What reason was there for continuing to doubt this amazing fact? Senjumaru hadn’t actually mentioned them, but there must be kalavinka birds and parrots and peacocks filling the air with their cries. There would be pavilions made of mother-of-pearl and agate, stairways of gold and silver and garnet. A wondrous world of fantasy abruptly rose before Rurikōmaru’s eyes, as in a fairy tale. Why should it be an obstacle to enlightenment, to spend a while in such a pleasant world? Why should the master have such contempt for it and try to keep them all away from it? He wanted to know the reason he had to overcome this “temptation” if he was to try to overcome it.
He spread the letter out in the dim lamplight and read it over and over again. That whole night he spent in thought, without a moment’s sleep. He struggled to find some means of denying the facts in the letter, taxing his knowledge and powers of understanding to their limits. He tried listening to the voice of conscience and seeking guidance from the Buddha to a degree that anyone would find commendable. In the end, there was nothing to keep him from taking the final step, apart from his attachment to his accustomed life in the monastery and his blind faith in the precepts of his master. But those two things had an unexpectedly strong hold on his mind. If he were to fight off the desire to leave the mountain, he would have to strengthen those two feelings to the utmost.
“So, am I willing to believe Senjumaru and deny the teachings of the Buddha, the precepts of my master? To go so far as to call the Buddha and my master liars? Do I honestly think that will be the end of it?” he muttered aloud. The fleeting world outside must surely be a pleasant place, as Senjumaru said. But would it do to cast aside in one morning the firm faith he had built up over fourteen years for the sake of such diversions? Had he not recently made a vow to endure the harshest, most painful ascetic practice? Even if he could have worldly pleasures in the present life, wouldn’t he have to endure pains ten or twenty times as great if, incurring the Buddha’s displeasure, he fell into the fires of Hell in the next life?
The word “breeding” suddenly came to mind. He and Senjumaru had had different characters since earliest childhood. He knew the Buddha was protecting him. It was that, surely, that had made him think of retribution in the next life just now. So long as there was a next life, how could he fail to fear the prospect of punishment? It was because there was hope of a life to come that the master had forbidden them the pleasures of this life. Senjumaru, it seemed, did not believe; but he would—he would believe in the next life and in perdition. That itself would demonstrate the superiority of his character. When the master praised him, wasn’t he referring precisely to that?
These thoughts descended on Rurikōmaru like a revelation from Heaven. At first it was like lightning flashing, then as if the waves of the sea were gradually spreading, washing over his soul, filling his body to overflowing. He felt refreshed, like someone moved by the clear sounds of music; it seemed to him the sort of heightened religious emotion that only an ascetic who has entered the realm of samadhi could experience. Rurikōmaru found himself folding his hands in prayer to the unseen Buddha and saying in his heart again and again: “Forgive me, please, for being foolish enough to give in to the temptations of this life even for a little while, and being willing to throw away the rewards of the world to come. I promise never again to allow those wicked thoughts to arise the way I did tonight, so please forgive me.”
No, no matter what, he would not be misled by anyone. If Senjumaru wanted to indulge in worldly pleasures, let him do so on his own. And then let him fall headfirst into the Avici Hell in the next life and suffer there for endless aeons. And Rurikōmaru, meanwhile, would travel to the Western Pure Land and gaze down from on high on Senjumaru crying in torment. His faith was now unshakable, regardless of what anyone said. He had stopped himself in the nick of time; but now he was safe, now there was nothing to worry about.
As Rurikōmaru arrived at this resolution, the long autumn night grew gradually lighter, and the clear sound of the bell calling them to early matins was heard. With a mind many times more tense than usual, he respectfully presented himself in the chamber of his master, who seemed only just to have awakened.
Now the man sent by Senjumaru had been waiting beside the stone steps leading to the Monju Pavilion from before dawn. But though Rurikōmaru did meet him there, the boy’s reply was an unexpected one: “For reasons of my own, I’ve decided not to leave the holy mountain, despite the attractions of life elsewhere. I’d rather have the blessing of the Buddha than the love of women.” He drew the letter from the night before out of the folds of his kimono, and went on: “Tell your master that I hope to gain peace in the next life, even if I have to suffer in this one. . . . And this letter will disturb my peace of mind, so please take it back with you.”
The man blinked his eyes in amazement and seemed about to say something, when Rurikōmaru hurriedly threw the letter onto the ground and set off toward the monastery without so much as a backward look.
And so winter came on. “You’ll be fifteen next year, and when I think of what happened to Senjumaru, it seems best for you to take your full vows as soon as possible, in the spring,” said the master.
However, Rurikōmaru’s mind had been disturbed by the letter from his old friend, and he wasn’t able to maintain his serenity for very long—he had merely repressed his feelings in a burst of religious fervor. Gradually he, too, began to share the obsessions that had so troubled Senjumaru. The time came when like his friend, he too would see the forms of women in his dreams and feel bewitched by the images of the bodhisattvas in the chapels and pagodas. He even began to wish he hadn’t returned Senjumaru’s letter that day. There were days when he became aware of himself waiting for the messenger from Fukakusa to come again. He was afraid to let the master see his face.
Nonetheless, he still had faith in the divine protection of the Buddha, and he was not about to act as rashly as Senjumaru had. So one day he presented himself reverently before the master and confessed: “Master, have pity on me—forgive me my folly, I can’t laugh at Senjumaru’s action any more. Teach me the way to put out the flames of passion and make my fantasies of women disappear. I will endure even the harshest rites to be free of them.”
“It took courage for you to confess this to me,” said the Master. “Your intentions are admirable. You’re a fine young acolyte, I assure you. Whenever those evil thoughts begin to arise, you must seek the Buddha’s compassion through wholehearted prayer. For the next twenty-one days, you are to purify your body with cold water each day without fail and seclude yourself in the Lotus Hall. Your reward will then surely come, and these shameful visions will cease.” Such were the master’s instructions.
It was the night of the twenty-first day, the end of Rurikōmaru’s special devotions. Fatigued from those long days of ascetic practice, he was leaning against a pillar in the Lotus Hall, dozing, when the figure of a noble-looking old man appeared in a dream. He seemed to be calling Rurikōmaru’s name repeatedly. “I have good news for you,” he told him. “In a former life, you were an official at the court of a certain Indian king. At that time, there was a beautiful woman in the capital who was very much in love with you. However, since you were already a person with his mind set firmly on the Way and not given to worldly lusts, she was unable to lead you astray. It was due to your merit in resisting that woman’s charms that you had the good fortune in this life of being brought up under the guidance of your master and receiving his invaluable instruction. The woman who loved you, though, has been unable to forget you and is now living on this mountain in a different form. As retribution for her sin in having tried to win you over, she was reborn as a bird; but having spent her life in this holy place where she hears the words of the sutras chanted every morning and evening, she will gain rebirth next time in the Western Pure Land. In the end, seated together with you on one of the lotuses that bloom in Paradise, she will appear as a bodhisattva, bathed in the radiance of the buddhas of all ten directions.
“The woman is now lying alone, badly wounded and near death on the summit of Mount Shakagatake. Knowing you are troubled by dreams of women, I urge you to go to her at once. Then she can enter Amida Buddha’s Pure Land ahead of you and from there help you in your quest for enlightenment. Your present distractions should vanish without a trace. . . . It was out of admiration for your strong faith that I came down from the Tushita Heaven, as a messenger of Fugen Bodhisattva. So that your faith may not falter, I give you this crystal rosary. You must never doubt my words!”
When Rurikōmaru returned to full consciousness, the old man was nowhere to be seen; but there was indeed a crystal rosary hid upon his lap, where it shone as brightly as beads of dew at dawn.
Trying to climb to the top of Shakagatake in a piercingly cold wind early in the morning of a day close to the end of December must have been, to the young acolyte, a task harder than the twenty-one days of purification with cold water. Yet Rurikōmaru felt neither pain nor hindrance as he climbed the steep mountain path, so eager was he to see in her present form the woman with whom he seemed to have such deep links, extending over past, present, and future lives. Even the snow, white and fluffy as cotton, that began to fall as he climbed served as fuel to make the flames of his single-minded fervor burn all the brighter. On he went, stumbling occasionally, through a landscape where everything—sky and earth, valleys and woodlands—was gradually enfolded in a sheet of silver.
At last it seemed that he had reached the summit. The snow fell in gentle eddies and covered the ground, and in its midst there was something whiter yet, something that seemed like the very spirit of the snow itself—a bird of unknown type with a painful-looking wound beneath one wing, flopping about in the snow, crying out in pain as drops of blood fell here and there like scattered scarlet petals. Catching sight of this, Rurikōmaru ran forward and held her closely in his arms, like a mother bird sheltering her chick beneath her wings.
Then, from the depths of the snowstorm, which seemed to smother all sounds, he raised his voice and chanted loudly, and still more loudly, the saving name of Amida. The crystal beads that he was holding in his hand he placed about her neck.
He wondered if he might not die of cold before she did of her wound. Pressing his face down against her, he covered her body with his own; and onto his hair, arranged in the charming and quite elaborate style of the temple acolyte, there fell softly, steadily, something white—bird’s feathers, perhaps, or powdery snow.
UNO KŌJI
Uno Kōji (1891–1961) often wrote about his own personal experiences, only slightly disguised, with a certain humor and spaciousness. His work is more appealing than the writings of several of the more serious novelists of this period, who, like the early “naturalists,” continued to use the “I novel” mode. Uno’s story “Landscape with Withered Tree” (Koboku no aru fūkei), written in 1933, is partly a portrait of the celebrated Western-style painter from Osaka, Koide Narashige (1887–1931). The title of the story is taken from that of one of Koide’s best-known paintings, which is illustrated here.
LANDSCAPE WITH WITHERED TREE (KOBOKU NO ARU FŪKEI)
Translated by Elaine Gerbert
There had been an unusually heavy snowfall, and when Shimaki Shin’kichi awoke on that morning of Empire Founding Day,1 judging from the amount that had accumulated in Osaka, he decided that snow would remain on the ground in Nara for at least five days. So he immediately got out of bed, got his painting gear together, and, on the way out, handed his wife a postcard with the admonition “Don’t tell them where I’ve gone.” The postcard was addressed to the Naniwa Western Painting Research Institute and on it he had written: “Will be away for the next four or five days.”
The Naniwa Western Painting Research Institute had come into existence during a conversation that Shimaki had with his closest friend Koizumi about six years ago. And since they had felt shorthanded, they had asked their mutual friends Yata Yasaku and Irii Ichizō, who also lived in the Osaka area, to join them as lecturers. From its beginning to the present, the Naniwa Western Painting Research Institute was the only “new school” Western painting research institute in Osaka.2 They had given it this name because the year before its founding the four painters had been elected to the New School Association, an association of “new school” painters radically opposed to the painters sponsored by the Ministry of Education—the “old school.”3
Koide Narashige, Landscape with Withered Tree
At Nara Shimaki avoided the lodgings that the members of the Naniwa Western Painting Research Institute usually used when they went to Nara and went straight to the inn where he stayed when he was alone, got his sketching equipment together, and set out at once for the Kasuga woods he knew so well. As he had expected, there was a lot of snow, twice as deep as in Osaka, and it was cold—bone-chilling cold.
The maid at the inn had warned him, “Today is the day of the Omizu-tori at the Nigatsudō Hall; it will be cold outside.” And as he walked on the snowy road, he kept repeating to himself, “O-mizu-tori, O-mizu-tori,”4 stressing each and every syllable as if it were a mantra to ward off the cold. Even so, his eyes were busily searching the countryside for a scene to paint, and his mind was absorbed with all kinds of thoughts. It was both Shimaki’s strength and his weakness to be possessed of both the hungry eye of the landscape painter and the searching mind of the literatus.
After he left the town and had walked for a while, he came to a sudden stop. He had discovered (or did he simply remember it?) an arresting landscape. It was the place where the mansion of the Kasuga Shrine5 had stood. The remains of an earthen wall lay on one side of the road, and here and there and in between were trees—the remains of an abandoned garden. It was Takabatake, the Takabatake he had painted years ago, now covered with a thick layer of snow. And it was spellbinding, so spellbinding that he began to wonder whether indeed it was the same Takabatake he remembered.
He spent about ten minutes trying to decide how he would paint this landscape. At one point he stood in the middle of the road, then took five steps forward, then backward, then moved to the left and then again to the right. But once he had made up his mind, it took him less than five minutes to set up his gear and to begin his preliminary sketching. He was a hardworking painter who spent a third of the year on painting trips, so his preliminary sketch was done in a craftsman’s-like manner in almost no time. If I were to describe it, I would have to say it looked as if his hand manipulated the brush so as to pick up, in a flash, piece by piece, what his eyes kept garnering from the landscape in front of him. And while he was thus engaged, he kept thinking of Koizumi Keizō.
This, of course, was not the first time he thought of Koizumi; in fact, he had been thinking of Koizumi these last few years, more than anyone else.
Shimaki had first met Koizumi some twenty-two or twenty-three years ago, when after graduating from middle school, he went to Tokyo and enrolled in the White Horse Society Western Painting Research Institute6 for a year to prepare himself for the entrance examination to the School of Fine Arts.7 At first, they did not have much of a chance to talk to each other, but Shimaki knew that Koizumi was, as he was, from Osaka. Whenever he saw him, Koizumi was in a corner of the studio sketching. He never talked to anyone, but his work was outstanding. He already was a student in the Japanese painting section of the School of Fine Arts but had come to practice sketching in order to be admitted to the Western painting section: In short, he was, in every respect, different from the other students. Once Shimaki got to know him better, Koizumi told him. . . .
It would take too long to render it in Koizumi’s Osaka dialect, but abbreviated and in standard Japanese it would go something like this:
For quite some time I’ve been prejudiced; that is, I’ve had negative feelings toward my fellow students from Osaka; I am an Osakan myself, born in the heart of Osaka, in fact, and when I go home for summer vacation, I am really happy when the train going west leaves the Omi Tunnel—the world see
ms so much brighter then. But I can’t stand listening to their dialect, it hurts my ears. So I make it a point not to speak to the students from Osaka. I find this behavior of mine distasteful. But is it not what most Japanese do when in Western countries—avoid other Japanese?”
When Koizumi told him all this, Shimaki expressed similar feelings, and from that time onward he felt quite close to Koizumi. But for reasons already mentioned, it took quite a while for them to reach the point that they could talk freely to each other. In the beginning, right after Shimaki was enrolled in the Western painting section of the Fine Arts School—Koizumi already was there—and for a long time thereafter, their contacts were so limited one could have counted them on the fingers of one hand.
One may get a better idea of their relationship at that time from the following:
Shimaki had invited Koizumi to come to his lodgings. Koizumi just stood at the threshold to Shimaki’s room, looked inside, then left. Shimaki wondered why he had not come in. Was his four-and-a-half-mat room too small? Was it because although he was an art student, he had no paintings in his room? Or was Koizumi simply misanthropic? They left school the same year. Koizumi went home to Osaka, while Shimaki remained in Tokyo for two more years. At one point, after he had returned to his native Osaka, Shimaki met a friend who suggested that he visit Koizumi. Recalling the Koizumi he had known at school, Shimaki remarked that visiting such a taciturn, eccentric person wouldn’t be much fun. Oh, said the friend, he’s exactly the opposite; he’s far from closemouthed. At the barber’s, for instance, he keeps people laughing for hours with his nonsense.
The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature: From Restoration to Occupation, 1868-1945: vol. 1 (Modern Asian Literature Series) Page 85
