by Donald Keene
I wonder, however, if a fact of which I have already spoken does not redeem me: it was perhaps because of the way my mother and sisters petted me that I first fell into the habit of fingering the mole.
“I suppose you used to scold me when I played with the mole,” I said to my mother, “a long time ago.”
“I did—it was not so long ago, though.”
“Why did you scold me?”
“Why? It’s a bad habit, that’s all.”
“But how did you feel when you saw me playing with the mole?”
“Well . . .” My mother cocked her head to one side. “It wasn’t becoming.”
“That’s true. But how did it look? Were you sorry for me? Or did you think I was nasty and hateful?”
“I didn’t really think about it much. It just seemed as though you could as well leave it alone, with that sleepy expression on your face.”
“You found me annoying?”
“It did bother me a little.”
“And you and the others used to poke at the mole to tease me?”
“I suppose we did.”
If that is true, then wasn’t I fingering the mole in that absent way to remember the love my mother and sisters had for me when I was young?
Wasn’t I doing it to think of the people I loved?
This is what I must say to you.
Weren’t you mistaken from beginning to end about my mole?
Could I have been thinking of anyone else when I was with you?
Over and over I wonder whether the gesture you so disliked might not have been a confession of a love that I could not put into words.
My habit of playing with the mole is a small thing, and I do not mean to make excuses for it; but might not all of the other things that turned me into a bad wife have begun in the same way? Might they not have been in the beginning expressions of my love for you, turned to unwifeliness only by your refusal to see what they were?
Even as I write I wonder if I do not sound like a bad wife trying to seem wronged. Still there are these things that I must say to you.
TRANSLATED BY EDWARD SEIDENSTICKER
MODERN POETRY: II
Night Train
The pale light of daybreak—
The fingerprints are cold on the glass door,
And the barely whitening edges of the mountains
Are still as quicksilver.
As yet the passengers do not awaken;
Only the electric light pants wearily.
The sickeningly sweet odor of varnish,
Even the indistinct smoke of my cigar,
Strikes my throat harshly on the night train.
How much worse it must be for her, another man’s wife.
Haven’t we passed Yamashina yet?
She opens the valve of her air pillow
And watches as it gradually deflates.
Suddenly in sadness we draw to one another.
When I look out of the train window, now close to dawn,
In a mountain village at an unknown place
Whitely the columbines are blooming.
Cats
Two pitch-black cats
On a melancholy night roof,
From the tip of their taut tails
A threadlike crescent moon hovers hazily.
“Owaa. Good evening.”
“Owaa. Good evening.”
“Ogyaa. Ogyaa. Ogyaa.”
“Owaa. The master of this house is ill.”
Harmful Animals
Particularly
When something like a dog is barking
When something like a goose is born a freak
When something like a fox is luminous
When something like a tortoise crystallizes
When something like a wolf slides by
All these things are harmful to the health of man.
The Corpse of a Cat
The spongelike scenery
Is gently swollen by moisture.
No sign of man or beast in sight.
A water wheel is weeping.
From the blurred shadow of a willow
I see the gentle form of a woman waiting.
Wrapping her thin shawl around her,
Dragging her lovely vaporous garments,
She wanders calmly, like a spirit.
Ah, Ura, lonely woman!
“You’re always late, aren’t you?”
We have no past, no future,
And have faded away from the things of reality.
Ura!
Here in this weird landscape,
Bury the corpse of the drowned cat!
The New Road of Koide
The road that has newly been opened here
Goes, I suppose, straight to the city.
I stand at a crossway of the new road,
Uncertain of the lonely horizon.
Dark, melancholy day.
The sun is low over the roofs of the row of houses.
The unfelled trees in the woods stand sparsely.
How, how, to restore myself to what I was?
On this road I rebel against and will not travel,
The new trees have all been felled.
Hagiwara Sakutarō (1886-1942)
Composition 1063
Ours are simple fences in the Ainu style.
We plotted and replotted mulberry trees
In our inch of garden,
But even so, couldn’t make a living.
In April
The water of the Nawashiro was black,
Tiny eddies of dark air
Fell like pellets from the sky
And birds
Flew by with raucous calls.
These fields full of horned stones
Where horsetails and wormwood have sprouted
Are cultivated by women
Dropping their litters
Patching together the ragged clothes of the older children.
Cooking and doing the village chores,
Shouldering the family discontents and desires,
With a handful of coarse food
And six hours sleep the year round.
And here
If you plant two bushels of buckwheat you get back four.
Are these people, I wonder,
So much unlike
The many revolutionaries tied up in prisons,
The artists starved by their luck,
Those heroes of our time?
Miyazawa Kenji (1896-1933)
Song
Don’t sing
Don’t sing of scarlet blossoms or the wings of dragonflies
Don’t sing of murmuring breezes or the scent of a woman’s hair.
All of the weak, delicate things
All the false, lying things
All the languid things, omit.
Reject every elegance
And sing what is wholly true,
Filling the stomach,
Flooding the breast at the moment of desperation,
Songs which rebound when beaten
Songs which scoop up courage from the pit of shame
These songs
Sing in a powerful rhythm with swelling throats!
These songs
Hammer into the hearts of all who pass you by!
Nakano Shigeharu (born 1902)
Spring Snow
It has snowed in a place where snow rarely falls,
Steadily, piling into drifts.
The snow covers all things
And all that it covers is beautiful.
Are people, I wonder, prepared for the ugliness of the thaw?
Early Spring
Midnight
A rain mixed with snow fell,
It trickled desolately on the bamboo thicket.
The dream dealt with another’s heart.
When I awoke
The pillow was cold with tears.
—What has happened to my heart?
The sun shines in mildly from tall windows,
A humming rises from the steelworks.
I got out of bed
And poked with a stick the muck in the ditch;
The turbid water slowly began to move.
A little lizard had yielded himself to the current.
In the fields
I push open black earth.
The wheat sprouts greenly grow.
—You can trust the earth.
Kitagawa Fuyuhiko (born 1900)
Morning Song
On the ceiling: the color of vermilion
Light leaking in through a crack in the door
Evokes a rustic military band—my hands
Have nothing whatever to do.
I cannot hear the song of little birds.
The sky today must be a faded blue.
Weary—too tired to remonstrate
With anyone else’s ideas.
In the scent of resin the morning is painful,
Lost, the various, various dreams.
The standing woods are singing in the wind.
Flatly spread out the sky,
Along the bank go vanishing
The beautiful, various dreams.
The Hour of Death
The autumn sky is a dull color
A light in the eyes of a black horse
The water dries up, the lily falls
The heart is hollow.
Without gods, without help
Close to the window a woman has died.
The white sky was sightless
The white wind was cold.
When she washed her hair by the window
Her arm was stemlike and soft
The morning sun trickled down
The sound of the water dripped.
In the streets there was noise:
The voices of children tangling.
But, tell me, what will happen to this soul?
Will it thin to nothingness?
Nakahara Chūya (1907-1937)
TRANSLATED BY DONALD KEENE
MODERN HAIKU: II
Isu yosete
Drawing up a chair
Kiku no kaori ni
In the scent of chrysanthemums
Mono wo kaku
I write my verses.
Mizuhara Shūōshi (born 1892)
The Imperial Tombs at Mukden
Ryō samuku
The great tombs are cold:
Jitsugetsu sora ni
In the sky the sun and moon
Terashiau
Stare at each other.
Kareno basha
In the withered fields
Muchi pan-pan to
A horse-carriage whip sharply
Sora wo utsu
Cracks against the sky.
An Ancient Statue of a Guardian King1
Kaze hikari
Wind and the sunlight—
Mukabaki no kin
Here, the gilt of a cuirass
Hagiotosu
Peels off and falls.
Natsu no kawa
The summer river—
Akaki tessa no
The end of a red iron chain
Hashi hitaru
Soaks in the water.
Yamaguchi Seishi (born 1901)
Guntai no
The tramping sound
Chikazuku oto ya
Of troops approaching
Shūfūri
In autumn wind.
Banryoku no
In the midst of
Uchi ya ako no ha
All things verdant, my baby
Haesomuru
Has begun to teethe.
Sora wa taisho no
The sky is the blue
Aosa tsuma yori
Of the world’s beginning—from my wife
Ringo uku
I accept an apple.
Nakamura Kusatao (born 1901)
In the middle of the night there was a heavy air raid. Carrying my sick brother on my back I wandered in the flames with my wife in search of our children.
Hi no oku ni
In the depths of the flames
Botan kuzururu
I saw how a peony
Sama wo mitsu
Crumbles to pieces.
Kogarashi ya
Cold winter storm—
Shōdo no kinko
A safe-door in a burnt-out site
Fukinarasu
Creaking in the wind.
Fuyu Kamome
The winter sea gulls—
Sei no ie nashi
In life without a house,
Shi no haka nashi
In death without a grave.
Katō Shūson (born 1905)
TRANSLATED BY DONALD KEENE
THE FIREFLY HUNT
[Sasameyuki, III, 4] by Tanizaki Junichirō (born 1886)
The publication of Tanizaki’s novel Sasameyuki, begun during the war, was discontinued by government order on the grounds that it was incompatible with wartime discipline, and not until 1946-1948, when the three volumes of the completed work finally appeared, could readers judge the magnitude and beauty of Tanizaki’s masterpiece. The title of the work means, roughly, snow that is falling thinly as opposed to thickly falling flakes of snow, and refers to the fragile beauty of Yukiko, one of the four sisters around whom this novel of life in the Japan of 1936-1941 is centered.
In the episode presented here, three of the sisters, together with the daughter of Sachiko, the second sister, go to visit a family named Sugano who live in the country.
•
It was a strange house, of course, but it was probably less the house than sheer exhaustion that kept Sachiko awake. She had risen early, she had been rocked and jolted by train and automobile through the heat of the day, and in the evening she had chased over the fields with the children, two or three miles it must have been. . . . She knew, though, that the firefly hunt would be pleasant to remember. . . . She had seen firefly hunts only on the puppet stage, Miyuki and Komazawa murmuring of love as they sailed down the River Uji; and indeed one should properly put on a long-sleeved kimono, a smart summer print, and run across the evening fields with the wind at one’s sleeves, lightly taking up a firefly here and there from under one’s fan. Sachiko was entranced with the picture. But a firefly hunt was, in fact, a good deal different. If you are going to play in the fields you had better change your clothes, they were told, and four muslin kimonos—prepared especially for them?—were laid out, each with a different pattern, as became their several ages. Not quite the way it looked in the pictures, laughed one of the sisters. It was almost dark, however, and it hardly mattered what they had on. They could still see each other’s faces when they left the house, but by the time they reached the river it was only short of pitch dark. . . . A river it was called; actually it was no more than a ditch through the paddies, a little wider perhaps than most ditches, with plumes of grass bending over it from either bank and almost closing off the surface. A bridge was still dimly visible a hundred yards or so ahead. . . .
They turned off their flashlights and approached in silence; fireflies dislike noise and light. But even at the edge of the river there were no fireflies. Perhaps they aren’t out tonight, someone whispered. No, there are plenty of them—come over here. Down into the grasses on the bank, and there, in that delicate moment before the last light goes, were fireflies, gliding out over the water in low arcs like the sweep of the grasses. . . . And on down the river, and on and on, were fireflies, lines of them wavering out from this bank and the other and back again . . . sketching their uncertain lines of light down close to the surface of the water, hidden from outside by the grasses. ... In that last moment of light, with the darkness creeping up from the water and the moving plumes of grass still faintly outlined, there, far, far, far as the river stretched, an infinite number of little lines in two long lines on either side, quiet, unearthly. Sachiko could see it all even now, here inside with her eyes closed. . . . Surely it was the impressive moment of the evening, the moment th
at made the firefly hunt worth while. ... A firefly hunt has indeed none of the radiance of a cherry blossom party. Dark, dreamy, rather . . . might one say? Perhaps something of the child’s world, the world of the fairy story in it. . . . Something not to be painted but to be set to music, the mood of it taken up on a piano or a koto. . . . And while she lay with her eyes closed, the fireflies, out there along the river, all through the night, were flashing on and off, silent, numberless. Sachiko felt a wild, romantic surge, as though she were joining them there, soaring and dipping along the surface of the water, cutting her own uncertain line of light
It was rather a long little river, as she thought about it, that they followed after those fireflies. Now and then they crossed a bridge over or back . . . taking care not to fall in . . . watching for snakes, for snake eyes that glowed like fireflies. Sugano’s six-year-old son, Sosuke, ran ahead in the darkness, thoroughly familiar with the land, and his father, who was guiding them, called uneasily after him, “Sosuke, Sosuke.” No one worried any longer about frightening the fireflies, there were so many; indeed without this calling out to one another they were in danger of becoming separated, of being drawn apart in the darkness, each after his own fireflies. Once Sachiko and Yukiko were left alone on one bank, and from the other, now brought in clear and now blotted out by the wind, came voices calling, “Mother.” “Where is Mother?” “Over here.” “And Yukiko?” “She is over here too.” “I’ve caught twenty-four already.” “Don’t fall in the river.”
