The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature: From Restoration to Occupation, 1868-1945: vol. 1 (Modern Asian Literature Series)

by J. Thomas Rimer

  Living with total strangers, attended by the two nurses whom she had known long ago, the fact that she had once before been discharged from here as cured—all this led to a profound change in Ogen’s mood during the following morning. Since she knew her way around, she could slip away from the newcomers, go past the rooms where mentally ill people needing special attention were confined alone, and walk to the window that looked out on the spacious garden. A woman with finely dressed hair who looked for all the world like someone’s wife approached Ogen with the air of welcoming a new patient and favored her with a disconcertingly polite bow before passing on.

  There was something calming about the still, cold rays of light that shone in on the hallway along which Ogen was walking. At the end of the hallway was a window much more firmly barred even than that at the rest home.

  “I shouldn’t be a patient in a place like this. Why was I put in here?”

  “I have no idea.”

  The two people inside Ogen were starting another conversation here beside the window.

  “What would Kumakichi say?”

  “Kumakichi would also say that this is what he wanted and tell me to go on in.”

  “What about the Oyamas’ adopted heir?”

  “Him? He would say that it would be awkward for him if I were to leave here.”

  “And Naotsugu?”

  “The same with him.”

  “How about Otama?”

  “She’s the one who tricked me into coming here.”

  “They’ve all gotten together, decided that I am crazy, and put me in here. There’s nothing so sad as the scheming of the blind.”

  Ogen sighed. The words of the rickshaw man at her arrival here were still in her ears: “Today is your lucky day, madam!” How cold they sounded! Why did I have to come to a place like this? The more she thought, the more Ogen began to doubt her own sanity. . . .

  She could not stop thinking about how her father had spent his final days in the dark cell the family had built for him. Whenever she thought about her father’s death, Ogen resolved to keep a firm grip on herself. No matter what, she would not end up the way he did. She tried not to think about him any more than she could help, and, even if she did, not to think about the way he died. She had been working at this for a long time without telling anyone, but unfortunately these memories with all their painful associations kept coming back. One day there by the corridor window Ogen found herself in her father’s presence.

  There was a deep, green bamboo grove. There was a rice storehouse facing away from the bamboo grove. There was a woodshed. Part of the woodshed had been enclosed with a wooden grill to make a cell. That was where the person who had been Ogen’s father and teacher had spent his final days. Ogen had come over from the Oyama household to visit her father in his madness. Confined to his cell as he was, her father still said that he wanted to write. He pulled paper and writing brush over to him; even then he had not forgotten how to write. He had kept beckoning and saying, “Come over here, Ogen! Come on over!” She went nearer, thinking that he had wanted to show her what he had written, and he had clutched at her arm with such a fearful strength that she felt as though it had nearly been torn off. His beard grown long and his face pale, he would sometimes burst into wild laughter, bending over backward and clutching at his stomach and then suddenly grasp at the bars of his dark cell and weep without restraint.

  “Father . . . I understand exactly how you feel, Father. I am your daughter. I have never forgotten anything you taught me, even in my earliest days. Now I’m in this kind of place, too.”

  Ogen pleaded with her father just as if he were actually there. Her grief for her mad father made everything she saw unbearably frightening. She seemed on the verge of being dragged off in spite of herself to where she never, ever, wanted to go. This was her cell. The awareness was unbearable.

  She recalled the old verse that her father had recited in agony next to the barred window. She recited it herself there in the corridor:

  The crickets

  Cry out; on the chill

  Straw mat

  I spread out my robe

  To sleep all alone.16

  Her daughter Oshin was no longer at her side. Unseen by anyone, Ogen slumped down there by the window and fell into violent weeping.

  Three years had passed when the hospital reported to Naotsugu’s house that Ogen’s condition was grave. None of her relatives reached her side before she died.

  Her adopted heir at the Oyama household, who had secretly been sending money for her support through Naotsugu ever since she went to the rest home, came up to Tokyo at the news, but he also was too late. Ogen died alone in a room of the Negishi hospital.

  None of her relatives had yet arrived. The elderly nurse who had looked after her for the past three years came to her at nine o’clock that night when she was on the verge of dying and stayed to wipe her face after it sank into the sleep of death. She crossed Ogen’s arms on her breast. They looked like the hands of one who had borne her full share of woman’s sadness during her life.

  Her adopted heir came at ten o’clock with Naotsugu’s daughter and her children. The elderly nurse went on putting the room in order as she spoke.

  “The day before Mrs. Oyama died, she said that she wanted to have her head shaved and take Buddhist orders. I said that she would have to consult with her family before doing that. That was one thing I couldn’t let her do on my own authority. She did do a lot of sewing while she was here.”

  Ogen’s first brother had been far away for many years, but he happened to be in Tokyo at the time, He and Otama and her two children had rushed over, but it was already past eleven when they joined the other relatives.

  “It’s late. You children go on back home, and we’ll hold a wake for her. This is a hospital, after all,” Shōta said, speaking as the eldest. His daughter put water and white dumplings by Ogen’s pillow. Then she and the children made their final farewells and left.

  Her relatives sat around the brazier in the bare room beside Ogen’s body throughout the March night. Like one on a journey, Ogen had left few belongings behind. Her adopted heir gathered them up, saying, “How could she have endured being here?”

  Shōta reminisced. “The one time I visited Sister, she seemed quite tranquil. I was thinking that if she stayed like this, we should be able to get her out of the hospital. It’s too bad.”

  “Whatever has happened to Uncle Kumakichi?” asked Otama’s husband. “Notice got to him too late,” Shōta said as he got up and went over to the one window in the room. Everything was still outside; not a sound reached the window.17

  “It will soon be daybreak,” said Otama’s husband as he joined Shōta at the window. The two of them opened the shutters. The skies were still dark over Negishi.18

  TAYAMA KATAI

  Tayama Katai (1871–1930) was perhaps the most celebrated of the novelists referred to as “naturalists.” He often chose as his subject matter an objective rendering of the sexual longings and proclivities of his male protagonists, material that until now seldom was used in Japanese fiction with any pretension to artistic merit. “The Girl Watcher” (Shōjobyō, 1907) is a vivid example of the methods he employed, which, not surprisingly, often shocked his readers.

  THE GIRL WATCHER (SHŌJOBYŌ)

  Translated by Kenneth G. Henshall

  1

  As the 7:20 A.M. Yamanote Line train passes through Yoyogi Station on its way to the city, shaking the embankment, a man walks on his way between the paddies in nearby Sendagaya. He goes the same way every morning, whatever the weather. Rainy days find him plowing his way through the mud in his old waterproof boots, while on windy days he has his hat clamped on the back of his head, warding off the dust. The people living along the way spot him coming, and one woman even wakes up her husband, a military official prone to sleep late on drowsy spring mornings, by telling him he’ll be late for the office as “that man” has just gone past.

  He
had first appeared on the scene some two months earlier. It was a time of suburban development, and new properties would appear on the top of a hill or at the edge of a wood, with the huge mansions of major generals and company directors scattered picturesquely among the great rows of charcoal oaks that were spared from the development of the area. Rumor had it that beyond these oaks, half a dozen or so houses had been built to let and that the man had probably moved into one of these.

  Somebody passing by is not usually anything to start talking about, but in the lonely countryside, people are something of a rarity, and this particular man’s figure was, moreover, decidedly peculiar: he walked in a strange duck-like fashion, and there was just something odd about him which caught the attention of the people of leisure living along the way.

  He was about thirty-seven, with rounded shoulders, a pug nose, protruding teeth, a swarthy complexion, and tangled sideburns that covered half his face. He was quite fearsome to look at, enough to upset young ladies even in broad daylight. But in contrast, he had something kind and gentle about his eyes, which always seemed as if entranced by something. His legs set determinedly wide apart, he would scurry along at an amazing pace, even putting to shame a certain soldier who went out training every morning.

  He mostly wore Western-style clothes—an old brown suit of threadbare Scotch wool, and an Inverness cape faded to a dull purplish yellow. In his right hand he carried a walking stick with an easy-grip dog’s-head handle, while he kept his left hand in his pocket, with an ill-becoming maroon cloth bundle clasped under his arm.

  “He’s off now, then, I see,” mumbled the gardener’s wife to herself as he passed by their trellis fence on the corner. The gardener’s place was also a newly built detached, with the spindly pines, oaks, box trees, eight-finger trees, and so on that were for sale planted untidily around outside. Beyond it, along the highway, lay the broken skyline of Sendagaya’s new residential area, with the rays of the morning sun glittering on the upstairs windows. To the left lay the numerous factories of Tsunohazu, with the smoke of the morning’s work, already under way, coiling low and thick from the narrow flues. In the otherwise clear sky, he could make out the tops of telegraph poles above the woods.

  He walked on his way.

  Crossing the paddies he entered a narrow pebbly lane with neat rows of brushwood fences, oak hedges, and hawthorn hedges, punctuated by glass doors, cross-barred gates, and gas lamps. Some gardens still had ropes fastened to the trees to prevent frost damage. A few blocks farther on, he came to Sendagaya Road, where he invariably encountered the soldier racing along on his exercises. He continued past a foreigner’s large Western-style house, the huge gate of a doctor’s new house, and an old thatched cottage that sold cheap confectionery. Now he could see the raised track of Yoyogi Station, and from here he could usually hear the train whistle from Shinjuku, the next station, which would prompt him to forget any semblance of dignity and race ahead at full tilt, bulky as he was.

  Today as usual he arrived at the spot and listened but could not hear the train coming and so continued at his same brisk pace. However, turning the corner at the T-junction with the track, he caught sight ahead of him of an attractive woman with a fashionable hairstyle and a smart purple coat. A green ribbon, satin sandal-straps, crisp white socks. The sight made his heart race. He couldn’t put it into words but just seemed to feel, in a happy, flustered sort of way, that it would be a pity to overtake her. He already knew the woman by sight, and they had traveled in the same train carriage at least five or six times. In fact, one wintry evening he had deliberately made a detour to see where she lived—a large house to the west of the Sendagaya paddies, surrounded by oaks. He knew she was the eldest daughter of the family. She had beautiful eyebrows, a pale complexion, and plump cheeks, and when she laughed, her eyes were expressive beyond words.

  He enjoyed thinking about her. “She’s in her early twenties, so she can’t be going to school—I know that anyway, since I don’t see her every day. But I wonder where she does go, then?” He was terribly excited by the beautiful figure ahead of him. “I wonder if she’s engaged yet?” This thought, however, caused him a twinge of sadness. “If only I were a bit younger . . .” But then his thoughts changed again. “How absurd! I’m not only too old, I have a wife and children as well!” He was left feeling somehow sad, somehow happy.

  As it happened, he did overtake her, at the steps up to Yoyogi Station. The rustling of her clothes and the fragrance of her perfume made his heart miss a beat, but he refrained from turning around and raced up the steps with giant strides, almost at a gallop. The stationmaster clipped his red return-ticket and gave it back to him. Like all the station officials, he was now quite accustomed to the man’s bustling, fast-talking manner.

  As he was about to enter the wooden waiting room, the man’s sharp eyes caught sight of the familiar figure of a girl student standing there. She was a sweet-looking girl, with plumpish features and rosy cheeks. She wore a bright, striped top and a maroon hakama. She carried a slender parasol in her right hand and a bundle wrapped in purple cloth in her left. He noticed straight away that her ribbon today was white, different from her usual one.

  “Surely she can’t have forgotten me, not this girl?” He looked toward her, but she was facing away, with a blank expression. “She’s probably just shy,” he thought, and this somehow seemed to endear her to him. He pretended not to look but in fact did so frequently and intently. And then, looking away, his gaze now fixed on the woman he had just overtaken on the steps.

  He hardly seemed aware of the train’s arrival.

  2

  There was a reason for his thinking that the girl might not have forgotten him, for a rather interesting incident had taken place. She had always got on the train at Yoyogi at the same time as he did, to go as far as Ushigome, so he had known her by sight for some time. But even so, he’d never gone so far as to speak to her. He would just sit opposite her, thinking about what a plump girl she was, how fleshy her cheeks were, how big her breasts were, and what a wonderful girl she was. As the days passed, he’d come to notice all sorts of things about her, such as how beautiful her smile was, how she had a little mole just below her ear, how white her slender arms were as she clung to the straps in the crowded carriage, how she talked saucy girl-talk with some school friends who joined her at Shinanomachi. It got to the point where he wanted to find out about her home and family.

  But for all that, he didn’t seem prepared to go quite as far as to follow her to find these things out. Then one day, as he was coming out onto the paddies of Sendagaya in his same old way along his same old route, with his same old hat and his same old Inverness cape and his same old suit and his same old shoes, he suddenly saw, walking toward him that very same plumpish girl. She was wearing a white top fastened loosely over her jacket, was smoothing her hair with her hand, and was chatting about something with a girlfriend. Whenever we meet a familiar face in an unfamiliar setting, we always seem to feel a sort of friendship, and this is what he, too, seemed to feel. He suddenly slowed as if intending to say hello. The girl also glanced toward him, as if she were thinking, “Ah, it’s that man from the train.” However, she passed by without a word. He spoke out instinctively but to himself: “No school today, then? Examleave perhaps, or spring holidays?” He hurried on a dozen or so yards without thinking, then suddenly spotted—quietly fallen there on the black, soft, beautiful spring soil and looking just like a silver pine needle on a gilded screen—an aluminum hairpin.

  It was hers!

  He turned round quickly and called out to her.

  “I say! Hey! I say!”

  She’d only gone a few dozen paces, so she undoubtedly heard him. But not thinking that it was she herself that he was calling, she carried on walking and chatting with her friend, not even looking around. The morning sun shone beautifully on the blade of a farmworker’s plow out in the fields.

  “I say! Hey! I say!”

  He called out again a
s if reciting a verse.

  This time the girl did turn round. She saw him looking toward her, in a strange pose with his hands up in the air. With a sudden realization she clasped her hand to her hair—the pin was gone. “What? Heavens! I’ve dropped my hairpin!” she exclaimed and dashed off toward him. He waited, holding the pin, hands still held high. She panted as she ran.

  “Thank you very much . . .”

  She thanked him, blushing with embarrassment. A grin spread over his big, square-cut face, revealing his obvious delight as he returned the pin to her beautiful white hand.

  “Thank you very much indeed.”

  She thanked him again politely, then turned on her heels. He was deliriously happy. It was simply marvelous. “From now on she’ll remember me! From now on, when we meet in the train, she’ll think of me as the man who picked up her pin for her!” His thoughts rambled. “If I were a little younger and if she were just a little prettier, then there’d have been an interesting tale to tell about this episode. . . .” One thought gave rise to another. He had idly wasted away his youth. His wife, whom he’d once loved, had passed her prime. He had children. His life was bleak. He was behind the times with no hope for the future. Such thoughts were tangled and twisted, almost without end. Then suddenly into the midst of this reverie floated the sullen face of the editor in chief of the magazine house where he worked. At which, hastily abandoning his daydreams, he hurried on along the lane.

  3

  We might well wonder where this man comes from. Across the paddies of Sendagaya, beyond the rows of charcoal oaks, through the area lined with the gates of the splendid new mansions, past a meadow with mooing cows, along a little path by the rows of great oaks, and, beyond that, down in the shadow of a gently sloping hill, you find a small detached house, and it is from here that he emerges every morning. Its appearance—low roof, three rooms, surrounded by a low hawthorn hedge—tells you that it is a crudely built, rented house. The garden and parlor can be fully seen from the road without having to go in through the little gate. And in the garden, down at the foot of five or six dwarf bamboos, several small daphnes are in bloom, with half a dozen or so potted plants laid out untidily nearby. A woman in her midtwenties, clearly his wife, is busily at work, with her sleeves tied up out of the way. A boy of about four and a girl of about six have come out onto the sunny veranda of the room next to the parlor and are happily playing and chattering away.