet he knew that something must happen before he would be allowed to pass. They would call him, they would stop him—he was strangely sure that somehow he must hear a voice. It might be as when a traveler hears the cry of a raven or the scream of a night heron and cannot be sure, even if he is quite alone, that the call has been at him;’ but Sakagami knew that he would have to hear that unpleasant, that odious voice.

  Three blind ones in single file.

  In the center was a woman, perhaps in her middle years, white throated, thick haired, her shoulders thin and slight. The long sleeves, falling down from her folded arms, were of a darkness that seemed to sink through to the thin breasts beneath, and their trailing edges gave way to a like darkness in the obi. Was the slapping from her sandals?—but the long skirt brushed the ground and hid her feet.

  The man in front wore a limp, loose garment, gray perhaps, in the darkness almost like the night mist itself spun and woven. His brimless cap shot into the air, a veritable miter. His gaunt body swayed as he drew near—and passed.

  The other man, slender and of no more than medium height, clung to the woman as if he meant to hide in the shadow of her hair. Though Sakagami had had no clear view of any of them, the third had been the most obscure of all.

  And yet Sakagami knew immediately that he had been stopped by this shadowy one.

  “Are you speaking to me?” Sakagami looked back. His shoulders were hunched in the sudden chill, and his answer was like a curse flung at a barking dog.

  “I am speaking to you.” The voice was low. It was indeed the slight man in the rear. He seemed to straighten up as he spoke to Sakagami, who was two or three paces up the hill from him. He held his staff at an angle, an oar with which to row his way through the mist.

  The other two—the long head in front; and the high Japanese coiffure (Sakagami could not be sure what style), like a wig on an actor’s wig stand, suspended upside-down—stood diagonally down the slope with their backs to their companion.

  Sakagami turned on his heels to stare at the man.

  “And what do you want?”

  “I should like to talk to you.” Whether he was very sure of himself, or out of breath, his slowness seemed wrong in the cold of the late winter night.

  2

  “What is it?”

  Coming toward him in the mist, they had seemed like two grave markers, a tall one and a low one, blown in by a last gust of the autumn winds from some cemetery on the moors, the dead tufts of grass white in the earth still clinging to their bases.

  But his tone became more gentle as he saw that the three, groping their way along this shabby, deserted street as through the caves on the Musashino Plain, were only three blind ones who made their living by massaging and who had set out together, who would blow the flutes that were the sign of their trade, as thin and high in the winter night as the sound of a mosquito in January, and who would presently disappear behind the lantern of a poor rooming house.

  “I have little to say. But I should like to know where you are going. Where? Where? Where?” There was a touch of derision in the nasal tone. His head cocked to one side, the man looked up at Sakagami. He raised his hand as if to scratch his ear, and tapped at the head of the staff.

  “It makes no difference,” said Sakagami testily. He was going to meet a woman who had been forbidden to see him. “Does it matter where I’m going?”

  “It does. I am sorry, sir, but it does.” There was a strength in the voice that kept Sakagami fixed to the spot.

  “And why?” Sakagami turned and started down toward the man; but he pulled back as the mist clutched at his face.

  “It is late.” The voice was suddenly strong. The head bowed heavily toward the earth.

  Long Head, in front, turned slowly to face the bank above the road.

  The woman seemed to sink into the earth as she sat down disconsolately on her heels. The tip of her staff was white against the dark hair.

  Seeing that the three meant to stay, Sakagami resigned himself to being delayed; but at the thought of what lay ahead his chest rose and fell violently, as if poison were being forced in through his mouth. A rising, a rush of blood, and a collapse with an angry tremor of the flesh.

  Banks rose on both sides like mountain slopes. Against the sky, over the bank toward which Long Head faced, one or two barracks-style houses stood like tea huts on a mountain pass, tight and dark. Not a sliver of light escaped from them. On the bank, dead grass, blanketed by the mist as by a frost.

  On the side of the road where the three had stopped, the bank had slid away, exposing the roots of trees and the retaining stakes. Trees sent up their skeleton forms above. Here and there the mist clung to the branches like dirty moonlight. There were no stars. The bottom of a defile in Yotsuya, like the bottom of a mountain ravine, at one o’clock in the morning.

  Only the racing in the chest. “Is it wrong to be so late?” The words themselves seemed to be weighted down by the heavy air.

  “You were certain to say that.” The man slapped the back of the hand that held the staff. “It is wrong, very wrong indeed.”

  “I am not to go on then?” Perhaps this oracle could tell him something of the meeting that was to come.

  “If you will go on, whatever I say, let that be the end of it. But I must stop you for a moment. I alone—or that gentleman too.”

  Long Head coughed faintly as the other brought his staff upright.

  3

  “And what if I hav
e to go?” Sakagami’s breath came faster. “What if my father is dying, or a friend is ill? How can you know? You speak as though I were doing something wrong.”

  The man bent his head as though to rub his cheek against the staff, and laughed unpleasantly. “I know where you are going. And that gentleman says I must speak. . . . Shall I tell you? It will be no trouble. And you will tell me I am right. You go to meet a woman.”

  Sakagami did not answer.

  “She has duties and ties. There are obstacles and complications. But you have pushed and slashed, and broken down fences and walls. . . . You have pressed her with an urgency that would tear her very breast open, and she will meet you at the risk of her life. You are on your way to meet her. I knew from your footsteps as you came up, and met us, and passed. I knew a man rushing along, out of his senses.

  “Dew falls, frost falls. The moon clouds over, the stars are dark. In the wide skies too there are shadows. The shadows are gentle. But the breast is blocked and the breath is tight. See the lightning and the thunderclap after the darkness.

  “In the heart of man, nothing is strange.

  “I think as you do, I put myself in your place, and everything is clear, even to a blind man, as clear as this hand itself.” The man brought his hand up to cover his face.

  Sakagami could see in the dim light that the other two were nodding deeply, as if on a signal.

  “You are fortunetellers, are you? I was in a hurry, and perhaps I was rude.” Sakagami heaved a sigh. “She left home barefoot. . . . It is some distance from here, but she is waiting in the woods alone. She cannot move until I come.

  “I had a telephone call from her just now, so short that it was no more than a signal, and I hardly know what I am about. Can I help going? Do you say I shouldn’t go?”

  “I thought as much. . . . No, you were right to admit everything like a man. It will be sad for both of you. But how very dangerous.” The man clutched his staff to his chest with both hands, and stood in silence for a moment. “I shall ask you a question. Along this bank where we are gathered there is a row of gaslights. How many of them are lighted, and how many are dark? Tell me, please. Tell me.” He nodded as he spoke, and his head fell to his chest.

  Sakagami followed the line from the bottom of the hill behind the three. It was not the first time he had taken this road. Below the cliff, on one side, the gaslights stood at intervals of about two yards, put up by a nearby movie theatre for the safety of passers-by.

  The lamps were white and cold as frost needles. The glass chambers, like windows in the face of the cliff, were dark as far as his eye reached. They drank at the mist and sucked it in, and at intervals spewed out an ashen breath.

  Like a devil’s death mask shaped from cotton wadding, the mist clung to the nearest lamp and became a great earth spider, sending out horrible threads on that ashen breath, into the sky and down to the ground. Was that why the mist seemed to clutch so at the face?

  4

  “They will all be out,” the man said as Sakagami looked up and down the row.

  “They are all out.” The darkness of the night closed in more tightly.

  “They will all be out. And now, you will see that one lamp up the hill from here is still burning. You see it? How many lamps away is it?”

  “I see it.” There was one feeble, wavering flame, about to float off on the mist. “But I can’t tell you how many lamps away it is.”

  “Not far away. When the traveler sees a night crane in the pines along a lonely road, it is always in the fifth pine away. . . . The lamp will be the fifth up the hill from you.

  “If I am wrong, that gentleman will tell me so. He says nothing. I am right. Count them for yourself, count them for yourself. One . . .” He tapped twice with his staff.

  “One.”

  “Two.” Tap, tap, tap.

  “Three. Four. Five. It is the fifth.”

  “As I said.”

  “But why?”

  “You see us, and this bank, and these dark lamps, all because on that one light. But for it, you would not see me if I were to pinch your nose.”

  He did indeed see the dim figures by the light of that one lamp. By that faint light, even the row of dark lamps down the slope sent out an occasional flicker of light—and Sakagami stood dim and uncertain in the breathing mist.

  “What does it mean?”

  “And can you see nothing under the fifth lamp, the lamp that is burning?”

  “I beg your pardon?” Sakagami’s voice shook.

  “And can you see nothing?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Not a thing.”

  “That is not as it should be. If you will but go up and look, you will see. It is for that that I have stopped you. Listen, if you will.”

  He twisted and bent forward a little, and rattled his staff in the stones that lay at the base of a gas lamp. The sound was drunk up in the mist.

  “Let me make the point clear: The gaslight under which we stand—it has moved not one step ahead of us and not one step behind us since I stopped you—is the nineteenth in the row from the bottom of the hill.

  “If I am wrong, the master there will correct me.

  “Three years ago, on a different night indeed, but in this same November, at this same hour, this happened to me too.

  “I was not then the blind man you see now.”

  He turned squarely toward Sakagami, but his head was still bowed.

  “I was going to meet a woman as you are, and I was climbing this hill.

  “But I passed only one blind man. That is the whole of the difference.”

  Long Head faced squarely down the hill away from Sakagami, and started to walk off—and was still again.

  5

  And the woman: still sitting on her heels, she turned to hear the story. The knee of her kimono and the obi at her waist were folded one against the other. Her throat was white.

  The man’s voice was firm. “He called me from behind, as I called you, and, at the nineteenth lamp, the fifth below the lighted lamp, he said to me what I have said to you.

  “I have but repeated it.

  “And why should I not go to meet the woman, I retorted as you did. He answered. . . .”

  Sakagami somehow knew that “he” was Long Head here.

  “‘There is a strange creature under the fifth lamp ahead, the lamp that is still lighted. . . . A demon that takes the shadows of men, snatches them, devours them.

  “‘He sucks at a shadow, and the man grows thin; licks the shadow with his tongue, and the man languishes; tramps on the shadow, and the man is ill; snuffs it quite away, and the man dies.

  “‘The demon is always about, in the sunlight and the moonlight, to suck, to lick, to trample, and in time the man dies. Terrible though that is, it is more terrible when, under just such a light as we have here, he opens his mouth . . .’”

  The blind man’s gaping mouth.

  “‘. . . and swallows the shadow. That is all. The man dies. You are not to pass by here again.’

  “That is what he said.

  “But I was young and hotheaded. What was he talking about? I retorted. In the first place, what sort of monster was it? He did not smile. ‘Very well, very well, I shall tell you. It is like a lizard with a fez. It is like a white dog spread-eagled, and on its head a biretta.’

  “Seeing was quicker than hearing, I said. Let the thing have my shadow—I had believed nothing. I climbed to that fifth light, kicking up the gravel as I went. I found nothing there.

  “The blind man, scraping at the gravel with his staff, sprang up the hill after me. ‘Have you gone mad? You are too brave for your own good. It is no use talking to one who believes nothing I say, but the demon will not be after your shadow for a time.

  “‘He has long been after the shadow of the woman, the woman you are going to meet. I tell her through you to be forever careful, not for a moment to be off her guard.’

  “That is
what he said.”

  6

  “And why should he be giving advice—did he know the woman, I asked. ‘A housewife in my block saw her just this evening. They were at the bath together. The skin like snow, patted and rounded—one wondered why it did not melt in the steam. Over it, scarlet satin, and a pale yellow sash—scarlet that seemed to glide and flow from the breasts. A kimono for good autumn weather, a latticework of indigo and dark-blue stripes. A black damask obi, and a scarlet cord. An azure ribbon to bind the hair. An ear, faint through hair aglow like falling dew. And the rich swell of the neck and shoulders. Woman though she was, the housewife I speak of stood fascinated. She moved around to the front, and stared at the back, and peered at the naked form in the mirror. And she described everything to me, down to the mole on the white skin at the base of the left breast.’

  “‘It will be this woman you are going to see.’

  “That is what he said.”

  Sakagami was trembling. Not only because the faint image of the woman, now looking away, came to him as that of the woman being described—the same kimono, the same obi.

  But because of the woman he was going to meet tonight. He expected her to have on that obi, and that kimono—but what if she should have on the everyday black obi and the latticed kimono that had so become a part of his life?

  His blood ran cold, and an instant later he flushed.

  “‘Am I right? The kimono, the obi, the scarlet beneath . . . am I right about the woman you are going to meet?’ It made no difference about the black damask, or about the indigo and blue, or about the white skin. But imagine, if you will, how it was to be told even of the mole on the breast.