Blue Bamboo: Japanese Tales of Fantasy

by Osamu Dazai

  Jirobei bathed himself frequently in the cold waters of the streams. Sometimes he dived to the bottom and crouched there, motionless. He was taking into consideration the possibility of accidentally slipping and falling into the water during a fight. It could happen, what with streams crisscrossing the entire town. As an added precaution he tied his cotton bellyband an extra inch tighter to guard against letting excessive amounts of saké into his stomach, knowing that if he got too drunk, his legs might unexpectedly fail him.

  Three years had passed. Thrice the festival at the Great Shrine had come and gone. The training was complete. Jirobei looked more stolid and imposing than ever and was so muscle-bound that it took him a full minute just to turn his head to the left or right.

  Relatives, being tied by blood, are quick to notice changes in one another. Ippei knew that Jirobei was up to something. He had no idea exactly what sort of training his son was engaged in, but he sensed that he’d become a man to be reckoned with. Setting in motion the scheme he’d cherished for so long, he arranged for Jirobei to be named his successor in the honorary post as head of the fire brigade. Jirobei, by virtue of his unaccountably grave and commanding demeanor, immediately earned the trust and allegiance of the fire fighters; they called him “Chief’ and treated him with the utmost respect, the sad upshot of which was that opportunities to challenge someone to a fight simply never presented themselves. Jirobei was disconsolate to think that at this rate he might go to his grave without ever having partaken in a brawl. Each night his arms, bulging with the muscles he’d acquired through his rigorous training, itched maddeningly, and he scratched at them in a wretched frame of mind. Finally, out of sheer deviltry and desperation, and in hopes of creating an occasion to display his powers, he had his entire back tattooed. The tattoo was of a blood-red rose some six inches across, around which were gathered five long, slender, mackerel-like fish that poked at the petals with pointed bills and were themselves encircled by a pattern of rippling blue wavelets that lapped at Jirobei’s ribs and spilled over onto his chest. So impressive was this tattoo that, far from exposing Jirobei to the insults and provocative comments he was prepared for, it merely served to spread his fame up and down the Tokaido Road, and soon he was a hero not only to the firefighters but to all the ruffians and layabouts in town. Now his prospects for a fight were nil, and it was more than he could bear.

  But then, just when he’d all but given up hope, a ray of light appeared. There was in Mishima at that time a wealthy saké brewer named Jinshuya Joroku, the Shikamayas’ greatest rival and competitor. Joroku’s saké was cloyingly sweet and darkish in color, and he himself was no exception to the rule that a brewer resembles his saké. A blackguard and an incorrigible womanizer, he was unsatisfied with the four mistresses he already had and was doing all he could think of to increase the number to five. It so happened that the arrow of his desire described an arc that passed over the Shikamaya home and pierced the grass-thatched roof of the calligraphy teacher’s modest abode across the way. The calligraphy teacher didn’t give in easily to Joroku’s demands concerning his daughter. Such was his despair on hearing them, in fact, that he twice attempted hara-kiri and would have succeeded had he not been discovered and restrained by members of his household. Jirobei, having caught wind of this unjust state of affairs, awaited his chance, his muscles squirming and itching for action.

  Three months later an opportunity arose. In early December, Mishima was visited by a rare heavy snowfall. Flurries began to fall at sunset, and soon enormous, peony-like flakes were floating down thick and fast. Some four inches of snow had accumulated on the ground when, all at once, the town’s six warning bells began to sound. Fire! Jirobei sauntered calmly outside. The house going up in flames was that of the tatami-mat maker who lived next door to Joroku. Balls of fire danced and whirled over the roof of the poor fellow’s house, and sparks billowed out like clouds of pinetree pollen, scattering far and wide; from time to time black smoke rose up like a tremendous, malevolent ghost, enveloping the entire roof; and the great flakes of snow, tinted with the bright colors of the flames, looked even more exquisite and precious as they fluttered down from the sky. When Jirobei reached the scene, the firefighters were engaged in an argument with Joroku. Joroku wouldn’t let them drench his house with water and demanded they knock down the tatami maker’s roof to snuff the flames and keep them from spreading. The firefighters, for their part, maintained that to do so would be in violation of the firefighters’ code.

  “Joroku-san,” Jirobei said, stepping forward. He kept his voice as low and restrained as possible and spoke with something almost like a smile on his lips. “Aren’t you making a bit of a mistake? Or perhaps you’re joking. You’d —”

  “I say!” Joroku interrupted him. “If it isn’t the young master Shikamaya! I’m only joking, of course. Ha, ha! Just having a little fun with the boys, you know. Go right ahead, let the water flow!”

  It didn’t develop into a fight after all. There was nothing Jirobei could do but stand there gazing dumbly at the fire. Fight or no fight, however, the young chief once again saw his reputation grow as a result of this incident. For a long time afterwards the story was told among the firefighters of how fearsome, how like a very god, Jirobei had looked facing down Joroku that night, and how, as he stood in the glow of the fire, ten or more large snowflakes fell on his flushed, red cheeks and clung there without even melting.

  On an auspicious day in February of the following year, Jirobei finished construction of a new house on the outskirts of town. The ground floor consisted of three rooms that measured six, four-and-a-half, and three tatami mats in size, and upstairs in the rear was an eight-mat room with a spectacular view of Mount Fuji. On an even more auspicious day in March, he brought his new bride, the calligraphy teacher’s daughter, to live with him. That night all the firefighters squeezed inside Jirobei’s new house to drink in celebration, and one by one as the night wore on they took turns entertaining the company with homespun party tricks and performances. It was morning before the last of them got up to deceive all the drunken and sleepy eyes with a magic trick involving a pair of saucers; when he was finished, a tiny splash of applause came from one corner, and with that the wedding banquet was brought to a close.

  Jirobei was vaguely aware that things had turned out pretty well for him after all, and he passed each day in a mild sort of stupefaction. His father, Ippei, was also heard to mutter, as he tapped out the ash of his long, slender pipe: “Well, that’s one load off my mind.” But then there occurred a tragic event that not even Ippei, with all his clearheaded wisdom, could have foreseen. One night during the second month after the wedding, Jirobei was sitting at home with his wife, drinking the saké she poured for him, when he suddenly said: “I’m a hell of a fighter, you know. Here’s what you do when you’re fighting somebody: first you punch them between the eyes with a right, like this, then you slug ’em in the solar plexus with your left, like that.” The demonstration was only in jest, of course, and he scarcely touched her, but his bride slumped to the floor, dead. Apparently those were, indeed, effective spots to hit a person. Jirobei was arrested, charged with manslaughter, and sent to prison—punished for being all too skilled at his art.

  Even in prison, that indomitable composure that one sensed about Jirobei prevented him from being abused or looked down upon by the guards and earned him the respect of the other inmates, who lost no time in recognizing him as boss of the cellblock. Seated upon his throne of several mats stacked one atop the other, with the rest of the convicts gathered at his feet, Jirobei would intone a mournful melody of his own invention, a melody that was not quite a song and not quite a chant:

  With cheeks flushed red,

  I whispered to the rocky crag:

  “I’m tough, you know!”

  The crag made no reply.

  SABURO THE LIAR

  Once upon a time, in the town of Fukagawa in old Edo, there lived a widower and scholar by the name of Haramiya K
oson, a specialist in Chinese religions. Koson had one child, whose name was Saburo. People in the neighborhood were wont to remark that it was just like a scholar to be so perverse as to name his only son Saburo, which is of course a name normally reserved for third sons. The fact that no one could explain what it was that made that particular act so typical of scholarly perversity was, it was said, precisely what made it so. Koson was not very highly thought of in his neighborhood. Word had it that he was exceedingly stingy—so stingy, in fact, that according to a persistent rumor he habitually regurgitated half his rice to re-use as paste.

  It was as a consequence of this miserliness of Koson’s that Saburo’s lies first began to blossom. Until he was eight years old, Saburo never received a single sen of spending money, but was forced to pass his days memorizing sayings of the ancient Chinese sages. Sniffling his perpetually runny nose and muttering the aphorisms to himself over and over, he would walk about the house working nails loose from the walls and pillars of all the rooms. As soon as he’d accumulated ten nails, he’d take them to a nearby junk dealer and sell them for one or two sen, which he’d invest in deep-fried dough cakes. Later on, when the junk dealer informed him that he could get about ten times as much money for books, Saburo began stealthily making off with one volume after another from his father’s library. It was as he was stealing the sixth book that his father caught him. Tears streaming down his cheeks, Koson chastised his wayward son with three quick blows to the head. Then he spoke. “To whip you at greater length would only cause both of us to work up an appetite in vain. I shall therefore leave your punishment at this. Sit down.”

  Saburo was forced to vow tearful repentance, and it was with this vow that his lies began.

  That summer, he killed the next-door neighbor’s pet dog. The dog was a Pekinese. One night it began to raise a horrible racket: long, drawn-out howls, frantic, scream-like yaps, exaggerated, moaning wails—a full repertoire of ghastly cries that made it sound as if it were suffering the agonies of the damned. When it had carried on without pause for an hour or so, Koson spoke to his son, who was in the bed next to his, saying: “Go have a look.” Saburo had been lying there with his head raised, blinking and listening. He got up, slid open the rain shutters, and looked outside. The Pekinese, tied to the neighbor’s bamboo fence, was writhing on the ground. “Hold it down,” said Saburo. In response, the Pekinese began to make a show of rolling in the dirt and chewing hungrily at the fence, as if it had gone quite mad, then proceeded to yap even more shrilly than before. Its infantile mentality inspired in Saburo a burning hatred. “Hold it down, hold it down,” he muttered beneath his breath as he stepped into the garden, picked up a stone, and hurled it. The stone hit the Pekinese square in the head; it gave a short, piercing cry, spun its white, furry body about like a top, and dropped to the ground, dead. When Saburo had closed the rain shutters and got back in bed, his father asked in a sleepy voice what had happened. Saburo pulled the quilt up over his head and said: “It stopped barking. It appears to be ill. I shouldn’t be surprised if it dies within a day or two.”

  During the autumn of that same year, Saburo killed a person. He pushed a playmate off the Kototoi Bridge into the Sumida River. He did it for no special reason; it was strictly on impulse—the sort of impulse that makes a man want to stick a pistol in his own ear and fire. The boy he pushed, the youngest son of a tofu peddler, moved his long, slender legs as he fell, taking three slow, waddling steps, as if trying to get a foothold on the air, then splashed through the surface of the water. When the current had carried the ring of ripples some yards downstream, a hand poked out from the center, clenched in a tight fist. Then it disappeared again. The ripples fell apart as they flowed along, and only when Saburo had watched the last of them vanish did he begin to wail at the top of his lungs. In response to his cries, people came running up and, looking at the spot Saburo pointed to as he sobbed, surmised what must have happened. One man who was particularly quick to jump to conclusions patted Saburo’s shoulder and said: “You did well, calling for help. Your friend fell in, did he? Don’t cry, we’ll save him. You did well!” From the crowd three confident swimmers stepped forward, raced one another into the water, and proceeded to display their rather remarkable aquatic skills. All three of them, unfortunately, were more concerned with how they looked to the crowd than with actually searching for the tofu-peddler’s son, as a result of which, when they finally did find him, he was already dead.

  Saburo felt nothing, even when he and Koson attended the boy’s funeral together. It wasn’t until he was ten or eleven that his secret crime began to torment him, and the anguish only resulted in bringing his lies into even fuller and more spectacular bloom. By lying to others, and to himself, he fervently tried to obliterate his crime from reality and from his own heart, and thus, in the course of growing up, he became a walking, talking mass of prevarication.

  By the time he reached the age of twenty, Saburo was, to all appearances, a meek and mild young man. When the Festival of the Dead came around, he sought and received the sympathy of people in his neighborhood by reminiscing, with many a melancholy sigh, about his late mother. This though Saburo’s mother had died giving birth to him; he’d never known her and had never even spent any time thinking about her before.

  As his skill at lying grew ever more remarkable, Saburo began to ghostwrite letters for two or three of the students who studied under Koson. His specialty was writing parents to ask for money. He would begin with a brief description of the weather and scenery, express an innocent hope that all was well with the beloved and respected parent, then delve right into the matter at hand. Nothing, to Saburo’s mind, could be less effective than to begin with long, drawn-out passages full of groveling flattery and end with a plea for cash. The plea only made the flattery all the more transparent and gave the whole letter an air of sordid insincerity. Better to pluck up one’s courage and get to the heart of the matter as quickly as possible. It was also advisable to keep things short and succinct. Like this:

  We are about to begin our study of the Book of Songs. If purchased from the local bookseller, the text costs twenty-two yen. Professor Koson, however, having kindly taken into consideration the financial status of his students, has decided to order the books directly from China. The cost comes to fifteen yen, eighty sen per volume. Since passing up this opportunity would mean suffering a substantial loss, I should like to order one of the books from him as soon as possible. Please send fifteen yen, eighty sen posthaste... After getting the request for money out of the way, one should then describe some trifling everyday occurrence. For example: Yesterday, looking out my window, I watched a single hawk doing battle with any number of crows—truly a valiant, soul-stirring sight. Or: The day before yesterday, as I was taking a walk along the banks of the Sumida River, I found the most peculiar little flower. It had small petals, like those of a morning glory, or, rather, quite large petals, you might say, like a sweet pea, and was white, but on the reddish side—such a rare find that I dug it up, roots and all, and replanted it in a pot in my room...

  And so on, rambling leisurely along as if one had forgotten all about money, or anything else. The beloved father, reading this letter, would reflect upon the tranquility in his son’s heart and, ashamed of the worldly cares that plagued his own, send off the cash with a smile. Saburo’s letters really did have such an effect. More and more students flocked to him to ask that he write or dictate their correspondence, and when the money arrived they would invite him out on the town and spend every last sen. Before long, Koson’s little school began to prosper. Students from all over Edo, having heard of Saburo’s talent, flocked there in hopes of picking up a few pointers from the young master.

  Being in such demand gave Saburo pause. To write or dictate dozens of letters each day was too much trouble. Why not publish? He could compile his methods for putting the touch on one’s parents into a single volume and have hundreds of copies printed up and sold at bookshops. He soon saw t
he flaw in this plan, however: What if the parents should buy and study the book themselves? He could foresee the result easily enough—as could his students, whose fierce opposition helped convince him to abandon the scheme. His desire to publish something had now taken root, however, and finally he decided to pen a novel about life in the pleasure quarters, such books being all the rage in Edo at the time. Written in a mock-serious tone, often opening with words like, “Ho, ho! I humbly submit,” and going on to describe all manner of nasty pranks and underhanded deceptions, works of this sort were the perfect medium for Saburo’s talents. At the age of twenty-two, he published two or three books in this genre under the pen name of Professor Crapulus Blotto, and they sold better than he’d ever dared dream they might.

  One day, Saburo discovered his own masterpiece, a volume entitled In Lies Lies the Truth, among the books in his father’s library, and casually asked him about it. “Is Professor Blotto’s novel any good?” Koson made a sour face before answering: “It most certainly isn’t.” Smiling, Saburo told him the truth: “Professor Crapulus Blotto is my nom de plume.” Koson, flustered but determined to feign composure, noisily cleared his throat twice, then a third time, and asked in a hoarse, conspiratorial whisper: “How much did you make on it?”