Modern Japanese Literature

by Donald Keene

  “Then you’ve been out before?” Shigemoto asked. His father nodded with the greatest emphasis. For some months now, choosing moonlit nights, he had waited for the house to be quiet and gone out in search of enlightenment, not to one specific place but to any charnel on the edge of the moor, and had stolen back again at dawn.

  “And has it helped you?” Shigemoto asked.

  “No.” His father stood quiet in the road. He heaved a deep sigh and looked off toward the moon over the distant hills. “It hasn’t helped me forget. This enlightenment isn’t so easy to come by as they say.” He ignored Shigemoto after that even when the boy spoke to him, and captive of his thoughts, said scarcely a word the rest of the way back to the house.

  That was the only night Shigemoto went out after his father. Since his father had stolen out unnoticed so many times before, undoubtedly he wandered out afterwards too. Late the next night, for instance, Shigemoto thought he heard his father’s door open softly. His father did not ask him to come along, however, and Shigemoto did not try to follow.

  Sometimes in later years Shigemoto wondered what could have made his father pour forth his heart thus for a still naive and uncomprehending child; but that was the only time in his life that he and his father talked together at such length. I use the expression “talk together” although in fact his father did most of the talking. At first the words were grave, they had a gloomy heaviness that weighed down the boy’s heart, but presently it was as though the old man was appealing to his son, and at the end—Shigemoto could not be sure it was not his imagination—the voice seemed to contain a sob. Shigemoto could remember a childish fear that his father, so deranged that he quite forgot it was but a small child he was talking to, could not hope for enlightenment, that his labors would come to nothing. Shigemoto was sorry for his father, tormented day and night by that beloved image until he sought relief in the way of the Buddha. He could think of his father as a wretched and piteous figure. But, to speak plainly, Shigemoto could not repress a certain hostility, very near anger, at the father who made no attempt to preserve the beautiful figure of his mother, who sought rather to turn it into the loathsome image of a corpse left by the road, into a thing putrid and revolting.

  He was only a little short, indeed, of calling out to his father, “I want to ask a favor. Please don’t turn my mother’s memory into something dirty.” Several times during the talk he was on the point of bursting out with it, and each time he was only able to restrain himself with difficulty.

  Some ten months later, toward the end of the following year, his father died. Was he able finally to gain release from the world of fleshly desire? Was he able to see her for love of whom he had so burned as no more than a worthless lump of putrefying flesh; was he able to die purified, ennobled, enlightened? Or was he, as young Shigemoto had foreseen, even at the last unredeemed by the Buddha; was that eighty-year-old breast, when it drew its final breath, aflame with passion, tortured again by the image of its love? Shigemoto had no way of knowing. To judge from the fact that his father’s death was not one to arouse envy for its peace and repose, however, Shigemoto thought that those forebodings of his had not been without point.

  Ordinary human sentiment would suggest that a husband unable to forget his runaway wife might do well to love all the more the only son she has borne him, that he might try to ease his pain even a little by transferring some of his affection to the boy. Shigemoto’s father made no such attempt. If he could not have back the wife who had deserted him, he would not be distracted, he would not be led aside, by anyone else, not even by the child in whom his blood was joined to hers—so intense was the love of Shigemoto’s father for his mother. Shigemoto had some few memories of times when his father had spoken softly to him, but without exception they were occasions when the two were talking of Shigemoto’s mother, and on any other subject his father was only chilly to him. Shigemoto did not resent his father’s coldness. As a matter of fact it made him happy to think that his father was so filled with love for his mother that he could give no attention to the child Shigemoto himself. His father grew colder and colder after that night, until it came to seem that the boy had quite disappeared from his mind. He was as one who gazes always at the blank space before his eyes. Shigemoto learned nothing from his father of his spiritual life during that last year, but he did notice that his father returned again to the wine he had given up, that even though he was shut up in the altar room as before the image of the Bodhisattva disappeared from the wall, and that in place of the sutras he presently took again to reciting the poetry of Po Chü-i.

  TRANSLATED BY EDWARD SEIDENSTICKER

  VILLON’S WIFE

  [Villon no Tsuma, 1947] by Dazai Osamu (1909-1948)

  Dazai Osamu, a member of a rich and influential family, was widely known during his lifetime, particularly to the younger generation, for his dissipation and excesses. His writings are autobiographical at least to the extent that we find in most of them the personage of a dissolute young man of good family, but Dazai was also gifted with a fertile imagination. His celebrity as a writer came after the war, with such stories as “Villon’s Wife” and the novel The Setting Sun.

  •

  I was awakened by the sound of the front door being flung open, but I did not get out of bed. I knew it could only be my husband returning dead drunk in the middle of the night.

  He switched on the light in the next room and, breathing very heavily, began to rummage through the drawers of the table and the bookcase, searching for something. After a few minutes there was a noise that sounded as if he had flopped down on the floor. Then I could hear only his panting. Wondering what he might be up to, I called to him from where I lay. “Have you had supper yet? There’s some cold rice in the cupboard.”

  “Thank you,” he answered in an unwontedly gentle tone. “How is the boy? Does he still have a fever?”

  This was also unusual. The boy is four this year, but whether because of malnutrition, or his father’s alcoholism, or sickness, he is actually smaller than most two-year-olds. He is not even sure on his feet, and as for talking, it’s all he can do to say “yum-yum” or “ugh.” Sometimes I wonder if he is not feeble-minded. Once, when I took him to the public bath and held him in my arms after undressing him, he looked so small and pitifully scrawny that my heart sank, and I burst into tears in front of everybody. The boy is always having upset stomachs or fevers, but my husband almost never spends any time at home, and I wonder what if anything he thinks about the child. If I mention to him that the boy has a fever, he says, “You ought to take him to a doctor.” Then he throws on his coat and goes off somewhere. I would like to take the boy to the doctor, but I haven’t the money. There is nothing I can do but lie beside him and stroke his head.

  But that night, for whatever reason, my husband was strangely gentle, and for once asked me about the boy’s fever. It didn’t make me happy. I felt instead a kind of premonition of something terrible, and cold chills ran up and down my spine. I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I lay there in silence. For a while there was no other sound but my husband’s furious panting.

  Then there came from the front entrance the thin voice of a woman, “Is anyone at home?” I shuddered all over as if icy water had been poured over me.

  “Are you at home, Mr. Otani?” This time there was a somewhat sharp inflection to her voice. She slid the door open and called in a definitely angry voice, “Mr. Otani. Why don’t you answer?”

  My husband at last went to the door. “Well, what is it?” he asked in a frightened, stupid tone.

  “You know perfectly well what it is,” the woman said, lowering her voice. “What makes you steal other people’s money when you’ve got a nice home like this? Stop your cruel joking and give it back. If you don’t, I’m going straight to the police.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I won’t stand for your insults. You’ve got no business coming here. Get out! If you don’t get out, I’ll be the
one to call the police.”

  There came the voice of another man. “I must say, you’ve got your nerve, Mr. Otani. What do you mean we have no business coming here? You amaze me. This time it is serious. It’s more than a joke when you steal other people’s money. Heaven only knows all my wife and I have suffered on account of you. And on top of everything else you do something as low as you did tonight. Mr. Otani, I misjudged you.”

  “It’s blackmail,” my husband angrily exclaimed in a shaking voice. “It’s extortion. Get out! If you’ve got any complaints I’ll listen to them tomorrow.”

  “What a revolting thing to say. You really are a scoundrel. I have no alternative but to call the police.”

  In his words was a hatred so terrible that I went goose flesh all over.

  “Go to hell,” my husband shouted, but his voice had already weakened and sounded hollow.

  I got up, threw a wrap over my nightgown, and went to the front hall. I bowed to the two visitors. A round-faced man of about fifty wearing a knee-length overcoat asked, “Is this your wife?”, and, without a trace of a smile, faintly inclined his head in my direction as if he were nodding.

  The woman was a thin, small person of about forty, neatly dressed. She loosened her shawl and, also unsmiling, returned my bow with the words, “Excuse us for breaking in this way in the middle of the night.”

  My husband suddenly slipped on his sandals and made for the door. The man grabbed his arm and the two of them struggled for a moment. “Let go or I’ll stab you!” my husband shouted, and a jackknife flashed in his right hand. The knife was a pet possession of his, and I remembered that he usually kept it in his desk drawer. When he got home he must have been expecting trouble, and the knife was what he had been searching for.

  The man shrank back and in the interval my husband, flapping the sleeves of his coat like a huge crow, bolted outside.

  “Thief!” the man shouted and started to pursue him, but I ran to the front gate in my bare feet and clung to him.

  “Please don’t. It won’t help for either of you to get hurt. I will take the responsibility for everything.”

  The woman said, “Yes, she’s right. You can never tell what a lunatic will do.”

  “Swine! It’s the police this time! I can’t stand any more.” The man stood there staring emptily at the darkness outside and muttering, as if to himself. But the force had gone out of his body.

  “Please come in and tell me what has happened. I may be able to settle whatever the matter is. The place is a mess, but please come in.”

  The two visitors exchanged glances and nodded slightly to one another. The man said, with a changed expression, “I’m afraid that whatever you may say, our minds are already made up. But it might be a good idea to tell you, Mrs. Otani, all that has happened.”

  “Please do come in and tell me about it.”

  “I’m afraid we won’t be able to stay long.” So saying the man started to remove his overcoat.

  “Please keep your coat on. It’s very cold here, and there’s no heating in the house.”

  “Well then, if you will forgive me.”

  “Please, both of you.”

  The man and the woman entered my husband’s room. They seemed appalled by the desolation they saw. The mats looked as though they were rotting, the paper doors were in shreds, the walls were beginning to fall in, and the paper had peeled away from the storage closet, revealing the framework. In a corner were a desk and a bookcase—an empty bookcase.

  I offered the two visitors some torn cushions from which the stuffing was leaking, and said, “Please sit on the cushions—the mats are so dirty.” And I bowed to them again. “I must apologize for all the trouble my husband seems to have been causing you, and for the terrible exhibition he put on tonight, for whatever reason it was. He has such a peculiar disposition.” I choked in the middle of my words and burst into tears.

  “Excuse me for asking, Mrs. Otani, but how old are you?” the man asked. He was sitting cross-legged on the torn cushion, with his elbows on his knees, propping his chin on his fists. As he asked the question he leaned forward toward me.

  “I am twenty-six.”

  “Is that all you are? I suppose that’s only natural, considering your husband’s about thirty, but it amazes me all the same.”

  The woman, showing her face from behind the man’s back, said, “I couldn’t help wondering, when I came in and saw what a fine wife he has, why Mr, Otani behaves the way he does.”

  “He’s sick. That’s what it is. He didn’t used to be that way, but he keeps getting worse.” He gave a great sigh, then continued, “Mrs. Otani, my wife and I run a little restaurant near the Nakano Station. We both originally came from the country, but I got fed up dealing with penny-pinching farmers, and came to Tokyo with my wife. After the usual hardships and breaks, we managed to save up a little and, along about 1936, opened a cheap little restaurant catering to customers with at most a yen or two to spend at a time on entertainment. By not going in for luxuries and working like slaves, we managed to lay in quite a stock of whisky and gin. When liquor got short and plenty of other drinking establishments went out of business, we were able to keep going.

  “The war with America and England broke out, but even after the bombings got pretty severe, we didn’t want to be evacuated to the country, not having any children to tie us down. We figured that we might as well stick to our business until the place got burnt down. Your husband first started coming to our place in the spring of 1944, as I recall. We were not yet losing the war, or if we were we didn’t know how things actually stood, and we thought that if we could just hold out for another two or three years we could somehow get peace on terms of equality. When Mr. Otani first appeared in our shop, he was not alone. It’s a little embarrassing to tell you about it, but I might as well come out with the whole story and not keep anything from you. Your husband sneaked in by the kitchen door along with an older woman. I forgot to say that about that time the front door of our place was shut, and only a few regular customers got in by the back.

  “This older woman lived in the neighborhood, and when the bar where she worked was closed and she lost her job, she often came to our place with her men friends. That’s why we weren’t particularly surprised when your husband crept in with this woman, whose name was Akichan. I took them to the back room and brought out some gin. Mr. Otani drank his liquor very quietly that evening. Akichan paid the bill and the two of them left together. It’s odd, but I can’t forget how strangely gentle and refined he seemed that night. I wonder if when the devil makes his first appearance in somebody’s house he acts in such a lonely and melancholy way.

  “From that night on Mr. Otani was a steady customer. Ten days later he came alone and all of a sudden produced a hundred-yen note. At that time a hundred yen was a lot of money, more than two or three thousand yen today. He pressed the money into my hand and wouldn’t take no for an answer. ‘Take care of it please,’ he said, smiling timidly. That night he seemed to have drunk quite a bit before he came, and at my place he downed ten glasses of gin as fast as I could set them up. All this was almost entirely without a word. My wife and I tried to start a conversation, but he only smiled rather shamefacedly and nodded vaguely. Suddenly he asked the time and got up. ‘What about the change?’ I called after him. ‘That’s all right,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what to do with it,’ I insisted. He answered with a sardonic smile, ‘Please save it until the next time. I’ll be coming back.’ He went out. Mrs. Otani, that was the one and only time that we ever got any money from him. Since then he has always put us off with one excuse or another, and for three years he has managed without paying a penny to drink up all our liquor almost singlehanded.”

  Before I knew what I was doing I burst out laughing. It all seemed so funny to me, although I can’t explain why. I covered my mouth in confusion, but when I looked at the lady I saw that she was also laughing unaccountably, and then her husband could not help but laugh too.<
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  “No, it’s certainly no laughing matter, but I’m so fed up that I feel like laughing, too. Really, if he used all his ability in some other direction, he could become a cabinet minister or a Ph.D. or anything else he wanted. When Akichan was still friends with Mr. Otani she used to brag about him all the time. First of all, she said, he came from a terrific family. He was the younger son of Baron Otani. It is true that he had been disinherited because of his conduct, but when his father, the present baron, died, he and his elder brother were to divide the estate. He was brilliant, a genius in fact. In spite of his youth he was the best poet in Japan. What’s more, he was a great scholar, and a perfect demon at German and French. To hear Akichan talk, he was a kind of god, and the funny thing was that she didn’t make it all up. Other people also said that he was the younger son of Baron Otani and a famous poet. Even my wife, who’s getting along in years, was as enthusiastic about him as Akichan. She used to tell me what a difference it makes when people have been well brought up. And the way she pined for him to come was quite unbearable. They say the day of the nobility is over, but until the war ended I can tell you that nobody had his way with the women like that disinherited son of the aristocracy. It is unbelievable how they fell for him. I suppose it was what people would nowadays call ‘slave mentality.’

  “For my part, I’m a man, and at that a very cool sort of man, and I don’t think that some little peer—if you will pardon the expression—some member of the country gentry who is only a younger son, is all that different from myself. I never for a moment got worked up about him in so sickening a way. But all the same, that gentleman was my weak spot. No matter how firmly I resolved not to give him any liquor the next time, when he suddenly appeared at some unexpected hour, looking like a hunted man, and I saw how relieved he was at last to have reached our place, my resolution weakened, and I ended up by giving him the liquor. Even when he got drunk, he never made any special nuisance of himself, and if only he had paid the bill he would have been a good customer. He never advertised himself and didn’t take any silly pride in being a genius or anything of the sort. When Akichan or somebody else would sit beside him and sound off to us about his greatness, he would either change the subject completely or say, ‘I want some money so I can pay the bill,’ throwing a wet blanket over everything.