Modern Japanese Literature

by Donald Keene

  Sugano pulled up some grass along the path and tied it into something like a broom; to keep fireflies in, he said. There are places famous for fireflies, like Moriyama in Omi, or the outskirts of Gifu; but the fireflies there are protected, saved for important people. No one cares how many you take here, Sugano said; and Sugano took more than anyone. The two of them, father and son, went boldly down to the very edge of the water, and Sugano’s bundle of grass became a jeweled broom. Sachiko and the rest began to wonder when he might be ready to think of going back. The wind is a little cold; don’t you think perhaps. . . . But we are on the way back. We are going back by a different road. On they walked. It was farther than they had thought. And then they were at Sugano’s back gate, everyone with a few captured fireflies, Sachiko and Yukiko with fireflies in their sleeves. . . .

  The events of the evening passed through Sachiko’s mind in no particular order. She opened her eyes—she might have been dreaming, she thought. Above her, in the light of the tiny bulb, she could see a framed kakemono that she had noticed earlier in the day: the words “Pavilion of Timelessness,” written in large characters and signed by one Keido. Sachiko looked at the words without knowing who Keido might be. A flicker of light moved across the next room. A firefly, repelled by the mosquito incense, was hunting a way out. They had turned their fireflies loose in the garden earlier in the evening, and considerable numbers had flown into the house. But they had been careful to chase them out before closing the doors for the night—where might this one have been hiding? In a last burst of energy it soared five or six feet into the air; then, exhausted, it glided across the room and lighted on Sachiko’s kimono, hanging on the clothes rack. Over the printed pattern and into the sleeve it moved, flickering on through the dark cloth. The incense in the badger-shaped brazier was beginning to hurt Sachiko’s throat. She got up to put it out, and while she was up moved on to see to the firefly. Carefully she took it up in a piece of paper—the idea of touching it repelled her—and pushed it out through a slot in the shutter. Of the scores of fireflies that had flickered through the shrubbery and along the edge of the lake earlier in the evening, there were almost none left—had they gone back to the river?—and the garden was lacquer-black.

  TRANSLATED BY EDWARD SEIDENSTICKER

  THE MOTHER OF CAPTAIN SHIGEMOTO

  [Shōshō Shigemoto no Haha, Chapters IX and X, 1950] by Tanizaki Junichiro

  The Mother of Captain Shigemoto is a novel of ninth-century Japan, and much of its material is based on actual events, as recorded in Heian literature. It deals mainly with an old man married to an extremely beautiful young wife who is his joy and treasure. The Prime Minister, hearing of her beauty, by a ruse manages to steal her from the old man, leaving him to spend his days in fruitless attempts to forget her. Captain Shigemoto was the child of the old man and his young wife, and he appears as a small boy in the following episode.

  •

  Shigemoto had one terrible memory of his father. He could never forget it. His father was at the time in the habit of sitting for days and nights on end in quiet meditation, and Shigemoto, at length overcome with curiosity about when he ate and slept, stole away from the nurse one night to the altar room and, sliding the door open a crack, saw in the faint light his father still kneeling as he had been earlier in the day. Time passed and still he knelt motionless as a statue, and presently Shigemoto slid the door shut and went back to bed; but the next night curiosity came over him again, and again he went to look and saw his father as on the preceding night. And then, the third night it must have been, he was taken with the same curiosity and tiptoed to the altar room; but this time, as he looked through the narrow crack in the door, scarcely allowing himself to breathe, he noticed that the light on the tallow wick was flickering in spite of the stillness of the air, and at that moment his father’s shoulders rose and his body moved. The motion was infinitely slow and deliberate. At first Shigemoto could not see what it meant, but presently his father, one hand pressed to the matting, his breathing heavy as though he were lifting an object of extraordinarily great weight, pushed his body from the floor and stood upright. Because of his age he could have gotten up but slowly in any case, and the long hours of unrelieved kneeling had so paralyzed his legs that he could pick himself up only with this special effort. In any case he was up, and he walked, almost staggered, from the room.

  Shigemoto followed him, bewildered. His father’s gaze was fixed dead ahead, he looked neither to the left nor to the right. He marched down the stairs, slipped his feet into a pair of sandals, stepped to the ground. The moon was a clear, crystalline white, and Shigemoto could remember a humming of insects that suggested the autumn; but he remembered too how when he slipped into a pair of grownup’s sandals himself and went out into the garden, the soles of his feet were suddenly cold, as though he had stepped into water, and the bright moonlight, laying the landscape over white as with frost, made him feel that it could indeed have been winter. His father’s shadow, swaying as he walked, was sharp against the ground. Shigemoto stayed far enough behind to avoid stepping on it. He would very probably have been seen had his father turned around, but his father seemed deep in meditation still, and when presently they had gone out the gate he walked firmly ahead as though he knew clearly where he was going.

  An old man of eighty and a child of seven or eight could not have gone very far. Still to Shigemoto it seemed something of a walk. He followed his father at a distance, now seeing him and now cut off from him; but there were no other travelers on the road, and his father’s figure reflected the moonlight so white in the distance that there was no chance of losing him. The road was lined at first with the earthen walls of fine mansions. Presently these gave way to poor fences of woven bamboo and to low, disconsolate roofs with shingles held down by stones, and these in turn became less regular, separated more and more by pools of water and by open spaces in which autumn grasses grew high. The insects in the clumps of grass were silent as the two approached, and began humming again as they moved away, noisier and noisier, now steady as a rain shower, the farther they walked from the city. Finally there were no houses at all, only a field of autumn grass stretching wide in every direction and a narrow country road twisting through it. There was but th one road, and yet as it wound now to the left and now to the right, lined with grasses taller than a man, Shigemoto’s father sometimes disappeared from sight around a bend, and Shigemoto moved up to within ten or fifteen feet of him. The boy’s sleeves and his skirt became soaked with dew as he separated the grasses that hung down over the road, and cold drops seeped down inside his collar.

  His father crossed a bridge over a small river, and instead of following the road on ahead, turned downstream along the sand in the narrow river bottom. A hundred yards or so below, on a slightly raised stretch of level ground, there were three or four mounds of earth, each one soft and fresh, the tombstones above them a gleaming white, even the epitaphs clear in the moonlight. Some graves had small pines or cedars in place of tombstones; others had in place of the mound a railing with a heap of stones inside and on top of it a five-stone marker; and still others, the rudest of all, had neither stone nor mound, but only a straw mat to cover the body, and an offering of flowers. Several of the tombstones had fallen over in the recent storm, and a number of mounds had washed away, leaving parts of bodies exposed.

  Shigemoto’s father wandered among the mounds as though he were looking for something. Shigemoto followed, almost close enough now to step on his heels. If his father knew of it he gave no sign, not even once turning around. A dog, hungry for flesh, jumped suddenly from a clump of grass and scurried off somewhere, but Shigemoto’s father did not glance up. The boy could tell even from behind that he was intent on his quest, that his whole spirit seemed poured into it. The old man stopped, and Shigemoto, stopping as suddenly, saw below him a sight that made his hair stand on end and his skin go cold.

  The light of the moon, like a fall of snow, covered everything over
with a phosphorescent light and obscured its form, and at first Shigemoto could not make out exactly what the strange object laid out there on the ground could be; but as he stared he saw that it was the bloated, rotting corpse of a young girl. He knew it was a young girl from the flesh of the limbs and from the color of parts of the skin. The long hair, however, had peeled off like a wig, scalp and all, the face was a lump that looked as though it had swollen up and been beaten flat, the entrails had begun to pour out, the body was crawling with maggots. One can perhaps imagine the horror of the scene, there in moonlight bright as day. Shigemoto stood as if tied to it, unable to turn his head, to move, much less to cry out. He looked at his father. His father had walked quietly up to the corpse, and now, bowing reverently before it, he knelt down on a straw mat beside it. Taking the same rigid, statue-like position he had had in the altar room, he lost himself again in meditation, sometimes looking down at the corpse, sometimes half-closing his eyes.

  The moon came out yet brighter, as though polished to its last perfection. The solitude embracing them seemed to grow more intense. Except for a rustling in the autumn grasses as now and then a breeze passed, there was only the shrilling of the insects, ever louder. The sight of his father, kneeling there like a lone shadow, made Shigemoto feel as though he were being pulled into a world of eerie dreams; but, whether he wanted to return or not, the smell of putrefying flesh struck his nostrils with a force that brought him back to the real world.

  It is not clear exactly where Shigemoto’s father looked upon the dead woman. There were probably open charnels scattered over the Kyoto of the day. During epidemics of smallpox or measles, when the dead were many, a vacant space was chosen, any space would do, where bodies could be dumped and buried hurriedly under a token covering of earth or a straw mat, partly from fear of contagion, partly for want of better means of disposal. This no doubt was such a ground.

  While his father knelt in meditation over the corpse, Shigemoto crouched behind the mound, trying to quiet his breath. The moon started down in the west, and as the cluster of grave markers behind which the boy was concealed sent a lengthening shadow off across the earth, his father at last arose and started back for the city. Shigemoto followed him along the road they had come. It was just as they crossed the little bridge and started off into the moor and the autumn grasses that Shigemoto was startled by his father’s voice.

  “My boy . . . my boy, what do you think I was doing there?” The old man stopped in the narrow road and turned back to wait for Shigemoto. “I knew you were following me. I had something to think about, and I let you do as you wanted.”

  Shigemoto said nothing. His father’s voice grew softer, there was a gentleness in his manner. “I have no intention of scolding you, my boy. Tell me the truth. You were watching me from the start?”

  “Yes.” Shigemoto nodded. “I was worried about you,” he added by way of apology.

  “You thought I was crazy, didn’t you?” His father’s mouth twisted into a smile. Shigemoto would have guessed that he laughed a short, weak laugh, though it was too faint to hear. “You are not the only one. Everyone seems to think I am crazy. . . . But I’m not. There is a reason for what I did. I can tell you what it is if it will help you. . . . Will you listen to me?”

  These are the things Shigemoto’s father talked of as they walked side by side back to the city. There was no way for the boy to know even vaguely what they meant, and we have in his diary not his father’s words but the adult observations Shigemoto later added. The question was that of the Buddhist “sense of foulness.” I am ignorant myself of Buddhist teachings, and I have the gravest doubts whether I can get over a discussion of the problem without error. I am much indebted to a Tendai scholar whom I have frequently visited and who has lent me reference works. From the start I have seen that the problem is a complex one not to be mastered without effort. There would seem to be no need to become deeply involved here, however, and I shall touch on only those points that seem necessary to my story.

  Though there may be others as good, I have found the best simple work on the subject to be that Companion in Retirement of which the author is either the priest Jichin or the priest Keisei, it has never been decided which. The Companion is a collection of anecdotes about the accomplishments of illustrious priests, and tales of conversion and salvation that were missed by earlier collections. In the first volume are stories like “How a Lowly Priest Perfected the Sense of Foulness in His Spare Time,” “How a Lowly Individual Saw the Light After Viewing a Corpse Laid Out on a Moor,” and “The Woman’s Corpse in the River Bed at Karahashi,” and in the second volume, “How the Lady in Waiting Displayed Her Foul Form.” One can see well enough in stories like these what the sense of foulness is.

  To take one example from the collection:

  Long ago a saintly priest on Mt. Hiei near Kyoto had a lesser priest in his service. A priest the latter was called, but he was in fact little more than a temple servant who performed miscellaneous services for the sage. He was a young man of the greatest devotion and reliability, serving the sage well and carrying out his orders with never a mistake, and the sage had no little confidence in him. As time passed the young priest took to disappearing, no one knew where, when night fell, and returning again early the following morning. He must be visiting a woman at the foot of the mountain, the sage began to suspect. The latter’s disappointment and annoyance, though he remained silent, were extreme. The youth would reappear in the morning looking somehow morose, crestfallen. He seemed to avoid the eyes of the other priests, to be always on the verge of tears; and the others, from the sage down, concluded that very likely the lady at the foot of the mountain was being difficult—undoubtedly that was it. One night the sage sent a man out to follow him. The young priest went down the west slope of the mountain to what are now the outskirts of Kyoto, and on to the Rendai Moor. The other followed after him, at a loss to explain what this might mean. The youth wandered over the moor, now here, now there, and presently, making his way up to an indescribably putrid corpse, lost himself in prayer beside it, opening his eyes, closing them, now and again giving himself up to the most unrestrained weeping. All through the night this continued, and when the dawn bells began to ring he finally dried his tears and went back up the mountain. The man following him was deeply moved. He too was in tears when he arrived back at the temple. What had happened? the sage asked. The fellow had reason to be gloomy, the other answered, and told everything he had seen. “And that is why he disappears every evening. Our crime has been a fearful one indeed for having doubted so saintly a person.”

  The sage was astonished. Thereafter he revered his subordinate as no ordinary individual. One morning when the youth had brought in the porridge for breakfast, the sage, making sure that no one else was present, turned to him. “They say you’ve mastered the sense of foulness. I wonder if it’s true.”

  “It is not. That is for the great ones with learning, not for the likes of me. You should be able to tell from looking at me whether I would be capable of anything like that.”

  “No, no—everyone knows about it. As a matter of fact I’ve been doing honor to you myself for some time now. You must tell me everything.”

  “Perhaps I can say something, then. I don’t pretend to have gone very far, but I begin to think I understand a little.”

  “You will surely be able to give us a sign of what you have done. Suppose you try concentrating on this porridge.”

  The young priest took the tray, put a cover on the porridge, and for a time closed his eyes in intense meditation. When he took off the lid the porridge had changed to a mass of white worms. The sage wept unashamedly. “You shall be my teacher,” he said, and brought the palms of his hands together in supplication.

  —That is the story of “How a Lowly Priest Perfected the Sense of Foulness in His Spare Time.” It is, the author of the Companion in Retirement adds, a “most edifying one”; and the founder of the Tendai sect too has written that i
t is possible for even the unwise to gain insight into the nature of things by going to the edge of a grave and looking at a foul corpse. Our humble priest no doubt knew of the method. It is written in the Method of Suspension and Contemplation1 that “mountains and rivers are foul, food and clothing are foul, rice is like white worms, clothing is like the skin of a stinking thing.” So wonderful was the understanding of the priest that quite spontaneously his works fell into harmony with the teachings of the holy texts. An Indian monk once said that a bowl is like a skull and rice like worms, and in China the priest Tao Hsiian taught that a bowl is like a man’s bones and rice like his flesh. But a thing of surpassing promise it was for an ignorant priest, who can have known nothing of these pronouncements, to be able to demonstrate their truth. Even if one cannot follow him to the ultimate point he reached, one can still find the five desires growing weaker, the workings of the spirit changing, if one but recognizes the principle taught. “Those who have not seen the truth are stirred to the deepest covetousness by that which seems of good quality, and their resentment is not small at the rag that seems the opposite; the fine and the base may change, but that from which arises the cycle of birth and rebirth is eternal. . . . How pitiful, how profitless are worldly illusions. One can but think that only the trivia of a dream cause men to look with dread on resting in the eternal.”

  To come back to our story. It is clear from Shigemoto’s diary that his father too was trying to train himself to the sense of foulness, that the enchanting figure of the beauty who had deserted him—the “lost crane” of the Po Chü-i poem, “whose voice has gone silent behind the green clouds, whose shadow is sunk in the brightness of the moon”—was always with him; and that in the excess of his grief he had summoned up his will to beat back the vision. He first explained the sense of foulness that night, then told how he wanted somehow to forget his bitterness at the woman who had deserted him, and his love for her, to wipe away the image still shining in his heart, to put an end to his suffering. Some might consider him insane, he said; but such was the discipline he had chosen.