by David Peace
A little while later, in a room downstairs, as the distant boom of the first cannonade signalled the departure of the imperial hearse from the palace, as the temple bells began tolling one hundred and eight times, Shizuko’s sister heard a series of strange sounds coming from the second-floor rooms and she called for a maid. The maid ran upstairs to check on her master and mistress. She found the door to their living quarters securely locked, but from within she could hear an incomprehensible, pained voice, and through a crack in the door she could see her mistress lying on the floor.
The elderly sister immediately telephoned the local police station, only to find the line was busy. Nor was she able to reach the neighbourhood doctor, and so she sent the maids to search for help on the street outside. By chance, they found a passing police officer from Nagano who had been seconded to the capital for the funeral, Assistant Inspector Sakamoto.
Sakamoto followed the maids back inside the house. He went upstairs to the second floor and there, with his shoulders, forced open the doors.
In the eight-mat Japanese-style room farthest from the doors, before the framed portraits of the Emperor Meiji, the General’s parents, and their two sons who had died in the Russo-Japanese War, the General lay on his side in a pool of blood, his wife on her knees, her forehead touching the floor.
As the imperial carriage bearing the corpse of the Emperor, drawn through the night by oxen, ground past the house, in their shuttered rooms on Yūrei Zaka, Maresuke and Shizuko had turned themselves to ghost.
*
Ryūnosuke bought the newspapers, all of the newspapers, and Ryūnosuke read account after account of the deaths of General Nogi and his wife:
RENOWNED NOGI SUICIDED
GENERAL AND COUNTESS REPORTED COMMITTED OLD-FASHIONED HARAKIRI
FOLLOWED MASTER TO GRAVE JUST BEFORE IMPERIAL FUNERAL PROCESSION STARTED
WHY GENERAL NOGI DIED
LAST TESTAMENT OF GREAT HERO AN EPIC OF DEEPEST PATHOS
TOGO WEEPS, EMPIRE MOURNS, AND THE WORLD LAMENTS LOSS OF THIS SPOTLESS SOUL
The following is the testament left by the late General Count Nogi, the document being written by him on the night of the 12th, the eve of the Imperial Funeral:
‘1. I kill myself to follow Him who is gone. I am aware of the gravity of this crime; the offence it involves is not light. But to recall, I was responsible for the loss of the regimental colours in the campaign of Meiji 10, and since then I have searched in vain for a proper opportunity to die. To this day, I have been treated with unmerited kindness, receiving abundant Imperial favours and gracious treatment. Gradually I have become old and weak; my time has disappeared and I can no longer serve my lord. Feeling extremely distressed by his death, I have resolved to end my life.
‘2. Since the fall of the two Sukes in battle (abbreviation of the names of the General’s two sons, who met glorious death at the siege of Port Arthur), my respected seniors and friends have repeatedly urged that I adopt a son. Since ancient times, however, the difficulties of adopted heirs have been discussed, and there are many examples, in addition to the case of my brother. If I still had a child of my own, the honour of having received a noble title would force me to name him my successor, but to avoid leaving behind a possible disgrace I think it is best not to defy heaven’s orders by adopting a son. The tombs of my ancestors should be cared for by relatives, as long as they are related by blood. I request that the Shinsaka residence be donated either to the Ward or City.
‘3. I have written about the distribution of my property in a separate paper. My wife, Shizuko, will manage all matters I have not mentioned.
‘4. As to the distribution of my personal effects, I have left a word of request to Colonel Tsukada that he may use his discretion in giving my watch, range-finder, fieldglass, saddleries, swords, and other articles of soldier’s use, to my adjutants in my memory. The Colonel did a great deal for me during the late two wars. Shizuko is already informed of this distribution, so please discuss it with her. I leave my other possessions open to negotiation.
‘5. The Imperial gifts bearing the Imperial crests should be collected and presented to the Gakushūin Peers School, a word of request being left in this connection to Mr Matsui and Mr Igaya to deal with this matter.
‘6. Present the Gakushūin those of my books which it can use and give the rest to the Library of Chōfu. Those which are useless may be disposed of in any fashion.
‘7. The writings of my father, grandfather, and great-grandfather should be considered part of the history of the Nogi family. They should be scrupulously collected, excluding any truly unimportant works, and preserved for eternity either in the care of the house of Marquis Sasaki or in the Sasaki Shrine.
‘8. I bequeath the articles exhibited at the Yūshūkan (the war museum at Kudan) to that institution. This, I believe, is the best way to preserve them in commemoration of the house of Nogi.
‘9. As Shizuko gradually enters old age and encounters episodes of illness, the house of Ishibayashi, in addition to being an inconvenient place, will be very depressing. Therefore, this house should be given over to my brother Shūsaku, and Shizuko has agreed that she should live at my residence in Nakano. I leave the house and land in Nakano entirely to Shizuko.
‘10. I have left a word of request to Baron Ishiguro as to the treatment of my body, which may be donated to a medical school. Beneath my gravestone, it will be sufficient (and Shizuko consents to this) to place my hair, nails and teeth, including false teeth. I request that my gold watch with the Imperial gift inscription should go to Masayuki Tamaki, my nephew. I forbid him to carry this watch when not wearing uniform.
‘As for other matters not mentioned above, they are to be taken care of by Shizuko, and you are requested to consult her. During the lifetime of Shizuko, the name of the house of Count Nogi shall be honoured. But when her life is finished, the goal of extinction of the Nogi line shall be accomplished.’
The will is dated the First Year of Taishō, September 12, in the evening, signed ‘Maresuke’ and addressed to Yūji Sadamoto, Countess Nogi’s brother, Odate Shūsaku, the General’s brother, Masayuki Tamaki, the General’s nephew, and Shizuko. It appears evident from the will that the General previously confided his intention of committing suicide to the Countess and that she was to live on.
Day after day, Ryūnosuke kept buying the newspapers, all of the newspapers, and day after day Ryūnosuke kept reading account after account of the deaths of General Nogi and his wife:
HOW AND WHY THE GREAT HERO WISHED
TO DIE WITH EMPEROR
DEATH PLANNED FOR YEARS
WONDERFUL FORTITUDE OF THE COUNTESS
Baron Ishiguro, Surgeon-General and a close relative of the late General Count Nogi, gave an interview to the press representatives Monday afternoon. For the benefit of the public, Baron Ishiguro gave a detailed account of General Nogi and his wife.
‘General Nogi requested me in his will,’ said the Baron, ‘to offer his remains for surgical dissection or for some other use for the benefit of medicine. His body, however, is of but little medical value, as he died by cutting the artery in the neck and not from any other disease. But to carry out the special will of the General, I have offered his body to Dr Katayama and military surgeons Drs Tsuruda and Haga for medical examination.
‘General and Countess Nogi were found in the living room, which was locked within. And the questions are how General Nogi died and which died first, he or his wife. The customary way to commit seppuku, as performed by the bushi, is to cut the abdomen just deep enough to bleed, and then give a fatal thrust through the throat, because the cutting of the abdomen is not sufficient to put an end to life. General Nogi performed seppuku after this customary fashion. It appears that, having cut the abdomen, he readjusted his clothes, and then thrust, piercing it through to the left posterior, the sword in the right side of the neck part. This forceful thrust must have put an end to his life immediately as it completely cut the arteries.
‘Countess Nogi was dressed in mourning, with a dull coloured gown and a hakama of light orange shade. The weapon she used was a dagger about a foot long. She inflicted four wounds upon herself. One wound was in her hand. First she appears to have thrust the dagger into the middle of her breast, and then into her right side between the ribs; this thrust was about an inch and a half deep. Perhaps still fearing that the wound would not be fatal, she must have given herself the third and last thrust, which went through the heart. By the time she gave herself this last thrust, she had been considerably weakened by the first two wounds. Not having the strength to drive the weapon into her breast, she fell prostrate upon it, thus pushing it almost up to the hilt.
‘Personally, I have seen not a few cases of seppuku, and know that in performing the act, if one fails to kill himself by the first thrust, he is not able to put sufficient strength into the second thrust to put an end to his life. However, Countess Nogi, woman as she was, gave herself three powerful thrusts, and died in a most noble and decorous way.’
General Count and Countess Nogi, having locked the door from within, sat side by side facing the portrait of the late Emperor, and killed themselves in the brave style described above. On a desk in the room were found a heap of letters and other papers, including General Nogi’s will. Among those papers, two poems by the General and one by the Countess were also found. General Nogi composed the following two poems just before he killed himself: ‘God-like has he now ascended, our great lord, and his august traces, from afar, do we humbly revere’ and ‘It is I who go, following the path of the great lord who has departed this transient world.’
Countess Nogi left the following poetical composition: ‘I hear there is no Sun to return, as He departed, So sad to face the august procession today.’
Day after day, Ryūnosuke kept reading account after account of the deaths of General Nogi and his wife, kept reading the accounts and kept staring at the photographs, day after day Ryūnosuke kept staring at the photographs of General Nogi and his wife, and day after day Ryūnosuke kept wondering, staring at the photographs and reading the accounts; the initially somewhat contradictory and contested newspaper accounts, accounts filled with the words ‘suicide’, ‘harakiri’, ‘seppuku’ and then, finally, ‘junshi’.
Ryūnosuke had never read the word ‘junshi’ in a newspaper before the death of General Nogi; he had only read of it in novels or history books. Ryūnosuke had learnt that the samurai practice of following one’s lord in death had been outlawed by the Tokugawa Shōgunate in the third year of the Kanbun era, in 1663. It scarcely seemed believable to Ryūnosuke that one of the most famous figures of Meiji, one of the very architects of Japanese modernity, would perform such an ancient act upon the death of the Emperor.
But the newspapers were all agreed that General Nogi had committed junshi, following his lord into death, and then Shizuko had taken her own life, a true samurai wife following her husband into death.
Editorials and opinions, though, did differ as to the meaning and relevance of their deaths. Some judged the incident an international embarrassment for an aspiring modern nation, others that it was an important moral lesson and reminder of traditional values for that same aspiring, modern nation. Mori Ōgai and Natsume Sōseki, the two contemporary Japanese writers Ryūnosuke respected above all others, would be irrevocably affected by the passing of the Emperor, the ending of this era, and by the fact and the manner of the deaths of General Nogi and his wife Shizuko. Ōgai would turn to writing historical fiction, works such as Okitsu Yagoemon, Abe Ichizoku and Sakai Jiken, works fixated on self-sacrifice, and Sōseki would write Kokoro, a work haunted by deaths by suicide.
Ryūnosuke would keep reading all of these accounts, these editorials, opinions and books, and Ryūnosuke would keep staring down at the photographs, the two separate photographs of General Nogi and his wife, the photographs taken on the morning of their deaths, and Ryūnosuke would keep wondering: wondering about the General’s modern Western-style military uniform and his wife’s many-layered jūnihitoe kimono of sombre colours, his body shrunken and lost in his uniform, his face half in humiliation and shadow, her body rigid and noble in her robes, her face full-bold and stark; wondering about the Japanese rooms in their Western mansion; about drinking wine and not sake; the sakaki branches arranged on the table, the framed photographs arranged on the table; his obsession with photographs, with reproduction, his desire to disappear, for extinction; junshi and bunmei kaika, this act of violent tradition in this age of civilised enlightenment, nineteen hundred and twelve, the first year of Taishō.
Photographs of General Nogi, portraits of a Shōgun, were already being displayed in shop windows, adorning the walls of school halls, military academies, factories and offices. Remembered and revered, there was no avoiding them, no escaping him. But Ryūnosuke kept coming back to those photographs, those two separate photographs of General Nogi and his wife, those photographs taken on the morning of their deaths. Ryūnosuke kept staring down at the photographs, and Ryūnosuke kept wondering, would keep staring down at the photographs, and would keep wondering:
Why did he want to have this photograph taken?
And Ryūnosuke refused to mourn.
A pale green moth came and sat upon his shoulder. From outside the window, Ryūnosuke could smell fresh-cut hay, he could hear the oak trees rustling quietly in the evening twilight. In the light of a yellow autumn moon, Ryūnosuke looked up at the clock, at all three clocks.
Ryūnosuke didn’t know what time it was.
Jack the Ripper’s Bedroom
I found your story The Nose very interesting.
Your style is well polished, admirably fitting.
The Nose alone may not attract many readers.
Even if it does, they may let it pass quietly.
But without worrying about it, you must go on.
Go on and produce twenty or thirty stories like this one.
You will soon be incomparable in literary circles.
But ignore the crowd –
the best and only way of keeping your integrity.
Natsume Sōseki, letter to Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, February, 1916
‘There is a part of me wishes they would wipe the place off the map.’
‘Was it really such a terrible time, Sensei,’ asked Ryūnosuke.
Natsume Sōseki closed his eyes, closed his eyes for a long time, and when he opened them, opened them at last, they were red-ringed and damp. ‘I often wonder if I did not die back then, out there, and all of this …’ – he waved his hand across the desk, towards the shelves, at the glass doors, the garden outside – ‘if all of this is not the dream of a dead man …’
He paused, eyes closed again, then said, ‘I know very well the things people say about me, said about my time in London; that I shut myself in my room, that I cried in the dark, that I suffered a nervous breakdown, how I had lost my mind and gone insane.’
He paused again, opened his eyes again, sighed and said, ‘Not that it much matters now, now I have so little time …’
Ryūnosuke and Kume protested, ‘No!’
Sōseki raised his hand, smiled and shook his head, begged their silence. ‘And your ears, if you will and have the time. For now it no longer much matters, I will tell you what happened. Not to bother you with my personal trials, rather to throw a light on that place, those people, their world and our world. At least, a kind of light …’
*
‘It was the first month of the first year of their new century and the fourth month of my new life
in their country, and already I was in my third set of lodgings, a boarding house in an area called Camberwell, a wretched slum on the south side of the River Thames.
‘I’ve already written of the situation I found myself in: the poverty of the funding I had been given, the economies I was forced to practise, the pitiful place I was renting, bereft of company and society, starved of conversation and stimulation.’ He paused, he smiled. ‘Or maybe it was just the weather, maybe just the food, but I hated England and desired only a quick return to Japan as soon as I possibly could …
‘But, whatever the reason, it was the worst winter of my life,’ he said, then paused again, then smiled again. ‘Worse even than this one.
‘For then as now, I had problems sleeping, and I was aware my insomnia was only exacerbating my distemper. More than anything, I was tired of myself. So late one afternoon, in that January of 1901, having spent another interminable day reading in my dismal room, I reluctantly decided to venture outside; it was my hope that a long walk would speed me to sleep upon returning to my room. My reluctance, though, was two-fold: I knew almost nothing of the geography of the city, hardly knowing one direction from another, and yet again its buildings and streets were smothered under a bedspread of fog. However, I knew that the Tower of London stood somewhere to the north of my lodgings, on the other side of the river. And so this landmark was the ambition with which I left my room that afternoon.
‘Of course, first I had to run the gauntlet of my jailers, my landlady and her younger sister. No matter how soft my tread upon the stair, the door to the gloomy dining room was always open, the sound of their chanting filling the hallway: “Let us beg and pray Him day by day to reveal Himself to our souls, to quicken our senses, to give us sight and hearing, taste and touch of the world to come …”
‘That afternoon, I performed my best impression of a silent cat on the tips of my paws down the stairs, paw by paw, down the hallway, paw by paw, towards the front door, but to no avail, no avail –
