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

by J. Thomas Rimer

  Suidōbashi, Iidamachi—more and more passengers got on. When they got to Ushigome, he was on the verge of getting pushed out of the carriage. He clung to the brass pole, never taking his eyes off the girl’s figure, lost to all else. At Ichigaya another half-dozen or so passengers got on, and he pushed and shoved back in his turn but still appeared to be right on the point of getting pushed from the carriage. The electric wires could be heard humming in the distance, and somehow everything seemed to get noisy. The whistle blew, the carriage moved forward a few yards, and then as it suddenly gathered speed, a few nearby passengers somehow lest their balance and started to fall. The hand of the man ogling the beautiful girl came away from the brass pole, and his large frame turned a perfect somersault as it tumbled rolling onto the track, just like some large ball. “Watch out!” yelled the conductor, but at that moment a city-bound train came along, shaking the ground, and in a mere instant the big black mass was dragged slitheringly for some ten yards or more, and a crimson trail of blood stained one of the rails.

  The emergency whistle rent the air with a piercing blast.

  TOKUDA SHŪSEI

  At the beginning of his career, Tokuda Shūseu (1871–1943) was a disciple of Ozaki Kōyō, but then he went on to compose more subtle novels in the mode adopted by the “naturalists.” Shūsei’s writings remain highly admired for his renderings of feminine psychology. A story composed late in his career, “The Town’s Dance Hall” (Machi no odoriba), published in 1933, is a good example of his final mature and objective style.

  THE TOWN’S DANCE HALL (MACHI NO ODORIBA)

  Translated by Richard Torrance

  It was summer, so I wanted to wear light, cool clothing. Japanese-style clothing seemed appropriate, but I dislike formal, crested kimonos, and as a rule, I attend funerals and other formal occasions in Western-style clothing. Crested kimonos somehow remind me of lances, bows and arrows, and feudal ancestors. Japanese clothing’s simply too much trouble; it hangs from the body so sloppily that even one’s mood becomes loose.

  But when it came to putting together a matching suit of Western-style clothing, I couldn’t manage that, either. I had an old-fashioned morning coat, but the trousers that went with it were too tight and uncomfortable. What I finally decided on was a cashmere suit coat with a new pair of winter trousers I’d ordered made in the spring. For a change of clothes, I stuffed the morning coat and the kimono in my old suitcase. When the telegram arrived that my older sister in the provinces was in critical condition, I realized I wanted to speak with her one last time. Over the years, I’d lost almost all contact with my hometown. I had little reason to visit except on occasions like this one.

  On arriving at the train station of my provincial hometown, I learned that during the night, while I was passing through the vicinity of Nagano or Komoro, my sister had died. She was seventy years old. I was probably thinking of her when she breathed her last.

  It was when my lover and children were seeing me off at Ueno Station that I first noticed them. The tall gentleman appeared to be Eurasian. The short, fat man had his back to me, so I couldn’t tell whether or not he was Japanese. But I’m certain the tall gentleman wasn’t Caucasian. The short one kept up a ceaseless conversation in fluent English with the tall one. After they got off the train at Karuizawa, the passenger car suddenly fell quiet, and memories of my sister when she was young came back to me: her skin as she carried me on her back, her image as a bride when her beauty was the talk of the town. Then there were the changes that she’d had to face and overcome in life: the difficulties and crises she dealt with over the next thirty years. . . . She maintained the house by herself, for her husband was often away working as a supplier to mines in distant provinces. She also ran a small tea shop and raised her many children all on her own. After her husband retired, she lived with him for ten years until he died, a year ago. I thought about the suffering she endured living with him, suffering that now seemed to have disappeared as quickly as the wind disperses clouds. My concern about her future after her husband’s death had formed a bond between my sister and me. Yes, I’m certain I was thinking of my sister when she passed away.

  It was a quiet, formal sort of day. I was wearing a yukata of a light cotton material. I hadn’t seen my elder brother for quite a while, and we greeted each other over my sister’s body, which was stretched out horizontally in front of the family’s Buddhist altar. My brother was a few years older than my sister. Among those in religious orders in the room, I was acquainted with the young disciple of the Buddhist nun with whom my sister had been on cordial terms, the famous priest and archaeologist Ōtani Kōzui, and a young priest still at university. As I listened to the sutra chanted by the priest, who also was a talented storyteller, an evening breeze rustled through the room. One after another, an endless flow of guests filed in and out of the room to pay their final respects. Fruit and flowers were heaped high on the veranda.

  My legs began to ache from sitting formally on my knees. I also started to feel hungry. But because most of my family were firm believers in Buddhism, I couldn’t ask to be served fish or meat for dinner. I mentioned my preference to my nephew.

  “We’ll be able to manage something, I think,” my nephew said, but he couldn’t hide his discomfort.

  “I haven’t eaten sweetfish yet this year. Who serves it around here?” I asked while I was upstairs putting on my coat to go out.

  “There are several places,” my nephew replied. He suggested the name of a restaurant.

  I slipped on sandals, borrowed a walking stick, and fled the incense-filled house crowded with “true believers.” Whether it was my other older sister or the daughter of the deceased, none of my many blood relations seemed to have found much happiness in life. The thought of seeing them and listening to the details of their present circumstances depressed me beyond measure.

  Most of my youth had been spent in this part of Kanazawa (my home district encompasses a fairly large area), and I saw myself once again as a boy moving in the scenery of the town as I walked through it. I arrived at a lively, commercial neighborhood. People like myself ought to experience considerable nostalgia for their hometown as they approach old age. Perhaps it was because my life at present was too complicated to yearn for the past or because my youth in this town had been so insubstantial and unremarkable that I didn’t feel much different than I did on passing through any other provincial city.

  I left the main street and entered a dim, quiet side street. I immediately saw the restaurant’s name lit by electric lights. I proceeded to the entrance, crossing on the freshly washed stepping-stones opposite the stone lantern in the garden. I was led to a room that faced a small, elegant tea garden. A young, modest looking woman dressed much like someone’s wife brought steaming hot hand towels and an ashtray scented with incense.

  “You have a bath, don’t you?” I asked.

  “Yes, we do. I’ll have to prepare it, though,” she replied.

  The easygoing mood that permeated my hometown—almost as if one had entered the languid tropical latitudes—probably doesn’t suit my personality, for I frequently become irritated when I return to the place of my birth. This time was no exception. It was the same years ago when at eighteen or nineteen, I couldn’t bear to sit still in class, and driven by some irrational desire, I ran off to Tokyo.

  “I’ve come to eat sweetfish. You have sweetfish, don’t you?”

  “Yes sir, we do.”

  I walked along the stepping-stones in the garden, ducked through a side door, and went along a passage as dim as a basement to reach the bath. In this neighborhood, in houses like these, there invariably was a large, earthen-floored, warehouse-like structure that was cool in the summer. I finished my bath and returned to the room. The maid came in.

  “How shall we prepare the sweetfish?”

  “I forgot to tell you. Broil them in miso.”

  The girl left but returned almost immediately. She said they’d already filleted a sweetfish
, and it was too large to broil in miso.

  I felt annoyed. I didn’t want anything but sweetfish broiled in miso.

  “No smaller ones? How big is it, anyway?”

  “Just a moment, I’ll ask.”

  A little while later, the girl reappeared at the door to the room.

  “We don’t have any sweetfish . . .”

  “Not even large ones?”

  “No.”

  “That’s why I asked if you had any when I first came in!”

  Two dishes were placed in front of me.

  The restaurant’s mistress, a plump, amiable-looking person, appeared.

  “Did someone tell him we had sweetfish?” she asked the girl.

  “Yes, she did,” I said emphatically.

  “I came here specifically to order sweetfish. I don’t want anything else. I refuse to eat what she brought. I’ll have to leave if you won’t allow me to order for myself.”

  I felt self-conscious as I departed, seen off at the gate by the plump woman and the girl. It was odd that such a splendid establishment shouldn’t have sweetfish in season. It also seemed strange that the girl’s replies were more and more contradictory.

  I went to the main street, walked a hundred or so yards, and ducked into the antique shop owned by my niece’s in-laws. The niece was the daughter of my dead sister. Although it was a retail shop for the general public, wooden shutters were left up over the windows. Everything was in perfect order, but not a single antique was on display. I asked my niece’s mother-in-law, now more than eighty, if I might use the telephone. I had my nephew called to the phone.

  “They probably didn’t have fresh fish,” he explained. “A place like that won’t prepare sweetfish unless it’s still alive.”

  My nephew recommended another restaurant nearby. At last, I would be able to satisfy my physical hunger. Wouldn’t you know? That restaurant didn’t have live sweetfish, either.

  The next morning, about the time of the ceremony for placing the body in the coffin, I was overcome by the mixture of lack of sleep, boredom, chanted sutras, and the sweltering heat of the day, a day hotter than I could have imagined. From my widowed younger sister, numerous nieces and nephews, and cousins, I learned what had become of my relatives during the years since I’d last seen them. Were it not for occasions like this, I wouldn’t have a chance to hear each of their stories. Among them was a distant relative who was young enough to have an infant suckling at her breast. There also was a niece older than myself. All of us—my children and I included—belonged, in the end, to the “tribe” that originated with my father. Perhaps we weren’t equally content with our lot in life, but all of us had somehow merged with the masses and survived. We will continue to survive. My pride at being a sophisticated artist had been obliterated long ago, and now I found a sense of peace in the notion that I was no more than an ordinary individual working amid the masses. I was tired of life, and were it not for the stimulation provided by the city, I’d have written myself out long, long ago.

  I was resting upstairs in front of an open window. A light breeze rustled among the shadows of the leaves of a grapevine that crawled up the adobe wall to the roof of the neighboring warehouse. I knew I wouldn’t sleep. I went downstairs again. Everyone was gathered before the Buddhist altar.

  “They’re bathing the body.”

  I sat at the rear of the group. My sister-in-law and older sister, the two daughters of my dead younger sister, my nieces, and other women were wiping their tears with their handkerchiefs. “Namu Amida, Namu Amida . . .”

  The chant was repeated in succession by one person after another, in voices choked with tears.

  After the body was washed, the head was shaved to symbolize the deceased’s entrance into a state of salvation. My brother had ordered her hair cut short just before her condition became critical.

  “She looks just like her father.”

  “Yes, she does.”

  Two of my nieces, whispering to each other, seemed to remember my father’s face, though he’d died forty years earlier and not left behind even a single photograph of himself. I recalled the face in death of my oldest brother, who had died ten years earlier—the shape of his head resembled my sister’s. It struck me that my older half brother and half sister shared physical features inherited from their mother that were different from those inherited from our mother by me and my sisters. Undoubtedly, their mother was more beautiful than ours. Still, my father’s genes probably gave me and my sisters traits that we shared with our older half siblings.

  Dressed in a uniform half-coat, an employee of the funeral director was shaving the front of the head with a razor; then he abruptly let it flop over to begin work on the left temple. Next, he proceeded to the right side and then the back—it was a difficult task requiring a great deal of patience. He shaved it quite carefully, as if plucking down off a chicken. The mouth was stuffed with cotton, and light purplish spots speckled her lower eyelids, a side effect, apparently, of the medication she had been taking. The head and neck of the body resembled nothing so much as a earthen doll or a whitewashed wooden statue of Buddha, and whenever the man let the head slip, the chin shakily sank to the chest. The image of my sister when I was little as she carried me on her back . . . my sister when I was a boy and she’d play cards with us . . . the times in my adolescence when I was lost in reading plays and novels and my sister came to invite me to the puppet theater. . . . These memories floated to the surface of my mind. Then suddenly, for some unknown reason, I faintly remembered her scent as a young woman. The underarms of my sister, whose skin was as white as that of a maiden from the north, smelled slightly sweet.

  From this association came occasional images of her husband, who’d died the previous winter. He looked like a Eurasian. They said he had been a medical student, but when I knew him, he was working as a merchant. He was a progressive young man. He taught me the basics of English grammar and spelling. Shortly after he married my sister, and when I went to live with them, he showed me a biology book. He pointed out a passage that was considered inappropriate for elementary school students like myself. It concerned a boy who weakened day by day for no apparent reason. Of course, the book was a translation, and the story was set in the West. The conclusion of the tale revealed that the maid had snuck into the boy’s bed every night. I felt a sudden pain clutch my tiny heart when he read me that part of the story. In those days, my only playmates were young girls in the neighborhood. I couldn’t help but feel that I was committing the same sin as the boy in the book. I was a weak, sickly child who’d turn deathly pale and had to be held in my mother’s arms. I often was frightened by the idea of death.

  “That’s enough,” my brother declared brusquely, directing my attention back to my sister’s dry, hard head, now fully shaved. Only a slight dark shadow remained at the hollow of the nape of her neck.

  As the body was placed into the coffin, the mood of sorrow in the room grew even heavier. People began to sob.

  “Namu Amida, Namu Amida . . .”

  The mourners dispersed to the next room or upstairs to drink tea, smoke, and talk about other things.

  As the shadows began to lengthen, the coffin was carried out and loaded into a hearse with a miniature golden temple mounted on the top. My brother, myself, and the others climbed into automobiles parked behind the hearse.

  We soon were on the outskirts of the town. The scenery changed to hills, forests, streams, and paths among the fields.

  I was shocked at the blaring music that started playing when the cars drove through the entrance to the grounds of the crematory. It was incomprehensible. Far too cheerful to be classical Japanese court music and too boring to be Western concert music. In any case, I was certain I heard the strains of a classical Japanese flute and other ancient instruments. I looked for the source of the music. It was a phonograph set up in the hearse. The record bore the seal of the Imperial Household.

  After three hours of being incinerated with he
ating oil, my sister’s body was reduced to a pile of bones and ash, which were pushed out of the furnace.

  That evening, my brother treated me and my sister-in-law from Osaka to dinner.

  I’d bathed several times that day but did so once more to wash off the sweat before I went to relax in front of my dinner tray. The dinner was a fairly formal affair. I was given the seat of honor in front of a huge, twelve-foot-long alcove. My brother had adopted a male heir, and the young man sat across from me and raised his cup in a toast.

  In my youth, I’d sat frequently in this room. I had fond memories of the trees, stones, and grasses in the shade of the stepping-stones in the garden. The moss grew thicker and more lush with each passing year. My brother’s adopted son, a military man, had transferred to a local regiment and was able to live here with his wife and three children. Control of all of the family’s resources and the responsibilities of the head of the household had been passed to him by my brother and his wife. I still considered him a friend, but it felt strange to treat him with the same intimacy as before.