After reading these words, Shimaki was hardly inclined to pay much heed to Yata’s explanation. Shimaki reread the words. Those who “knew” Koizumi, those who associated with Koizumi, tended to think of him as a humorous man, a witty man, a good conversationalist. For a long time Shimaki, too, had held such a view. But from around the fall of the year before, or even before that, he began to suspect that Koizumi’s lightheartedness was a mask. He first became suspicious when he noticed that the humor and irony that filled Koizumi’s conversation and writing were virtually absent from the paintings in which he immersed himself with an intensity that felt like a bad karmic connection. Once he began to have these doubts and began to observe closely what Koizumi said and did, it seemed that Koizumi wore a mask not only when he went out but at home as well. Since then, every time Shimaki was away from Koizumi and thought about him, he worried that Koizumi might be suffocating under his mask—he actually was—just like the old woman of the legend who put on a demon mask to frighten her daughter-in-law and died in agony when the mask stuck to her face.—
Yata, who had grown bored or sleepy while Shimaki was preoccupied with his own thoughts, suddenly announced, “Excuse me, I’m going to sleep,” and lay down on the seat across from Irii, leaving Shimaki free to pursue his speculations.
Shimaki was familiar with Koizumi’s household, having occasionally visited the house when Koizumi was in Osaka. It wasn’t as gloomy as Yata had said. It was, on the contrary, a cheerful household, for Koizumi, who was immersed in his painting, left not only the household affairs but all other practical matters in the hands of his wife, who had a bright, brisk personality. But did entrusting her with too much turn Koizumi the man into a “mama’s boy”—whom she called “Papa”?
When they went out shopping together, his wife paid for their purchases. When they boarded a street car, she bought their tickets. Shimaki guessed, or was convinced, that in the end, it had reached a point where she was telling him, “Papa, please do these paintings.—I’m going to do so-and-so with them.” He had guessed, or was convinced, that the man who possessed such a bold, sharp, unique intellect and talent wore the “mama’s boy” mask only when he was with his wife—after all, his humor was still intact. He also surmised that for the past several years, Koizumi had chosen to shut himself up at home, where he was able to express himself “freely as he wanted and without reserve only on the canvas on his easel,” had left behind outstanding works and then died. When he thought about how Koizumi’s head grew larger as the body supporting it gradually grew thinner until it disappeared like a ghost, leaving nothing but a large head and a hand (as in a cartoon)—Shimaki felt so depressed and sad, he could not even cry.—
It was around ten o’clock when the three men arrived at Koizumi’s house in Sumiyoshi.
The body lay on the Chinese bed that the deceased had loved, in the middle of the bright, warm studio that he had loved, and the French doll, which he had loved, was by the pillow. The small body that he himself had referred to as “Bone Man” while he was alive and dubbed as “forever four feet, nine inches, tall and eighty-seven pounds” had become a hotoke,14 and lay peacefully on the bed. He looked venerable . . . as a precious two-inch buddhist statue. The many paintings that the human being who had been bestowed with a large soul and a small body had done during his lifetime were hanging and or lying side by side and covered every part of the studio. And each and every one, regardless of its size, looked large.
Yet two of those paintings seemed to fascinate the mourners more than the others and to fascinate Shimaki Shin’kichi in particular. One was the large oil painting Landscape with Withered Tree, the last work of the deceased, which was decorated with a black ribbon and hung on the wall over the bed on which the body of the dead man rested. The other was the unfinished sketch for the large oil painting Painting of a Nude, which rested on an easel under Landscape with Withered Tree. It, too, had been decorated with a black ribbon. (An amateur might not have noticed, but the “specialists” present were surprised at those paintings because the deceased had done very few large paintings; so few in fact that they could be counted on the fingers of one hand.)
After silently paying respects to his dead friend, Shimaki Shin’kichi stood still for a very long time comparing the two paintings.
He felt great admiration for Landscape with Withered Tree, yet paid even greater homage to Painting of a Nude.
YOKOMITSU RIICHI
Like Kawabata Yasunari, Yokomitsu Riichi (1898–1947) championed in literature the superiority of art, as opposed to politics, and joined him and others to create a movement for a literature based on what they saw as a recording of the direct experience of the senses. Although Yokomitsu experimented with many forms, including the novel, his early ideals are best articulated in his short stories. This particular work, “Mount Hiei” (Hieizan), published in 1935, is a good example of Yokomitsu’s sense of the fragile nature of spiritual tranquillity and the difficulty of separating oneself from the concerns of the mundane world.
MOUNT HIEI (HIEIZAN)
Translated by Lane Dunlop
Although it was eight years since their marriage, every year Sadao and his wife had dearly wanted to go to Kyoto. Although they’d wanted to go so often, their work conflicted and there were the children to take care of. There were no opportunities for a trip to the Kansai with the whole family. But now there was a letter from Sadao’s brother-in-law saying that he wanted to observe the thirteenth anniversary of their father’s death and by all means to come; so, pushing other things into the background, they had finally gone down to Kyoto in late March. Since this was his wife Chieko’s first trip west of Tokyo, Sadao thought it would be a good idea to show her the place where he had spent his boyhood. He also wanted to show his older boy, Kiyoshi, who this year would be starting his first year in school, the grade school that his father had first attended. Although he often visited the Kyoto–Osaka region on his own, this time Sadao would have to exert himself as a guide.
Sadao and his family put up at his elder sister’s house. The day after their arrival, one of his sister’s girls, Sadao’s two boys, with Sadao and his wife and his sister—six people in all—went to the temple at Otani where their parents’ bones reposed. Although his parents were dead, Sadao had gone to the temple to show them the children for the first time. Even the wind, blowing across the arched stone bridge against the napes of their necks, had a peaceful feeling about it. Carrying his second son, who was not yet two years old, looking up at the red plum blossoms that were already past their prime, Sadao mounted the stone stairs. Kiyoshi and his cousin Toshiko, who was a year older than he was, had already raced up the steps and were out of sight. In the laboriousness of his ascent Sadao felt how much his body had weakened. Thinking on his way up of his many friends who that year had died one after the other, thinking that even if he died his children would come here like this, thinking about what feelings his spirit would peer out at them with from inside the temple—with these and other thoughts that were in no way different from those of ordinary pious men and women who made temple visits—for a while absorbed in reverie, Sadao made his way up after the children. But when he saw his sister and Chieko, how with no apparent emotion at coming before the bones of his parents, they were praising the scenery and pleasantly chatting together, he thought that the most old-fashioned person among them was himself. Despite that, although coming to Kyoto many times by himself, he had not paid a single visit to the graves.
Before Sadao reached the top of the stairs, the children, who had gone on ahead after playing tag in the upper compound, had come back down from there and were playing tag again, with shrieks of merriment, around their mothers’ kimono skirts.
“Quietly. Play more quietly. Your cough’s come back again,” his sister scolded Toshiko.
But the children, cousins who had met for the first time, not even listening to their parents’ voices, straightaway scampered up the stairs again.
All
together now, the family went up the stairs and paid respects at the ossuary. After that, there would be the reading of a sutra in the main hall. But until the preparations for the reading were complete, they were to wait in a room across the garden. It was a gloomy, cold room that felt as if the sun never shone into it. The tatami was as firm and hard as a board, the ceiling high. But the paper sliding doors along all four sides of the room, thick with gold flake and with gorgeous birds and flowers in the Eitoku style, took one’s breath away. As the pictures on two old screens that stood folded up in a comer caught Sadao’s eye, he stared at them, forgetting even his own children. Here and there in a lakeside forest whose leaves had all fallen, white flowers like magnolias floated up to the eye, as in a dream. From the water’s edge beneath, a snowy heron looked as if it were just about to lift off and fly away. Compared with the dreamy flowers and forest, the heron had a strength and plenitude of life that astonished Sadao with a feeling of excellent wisdom. As, thinking that it must be the work of Sotatsu, Sadao fixed his eyes on it, tea was served. The children docilely ate their sugar-sprinkled Japanese crackers. Only Sadao’s two-year-old, crawling around on his belly as if swimming in the scattered fragments of finely broken-up sweetmeats that clung to him from his face to both hands, started energetically kicking at the screens as Sadao studied them.
“Now, now.”
Sadao, moving the screens out of range of the baby’s feet, again gazed at them insatiably. But although there was a fire in the brazier, it was terribly cold in the room. Not only would everyone catch colds at this rate, but Sadao himself was already sneezing continuously. Meanwhile, the preparations for the sutra reading had finally been completed. When they were shown into the main ball, though, not only was it even colder, but there was neither a brazier nor a single sitting cushion. Toshiko and Kiyoshi sat lined up beside Sadao, while Chieko sat by his sister, who held the two-year-old in her arms. When Sadao looked around, all was in order except that the baby, his legs sticking out from the sister’s embrace, still had his shoes on. But since they were brand-new and had not touched any floor, they could, in a sense, be considered a sort of substitute for tabi. As Sadao, not paying them any mind, silently watched the priest make his entrance, his sister noticed the shoes.
“Ara. Kei-chan still has his shoes on. What bad manners. This won’t do at all.”
Smiling, she began to take off Keiji’s shoes.
“It’s all right, it’s all right,” Sadao said
“That’s right. He’s darling, probably just like his grandfather.”
At this from his sister, even Chieko, who’d started to remove the shoes herself, left them as they were. Kiyoshi and Toshiko, not once looking at the altar, were still at their games from when they’d been outside. Their shoulders hunched with the effort, they stifled their giggles.
From the time the reading began, the family waited in silence for the sutra to come to a close. In the shivery draft that blew at him from behind, Sadao kept wishing that the long sutra would end quickly. But when he thought that if this were not his father’s but somebody else’s death anniversary, he probably would not feel that way, he realized that it was because he’d always been indulged by his father. The figure of his father as he had been in life came back to him again. He had liked his father, and after their separation by death, his desire to see him again had only grown with the years. As his father had died of a cerebral hemorrhage in Seoul when Sadao was twenty-five years old, he hadn’t even been with him at his death. Ten years afterward Sadao had flown to Seoul with some friends and older colleagues. Even then, as the plane had neared the sky over Seoul, he’d felt as if his father’s spirit were wandering there in the heavens. He remembered how the tears had welled up.
At last the lengthy sutra came to an end. When the family went out onto the wide veranda, the sunlit city lay beneath them in a single view.
“Well, we’ve done our duty now.”
Behind his sister as she said this, Chieko also, spreading her shawl over her shoulders, said, “I really feel relieved after that.” She started down the steps of the high veranda.
After this, it would be all right to take his family anywhere he felt like.
The next day, leaving the children with his sister, he and Chieko went off to Osaka and Nara. Afterward, he thought, they would make a tour of the famous sites of Kyoto that they hadn’t seen yet and, last, go out to Otsu over Mount Hiei. Otsu was where he had first gone to school. He especially wanted to see how tall the little cherry tree that he had planted at the time of his graduation from sixth grade had grown in the thirty years since then.
The day of their ascent of Mount Hiei, Sadao and Chieko, both rather tired from walking around every day, left the baby at the sister’s house and, taking Kiyoshi with them, went up the mountain in a cable car. Sadao had memories of having climbed Mount Hiei from Otsu twice in his grade school days, but this was his first ascent from the Kyoto side. When the cable car got under way, Chieko, saying that it made her nervous, refused to look up even once. But as they ascended, the roof tiles of the old capital, submerged in the mist, were beautiful, Sadao thought
“Take a look. It’s just like being in an airplane,” Sadao said, taking hold of Kiyoshi’s shoulder.
After they’d gotten off at the end of the line, the road going up to the top split into two. When Sadao, going on ahead, passed through the spacious temple square, the road, entering a forest, gradually began to go downhill.
“That’s odd. I’ve made a mistake.”
There were no passersby of whom he could ask the way, so he retraced his steps. At this blunder of Sadao’s, who when it came to the Kyoto–Osaka area usually had an air of knowing everything, Chieko took him to task. “See? You have nothing to look so important about.”
Finally making their way back along the road, muddy with melted snow, to their starting point, they met up with another group, and Sadao and his family tagged along behind them. Although the mountain road was quite muddy with thaw in places where the sunlight fell on it, in the mountain shadows, each time Sadao trod on the lingering snow, his straw sandals creaked. Chieko, now and then stopping and looking out over the peaks of the mountain range still covered with snow that stretched from Tanba to Settsu, kept exclaiming in admiration, “Oh, it’s beautiful. It’s beautiful.” When they’d walked about half a mile, they had to cross a valley in a second vehicle dangling from a wire rope. This ride felt even more like flying than the first one.
“This is even more like being on an airplane.”
“If it’s this, I feel all right. Somehow I didn’t like the cable car.”
Kiyoshi, held by Chieko, suddenly pointed up ahead and yelled, “Look, look! There’s another one coming.”
From the other side, a car making a return trip came floating toward them. For a moment everyone, mouths hanging open, gazed interestedly at the car. Just at that moment, by the relay pylon the car abruptly slipped down. Holding their breath, the passengers looked at each other. But when the pylon appeared behind the car that had gone on by, they all, as if understanding for the first time, suddenly raised their voices in shouts of laughter. “That’s what it was. That’s what it was.” Already by then, another car was approaching from the far side. It went on by everyone’s surprised face. The occupants of both cars, in their lighthearted feelings of relief, waved hand towels at each other, even merrier than before.
When, getting out of the car, Kiyoshi took his first step on the firm ground, he said to Chieko in a loud voice, “That was scary before. When the car went clunk like that, I thought it was going to fall.”
At this, even the people who, after getting off had gone on a long way ahead, turned around and let out another burst of laughter.
As it was still well over a mile to the main temple at the summit, Sadao suggested they take a sedan chair, but Chieko said she wanted to walk. The sedan-chair bearers, strenuously explaining the problem of the slushy road, kept following the three. But Sadao and
Chieko walked on without listening to them, though indeed there was snow everywhere, so deep that their straw sandals went in over the tops.
“How about it? Shall we ride?” Sadao turned around again.
“No, let’s walk. Unless we walk, even though it’s like this, what have we come for?” Chieko answered.
Although Sadao knew that the road from here on out was level, Kiyoshi was tired, and the coldness of the wet sandals would be a problem later on. He tried again. “Why don’t we ride? I don’t feel right about this.”
“I’m not riding. There’s nothing left to climb anyway, is there?” Chieko, stubbornly going on by herself, tramped through the snow.
“I don’t know. You’re going to have trouble.” Saying this, Sadao tucked up the edges of his kimono.
The road continued endlessly through a dark, dense cedar forest. Chieko and Sadao, keeping Kiyoshi between them, made their way over the snow that looked the hardest. As the bracing, chilly air tingled against their cheeks, nightingales sang amid a constant whir of wingbeats. Sadao, as he walked, suddenly thought that the great teacher Dengyō, by establishing his headquarters in this area close to the capital, had suffered a loss to Kōbō of Mount Koya. It was too close to Kyoto hereabouts, and whether he wished it or not, the influence of the capital would have been pervasive. It must have been a problem. On the other hand, Kōbō had been the better strategist. Sadao was also acquainted with Mount Koya. It seemed to him that when Kōbō chose that region, his power of vision had enabled him to see a thousand years ahead. If Dengyō, instead of relying on his own talent, had possessed the excellent spirit of reliance on nature, he would at least, rather than here, have crossed over Hira and established his main temple at the border of Echizen. If he had done that, besides having both land and water communication with the capital, he would not have had to have the Miidera Temple, the enemy at his back, in his sight.
The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature: From Restoration to Occupation, 1868-1945: vol. 1 (Modern Asian Literature Series) Page 88
