Blue Bamboo: Japanese Tales of Fantasy

by Osamu Dazai

  And so on. Having expounded such awesomely laudable sentiments, it remains only for us to confess that they do not by any means reflect our true feelings. We in fact believe that attaining such beauty that everyone we meet falls madly in love with us, is the highest aspiration for any human being, but we do not wish to invite the wrath of Mlle. Hatsué. Mlle. Hatsué happens to be both our elder sister and our French tutor, which means that we must at all times avoid any defiance of her judgments and devote ourselves to following her lead. “Age before beauty,” it is said, but let it not go unnoticed that life can be trying for those who find themselves in the latter category.

  Because Rapunzel was, as we have determined, an ignorant person who did not know how to resign herself, no sooner had she sensed that she was about to lose what she perceived as her qualification for being loved, than she began to wish for death. She was without hope. Life, for her, could have no meaning without the prince’s love. The prince, for his part, was desperate to save her. When one is in agony, one prays to God, but in the mad delirium of despair, one may be willing even to cling to the devil. The prince, at his wits’ end, begged the filthy old witch for help, all but clasping his hands together in supplication.

  “Please let her live!” he cried, breaking into a clammy sweat as he fell to his knees before the evil-looking one. To save the life of the woman he loved, he thought nothing of casting away every last ounce of pride and self-respect. Our gallant, our naive, our pure-hearted, pitiful prince.

  The old woman smiled. “Very well. Rapunzel shall live to a ripe old age. But even if she ends up with a face like mine, you will continue to love her as always, yes?”

  The prince wiped the sweat from his forehead with a fevered sweep of his hand.

  “I beg of you. I’m in no state even to consider such a question. I want only to see Rapunzel’s health restored. Rapunzel is still young. As long as she’s young and healthy, she could never be ugly to me. Please hurry. Make Rapunzel well again.” The prince’s eyes glistened with tears as he pronounced these bold words. Perhaps to let Rapunzel die while she was still beautiful would be the truest expression of his love... but it was out of the question. A world without Rapunzel would be as black as night. He wanted her to live. To live and to stay beside him forever. He wasn’t concerned about her physical appearance. To lose her would be unbearable. If it weren’t for the old witch standing there watching, the prince would have lain down beside his wife, clung to her emaciated breast, and cried: “I love you, Rapunzel! O mysterious flower, nymph of the forest, child of the mountain air, promise you’ll never leave my side!”

  The old witch narrowed her eyes dreamily, gazing with obvious pleasure at the tortured expression on the prince’s face. “What a nice boy,” she muttered, in her raspy voice. “What a nice, honest boy. Rapunzel, you’re a lucky girl.”

  “No,” Rapunzel moaned from her sickbed. “I’m a child of misfortune. I’m the daughter of a witch. When the prince shows me his love, it only makes me all the more aware of my lowly birth. I’m so ashamed... I always think of our old home in the forest, and sometimes I even feel my life was easier when I was shut up in the tower, communing with the birds and stars. I don’t know how many times I thought of fleeing this castle and returning home. But I couldn’t bear to part with the prince. I love him. I would give him my life ten times over if I could. The prince is a kind and gentle person, and I just couldn’t bring myself to leave him. That’s why I’ve remained here all this time. I have not been happy. Every day has been hell for me. Oh, Mother! A woman should never take for her husband a man she loves with all her heart. She’ll not be the least bit happy. No, Mother, let me die! I’ll never leave the prince as long as I live—so let me leave him by ending my life. If I die, the prince and everyone else can find happiness.”

  “That’s just your selfishness speaking.” The old woman said this with a snaggle-toothed sneer, but the words reverberated with motherly love. “The prince has promised to care for you no matter how ugly you become. He’s mad about you. I must say I’m impressed. The way things stand, if you were to die, why, he might even follow you in death. You wouldn’t want that to happen, would you? For the prince’s sake, you must regain your strength and see what happens. Let the future take care of itself. Rapunzel, don’t you understand? You’ve given birth to a baby. You’re a mother now.”

  Rapunzel breathed a faint sigh and quietly closed her eyes. The prince, exhausted by his own extreme emotions, now stood frozen in one spot, his face a blank, expressionless mask as, before his eyes and with unimaginable speed, the witch constructed a black magic altar. She dashed out of the room and was no sooner gone than she appeared again, carrying something in her arms, and no sooner had she appeared than she vanished and was back again carrying something else, and so on, until the room was filled with bizarre and wondrous objects. The altar stood upon the four legs of a beast and was covered with a crimson cloth that was made of the dried tongues of five hundred species of snakes and owed its color to the blood that had dripped from those tongues. On top of the altar was an enormous cauldron fashioned from the hide of a black cow, inside of which, though there was no fire, water boiled furiously, all but spilling over the sides. The old witch, her hair in wild disarray, ran round and round the altar, chanting some sort of incantation and tossing rare medicinal herbs and other extraordinary ingredients into the cauldron. Snow that had lain atop a lofty mountain peak since ancient times, frost from bamboo leaves that glittered in the last split second before melting, the shell of a tortoise that had lived ten thousand years, gold dust gathered flake by flake in the moonlight, the scales of a dragon, the eyes of a rat that had never seen sunlight, quicksilver regurgitated by a cuckoo, the glowing tail of a firefly, the blue tongue of a cockatoo, an eternally blooming poppy, the earlobe of an owl, the toenails of a ladybug, the back teeth of a katydid, a plum blossom from the bottom of the sea, and many other precious and all-but-unobtainable objects—one by one she threw them into the boiling mixture, circling the altar some three hundred times before finally coming to a halt. The moment she stopped, the steam that rose from the cauldron began to glow with the seven colors of the rainbow.

  “Rapunzel!” the witch shouted in a voice so powerful and commanding that it was scarcely recognizable. “I am about to perform a once-in-a-lifetime feat of sorcery, a tremendously difficult operation. Bear with me!” And with that, she drew a long, narrow dagger, straddled her daughter where she lay, and drove it into her breast. Before the prince even had time to let out a cry of horror, the witch had lifted Rapunzel’s wasted body above her head and thrown her into the cauldron—splash! A faint cry, like the sob of a seagull, was the only sound that followed the splash; afterward all was silence except for the bubbling of the boiling water and the old witch’s muttered incantations.

  Overwhelmed by what had just happened, the prince was dumbstruck for some time. Finally, in a voice that was scarcely more than a mumble, he said: “What the hell are you doing? I didn’t ask you to kill her. I didn’t tell you to boil her in your cauldron. Bring her back. Bring my Rapunzel back to me, you demon!”

  This much he said, but he did not have the energy or will to challenge the witch any further. He flung himself on Rapunzel’s empty bed and began to sob and whimper like a child.

  The old witch paid no attention to him but continued to chant, staring with bloodshot eyes at the boiling water as sweat coursed down her face and neck. Then, suddenly, she ceased her incantations, and at that very instant the water stopped boiling. The prince, with tears still streaming down his cheeks, lifted his head to peer questioningly at the cauldron.

  “Arise, Rapunzel!” the witch called out in a clear, exultant voice. And then, rising from the cauldron, there appeared... Rapunzel’s face.

  — VI —

  She was beautiful. Her face fairly shone with radiant beauty.

  So wrote the eldest son, bursting with excitement as he continued the story.

  The eldest s
on’s fountain pen was remarkable if only for its extraordinary girth. It was about the size of a sausage. Gripping this magnificent instrument tightly in his right hand, he threw out his chest and pressed his lips together in a straight, hard line, maintaining an air of great moment as he drew each character with large, bold strokes, but, sad to say, the eldest son was not blessed with the storytelling talent of his brothers and sisters. They, for their part, often made fun of him for that shortcoming, but this was merely proof of their own insolence and moral lassitude. The eldest son possessed impeccable virtues of his own, and they happened to be attributes that were indispensable to one in his position as eldest. He told no lies. He was an honest man. And he was what one might call, for lack of a better word, sentimental. He was simply not capable of writing something to the effect that Rapunzel had emerged from the cauldron with a face as ugly and fearsome as that of the old witch. He just couldn’t do that to poor Rapunzel. Nor, he thought, with something approaching righteous indignation, would it be fair to the prince. It was, therefore, with great fervor that he wrote these lines. “She was beautiful. Her face fairly shone with radiant beauty.”

  After he’d written that, however, he was stuck. The eldest son had always been too serious, and his powers of imagination were as a consequence severely underdeveloped. It would seem that the more irresponsible and crafty one is, the more likely one is to have a talent for storytelling. The eldest son was a man of irreproachable character. He burned with lofty-minded ideals and a had a deep affection for others that was devoid of any calculating self-interest—attributes that left him out of his element when it came to fabricating tales. He was, to put it more bluntly, a lousy storyteller. Whatever he attempted to write, it quickly began to sound like an academic treatise. This time he seemed in danger of slipping into an oratorical mode, but he was, if nothing else, in absolute earnest. “Her face fairly shone with radiant beauty.” After writing this, he solemnly closed his eyes and sat there as if lost in profound meditation. It was some time before he opened his eyes again and continued to write, more slowly this time. The following passage is his contribution. It isn’t much in terms of story, but one can detect between the lines the eldest son’s sincerity and compassion.

  It was not the face of Rapunzel. Or, rather, it was the face of Rapunzel, but not the same downy-cheeked face she’d had before her illness; not the same sweet face that reminded one of a wild rose (if one may be forgiven the indiscretion of appearing to critique a lady’s features). Were we to compare the faintly smiling face of the revived Rapunzel to a flower (impudent as it may be to liken the face of a human being, the crown of creation, to mere flora), perhaps it would have to be a Chinese bellflower. Or perhaps an evening primrose. An autumn flower, in any case. Climbing out of the cauldron, she stepped down from the witch’s altar and smiled sadly. Grace—that’s the word. She was endowed with a refined, dignified grace that she had previously lacked, and the prince instinctively gave a short bow to the genteel, queenly figure that stood before him.

  “This is very strange,” said the old witch. “This isn’t what was supposed to happen. I was expecting a girl with a face like a toad to come crawling out of the cauldron. A power greater than my witchcraft must have interfered. I’m defeated. That does it. I’ve had my fill of witchcraft. I’m going back to the forest to be a normal, boring old woman for the rest of my life. There are things in this world I just don’t understand.” And with that, she kicked the altar over and fed it to the fire in the hearth. It’s said that the exotic contents of the altar burned with a brilliant blue flame for seven days and seven nights. And the witch, true to her word, returned to the forest and quietly passed the remainder of her days as an unexceptional, mild-mannered old hag.

  What this means, of course, is that the power of the prince’s love had won out over the witch’s magic, and, in this writer’s opinion, it was from this point on that the prince and Rapunzel’s real life together as a married couple finally began. It might not be going too far to say that the prince’s attachment to Rapunzel had until now been based on little more than physical attraction. This, perhaps, cannot be helped for one who is still in his youth. But physical attraction inevitably wanes, and a crisis inevitably ensues. The young couple’s love had suffered a setback due primarily to Rapunzel’s pregnancy and the birth of their child, and this, no doubt, was God’s way of testing their love. But the prince’s ingenuous, fervent prayers had been heard, and God, in his benevolence and mercy, saw to it that Rapunzel was resurrected as a woman of refined, lofty spiritual qualities that outshone even her astounding physical beauty. Thus it was that the prince instinctively bowed to his wife upon beholding her.

  There it is, right there. That bow is where their new married life begins. A life based upon mutual respect. Without mutual respect, there can be no true nuptial bond. Rapunzel was no longer a savage child. Nor was she anyone’s plaything. With a smile of deep sorrow, resignation, and mercy on her lips, she stood as serenely composed as a natural-born queen. The prince, too, merely by returning that smile, was imbued with a profound and mellow sense of well-being. A husband and wife must remarry any number of times in their lives. In order to discover each other’s true worth, they must forge ahead together, overcoming crisis after crisis, never separating but renewing their vows again and again. It may be that five years from now, or ten years, the prince and Rapunzel will find themselves in the position of having, once again, to reaffirm their union, but in this writer’s opinion, they are not likely ever to lose the intense trust and respect that they have now acquired for each other, and we are probably justified in offering, at this point, three rousing cheers for the young couple.

  The eldest son had written this with such gravity and force of conviction that now not even he knew what he was trying to say, and he grew a bit disconcerted. He could see he’d done nothing to advance the story, and even wondered if he hadn’t managed to destroy it entirely. He sat clutching his fat fountain pen with a hopelessly glum look on his face until, desperate, he stood up and began taking books from his shelves and leafing through them. Finally he found something suitable. It was from the New Testament, the first letter of Paul to Timothy. He nodded to himself, convinced he’d found just the thing with which to conclude the story of Rapunzel, and, with an air of tremendous solemnity, began copying down the words.

  “I desire then that in every place the men should pray, lifting holy hands without anger or quarreling; also that women should adorn themselves modestly and sensibly in seemly apparel, not with braided hair or gold or pearls or costly attire but by good deeds, as befits women who profess religion. Let a woman learn in silence with all submissiveness. I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over men; she is to keep silent. For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. Yet woman will be saved through bearing children, if she continues in faith and love and holiness, with modesty.”

  That should wrap it up nicely, the eldest son thought, smiling to himself. It would also serve as a good admonition for the younger brothers and sisters. If it hadn’t been for this passage from Paul, his argument would have seemed incoherent, treacly, and conventional to a degree, and might even have invited the scornful laughter of the younger siblings. It had been a close call, and he gave thanks to Paul for helping him escape disaster. The eldest son never forgot to include a moral for the others. The moral, in fact, was his main concern, which was why he always grew overly serious, preventing the story from proceeding smoothly and turning it into a sermon. Being the eldest, he felt he had to be sober-minded at all times, and his sense of responsibility would not allow him to participate in the younger brothers and sisters’ nonsensical jesting.

  At any rate, with this more or less superfluous lecture on morality, the eldest son had somehow managed to bring the story to a close within the appointed time. Today was the fifth day of the new year. The second son had recovered from his cold. It was shortly af
ter noon when the eldest left his study in high spirits and walked about the house informing the others that the story was complete and instructing them to gather in the drawing room. The grandfather joined them, grinning, and in a while the grandmother also suffered herself to be dragged into the room by the youngest son. The mother and Sato busied themselves heating up the brazier, preparing tea, serving confections, laying out sandwiches for lunch, and fetching a bottle of whiskey for the grandfather.