Something Strange Across the River

by Kafū Nagai

  I altered my path and made for the east side of the Sumida River, thinking I would pay another visit to Yukiko Ando, whom I had taken to calling Oyuki, at her house by the embankment and relax there for a spell.

  After walking the path back and forth for five days or so, it was an easy walk—easier than my first long walk from Azabu. I changed trains at Kyobashi and Kaminarimon, and it became a habit, the sort that your body moves on its own before your conscious mind has time to step in and regulate. The automation made the distance less bothersome. The trains fill up with people at different times each day, but once you’ve got it figured out you can avoid the rush, and even long distances become opportunities, not only for transport, but for quiet reflection over a book.

  Sometime around 1920, I began to need glasses for my reading, at which point I completely gave up on reading on the trains. But now, with the long round trip from Kaminarimon, I decided to take up my old habit again. However, it has never been a custom of mine to reach for newspapers, magazines, or recently published books, and in keeping with my private custom the first book I brought with me was Gakukai Yoda’s Twenty-four scenes of the Sumida.

  Rolling, squirming riverbank.

  A bow, strung with three shrines.

  Ending at Chomei (long life) Temple.

  Blanketed with cherry blossoms.

  The Tokugawas once loosed falcons here.

  A sip of its waters

  Can sure the stomach’s ills.

  The water of long life,

  hence the temple’s appellation.

  Basho wrote of its snows,

  So loved by the people.

  A hero for the ages,

  his name shook the earth’s foundations.

  The robe of a monk is no more than a strip of cloth,

  but they say that if you stood before this tree,

  you could hear him.

  I hoped the old text would deepen my appreciation for the scenes before me.

  On my third trip I had to stop to buy some food on the way. Considering I was already involved in a transaction, I decided to add something to the bill for the woman as well. I only made the trip four or five times, but the journey produced two tangible effects.

  It was not just my diet of tin-canned foods, but also my occasionally shoddy appearance, say, a missing button on a jacket, that eventually convinced the woman that I really did live alone in an apartment. It follows then, that there is nothing particularly odd about a man going out on the town every night, so long as he is single. Surely no one would guess that I needed to vacate my apartment to escape the radios, and furthermore, if I did not go to see plays or motion pictures, then how else was I to spend my time? I was certain she did not think I came because I had nowhere else to go. Eventually I came to worry whether or not there were concerns about where my money came from, considering the area’s reputation. I eventually asked her what she thought of it. She replied that as long as I paid her what was owed each night, that she was not concerned with anything else.

  She explained further. “All sorts of people hang around here. We once had a customer who stayed an entire month.”

  “You don’t say,” I said, surprised. “Don’t they need to inform the police? In Yoshiwara I heard that they have to tell the police all the time.”

  “Around here I’d say it depends on the apartment block.”

  “Who was it that stayed for a month? Some kind of thief?”

  “He was from a kimono shop. Eventually the owner of the shop came in and dragged him off.”

  “Guess he ran off with the shop’s money?”

  “Probably.”

  “Well, you don’t need to worry about me,” I said to comfort her, but she appeared unconcerned to the point of apathy. She let the topic fade off.

  With time, however, I came to realize that she had come up with her own theories as to the source of my funds.

  On the wall of the second floor alcove, there stands a very large frame filled with various ukiyo-e prints of beautiful women, all quarter-size reproductions. I had seen a few of them before as illustrations in magazines. Utamaro’s Abalone Divers, Toyokuni’s Women of the Baths, and so forth. There was also an altered print from Hokusai’s three-volume erotic works, of which the man had been cut from the print, leaving only the woman. I explained the alteration in detail.

  The explanation, along with the fact that I often wrote in my notebook while Oyuki was upstairs with clients (a practice that led to her often catching me unawares in the middle of my scribbles), combined in her mind and distilled into a theory in which I was involved in the publishing of “secret” books and materials. She asked me to bring one such book the next time I came.

  I’d kept some old copies of collections from the past few decades, so I brought three or four of them along with me the next time, as requested. And so it came to be that, without ever speaking of my occupation, Oyuki not only decided that I was a publisher of such materials, but set her mind at ease about the supposed source of my income, and in doing so quickly changed her attitude towards me. As if letting down her hair, or rubbing the tension from her shoulders, she no longer treated me like a simple customer.

  When the women who live in the shadows face the men who creep about in the darkness, there is no fear or malice in them, only kindness and love. There is no need for explanation; the innumerable acts speak for themselves, and nothing I put to paper can elaborate on them. There was the geisha from Kyoto who helped the man sought by the shoganate, the girl at the frigid train stop who emptied her pockets to help a gambler. Tosca fed the fugitive, Michitose gave all her love to the desperate man.

  My greatest anxiety was the possibility of running into other writers or reporters around town, or possibly on the train. It does not matter in the least where I meet other people. I had long since been cast off by the upstanding aristocracy of the world. The children of my relatives no longer came to see me. My only fear was of those other scribes of the city. Once, some ten years prior, when cafes were sprouting up all about Ginza, I’d had too much to drink and drawn the attention of all the newspapers in town. In April of 1929 the Bungei Shunju paper attacked me as an “existence that needn’t be tolerated.” They proceeded to depict my character as a “seducer of maidens,” in an attempt, I can only imagine, to make me out as some sort of criminal. To think of the articles they would pen upon the discovery of my jaunts east of the river.

  I rode the train out there each night, and stole into town. The main street was bustling at night with people and the lit, buzzing signs of the shops. When the lanes and alleyways are filled with people I need to keep a constant watch over who is walking around me—both front, back, left, and right. I believe the experience is essential, for if I am to give an authentic description of hiding from the world, I must deepen my understanding of Junbei Taneda, the protagonist of Disappearance.

  Chapter Six

  I have already indicated the whereabouts of the house I sneak off to by the embankment: Terajima, 7-chome, No. 60-something. The block stands just up in the northwest corner of the square, by which it follows that it is not the best place to avoid prying eyes. If one were to find a similar area in Yoshiwara, it would perhaps be in Kyomachi, just to the side of the moat.

  Allow me a slight digression regarding the evolving nature of this area. In 1918, the area behind the Asakusa Kannon Temple was made narrower by the construction of a wide main road, but for many many years the area had been filled with bars and various forms of entertainment, and the businesses were forced out by the expanding road. The businesses moved and now line both sides of Taisho Street, which is plied by the Keisei buses daily. Those businesses, along with ones relegated to behind Denbo-in temple and Edo river Tama, now fill in nearly every available spot on Taisho Street. The hustle brought out the crooks, who grew so emboldened as to snatch the hats from people’s heads in broad daylight, in response to which the police placed an ever more stringent watch on the area until the disreputable
places were forced into alleyways where they could not be seen by passing cars. Back in the Asakusa area the shops behind Ryounkaku Tower in Senzoku did their damnedest just to stay afloat—an effort to which the earthquake and fires of 1923 laid waste, their inhabitants shuffled to this very same district for a time. Many of them quickly altered their lifestyles to approximate their new surroundings, and by the time the city was rebuilt they had formed unions and made geisha houses. Their newfound business interests brought prosperity to the town, along with which came the quasi-permanent status of the town. The only road from Tokyo into the town came across the Shirahige Bridge, which was crossed by the Keisei Electric Railway. Prior to the discontinuation of the line the most prosperous area was the streets surrounding the station.

  Furthermore, in the spring of 1930, the city executed their plans to build a road connecting Azuma Bridge with Terajima. The city trains ran to Akiha Shrine, and the city bus routes were extended out to Terajima, 7-chome. At nearly the same time, the Tobu Railway Company constructed the Tamanoi Station just to the southwest of the main square so that people could come from Kaminarimon for just six sen. The sudden influx of people changed the face and backside of the town dramatically. What had previously been obtuse and nonnavigable alleyways became bright, welcoming thoroughfares, and what had previously been overlooked, though now on the outskirts of town, was crowded with banks, post offices, baths, theaters, cinemas, and the Tamanoi Inari Shrine still lined the main thoroughfare just as they always had. The new street, referred to as the “big little street” or the “redone street” was congested with taxis and night stalls. It was perhaps the busiest section of town, though despite its reputation it had yet to lay claim to a police box, or even a public toilet.

  Even this backwater town, suddenly enlivened, was not able to escape the undulating and manic altercations of the times. And neither can any of us.

  That house by the embankment, the one that set my mind at ease… The house where Oyuki lived stood at the corner of the district that exploded in popularity with the Taisho-era improvements. It felt, to someone like me, left behind by the times, as if we were connected by a deep, mysterious fate. To get there I would turn off of Taisho Street into an alleyway, walk past the Inari Shrine and its dirtied flags, find the embankment and walk alongside it further and further back until the sound of the radios and record players and footsteps disappeared and everything was silence again. In the summer, there was no place more suitable for escape from the radios. It was a place of rest.

  The neighborhood had, as a rule by the local association, prohibited the playing of radios and gramophones from four o’clock in the afternoon, when the women would sit in the windows. They had banned the playing of the shamisen. With the rain and the deepening of night the calls of women for men grew less frequent, along with which the growing silence was filled with the drone from clouds of mosquitos filling the rooms. The sounds gave voice to the loneliness of these back alleys in a forgotten district. But it was not a twentieth-century sadness. It was the sadness one might find in the kabuki of Tsuruya Nanboku.

  Oyuki, her hair in a looping chignon, framed with a view of the dirty embankment and surrounded by the murmur of mosquitos, always excited my senses. She brought the fading, phantom-like image of a world 30 years past back to vivid life. I wished I could find the words to express my gratitude to the one who brought that suspicious specter of the past back to me. Oyuki, far more than the actresses, far more than the poets and their words of butterflies, was an artist of exquisite refinement. She could reach into the yawning gaps of time and bring the past back to life.

  As Oyuki slowly scoops rice from its basket to our bowls, and then with the dribbling of tea over rice, along with the dim electric light and the hum of the mosquitos— when it all comes at once I can see those girls that I had loved in my youth appear before my eyes, as if they were there in the flesh. Back then we were not concerned with fashionable words like “boyfriend” and “girlfriend,” and the preposterous title of “love nest” was never conferred upon a place of common use. Husbands and wives referred to one another with far less formality back then.

  The mosquitos still drone over the embankment, but if you cross the Sumida River and head to the east, it’s as though nothing has changed in 30 years. Their song is of the melancholy reaches of the town. How great, even these ten years, the change has been in the dialect of the city!

  The mosquito net, all folded up

  The heat of the summer

  The western, autumn sun, the embankments,

  The pattering fans snap in half

  in the autumn heat.

  Tie off the holes in the mosquito nets.

  It’s the end of September.

  The mosquitos come buzzing from the trash cans

  You can seem them against the walls,

  among the water splotches from the rains.

  It’s the start of autumn,

  The mosquito nets and a bottle.

  The above is an old song that came back to me one day, while I was sitting in the tea room of Oyuki’s apartment and I noticed the hanging mosquito net by the window. Back then my friend Aa, long since passed, was living with a girl in secret, out behind the Fukagawa Chorei Temple. His parents didn’t approve. I used to go out there to see him, so it must have been around 1910.

  Oyuki poked her head out from the mosquito net and explained that she’d developed a sudden toothache that had kept her in bed all day. She had just been lying down. There was no place for her to sit so we lined up and sat on the step by the door.

  “You’re late. Oh, why do you have to keep me waiting?”

  The woman’s language and attitude had, with her presumed knowledge of my occupation, crossed the line from affectionate to nearly vulgar.

  “I’m sorry. Is it a cavity?”

  “It just started hurting. It hurts so badly I feel like the room is spinning. Is it swollen?” she asked, turning to show her profile. “Do me a favor, will you watch the room for me? I’d like to run to the dentist.”

  “Is it nearby?”

  “Just over by the police.”

  “Then it must be near the public market.”

  “Well, well—you’ve walked all over this place so you certainly know it well. You cheater.”

  “Ouch. Don’t be that way. I just do what I can to keep my head above water.”

  “Fine, then, I’m heading out. If it looks as though it will take too long I’ll come straight back.”

  “Wait, wait, wait for me—but don’t go under the mosquito net—is that how it is? Oh well, no matter.”

  I have made a point of matching my own demeanor to that of hers, so when she speaks roughly, I follow suit. This is not done in an effort to hide my true self, it is simply the way I choose to interact with modern people, no matter where they are from or who they are. Much like going overseas and taking the steps to speak the language of the land you are in, I try to match my diction to that of my conversation partner. In doing so I match my speech to that of the natives of foreign countries when I am there. When the partner becomes over-familiar, even rude, I find that I become the same. This digression grows long, but I might continue to say that when speaking with people in the modern dialect it is no problem for me to take on their tones, yet when it comes to writing letters I am overcome with difficulty in the endeavor. This is especially so with letters to women. Just how coy is one to behave on the page? This is to say little of the modern practice of attaching a “-ness” to words to increase their stature. “Inevitableness” and “importantness” and such rubbish. I often continue talking in said manner as a joke, but when it comes to lifting a brush and putting such words to paper I am overcome, time and again, with a fresh wave of revulsion.

  The good things are those that will not return to us. Just the other day, when airing out my books, I’d come across an old letter from a geisha trained at Yanagibashi. She was in Koume then. Those were times when a certain degree of formalit
y was expected in a letter, and despite perhaps not always knowing proper spellings, when she took up brush and ink she saw to it that her letter was true to form. At the risk of inviting ridicule, I should like to record her letter here.

  “Please do understand that I wished to write you a letter. The duration of my silence has been far too long. I know it to be so and I am sorry. I also wish to inform you that I have moved to new quarters, as the state of my former rooms was in disarray. There is a matter that is difficult for me to give expression to in writing, but I simply must discuss it with you. At a time of your own convenience, do pay me a visit. I shall be waiting. Pardon the brevity of this letter, I am in an terrible hurry. I will tell you all of it when I see you. Please do hurry.”

  “Down by the ferry you will discover a boathouse. Ask the boy working there. The weather has been so nice lately, you might invite Aa to accompany you as well. It would be wonderful if the three of us could go to Horikiri. Would it be easiest to make the trip in the morning? Pardon all these questions. Respond only if you feel inclined.”

  Many sentences carry distinct traces of a downtown woman’s speech pattern. The Takeya Ferry is gone now. So is the Makurabashi Ferry. Where, then, am I to search out these sentimental relics of my youth?

  Chapter Seven

  After Oyuki left I spent the majority of my time sitting in the mosquito net, swatting at the mosquitos, occasionally adding charcoal to the brazier, occasionally boiling a pot of water. The heat of the evening was irrelevant; in this town it was customary to brew tea the moment a guest arrived. The houses were filled with flames and the bubbling of boiling water pots.