The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature (Modern Asian Literature Series)

by Неизвестный

  “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.

  UCHIDA HYAKKEN

  The writer Uchida Hyakken (1889–1971) first became widely known in the West because he was the subject of Kurosawa Akira’s final film, Mādadayo (1998), which might be roughly translated as Not Yet! But Hyakken has long been a celebrated figure in Japan, publishing poetry, fiction, essays, and diaries during his lengthy career. As a young man, he was a disciple of Natsume Sōseki. After his graduation from Tokyo Imperial University, Hyakken taught German and began to publish his often unsettling and unusual stories. Many are written in the first person, and some critics have regarded them, in the context of his time, as representing a distinct variety of Japanese modernism.

  The two stories included here are the title stories from two of Hyakken’s most significant collections, Realm of the Dead (Meido, 1922) and Triumphant March into Port Arthur (Ryojun nyūjōshiki, 1934).

  REALM OF THE DEAD (MEIDO)

  Translated by Rachel DiNitto

  Atop the steep embankment a dark path stretched silently and coldly into the night. The dingy chophouse below cast its faint glow into the blackness of the mounded earth. I was sitting in one of the worn-out seats, not eating, but longing for company. The table was bare, and the lonely reflection off the surface chilled my face.

  The four or five men next to me conversed in muffled yet lively voices, laughing quietly as they ate. I thought I heard one of them say, “He couldn’t be bothered to come greet you.” But maybe I’d only imagined that. Even though I didn’t know what they were talking about, I couldn’t forget about it. As I sat there thinking, I grew angry. Could he be talking about me? I turned to look, but in the murky dimness I could not tell which man had spoken. “It can’t be helped. It’s my fault,” said another man, his voice loud yet hollow.

  His words faded, and with them, I too disappeared into the gloom. I was brought back by a sudden wave of emotion and started to cry. I felt terribly sad, but couldn’t say why. The source of this sadness lay at the edge of my memory, somewhere in the zone of forgetting, disappearing just as it was about to surface.

  A little later, I ate some pickled carrot greens and a thick yam gruel. The group of men next to me talked on, laughing quietly. The man with the loud voice was older, a little over fifty. His image was projected onto my eye like a puppet in a shadow play, and I could see him gesture as he spoke to the others obscured in the darkness. Although his outline was visible, I couldn’t tell what was going on. I couldn’t make out his words, and his voice wasn’t as clear as it had been just moments before.

  Figures passed on the embankment at regular intervals. The air filled with a paralyzing loneliness. The men stopped talking and huddled together, clinging to one another. All alone, I curled up and remained completely still. When the figures were gone, the men began talking again, but I still couldn’t hear or see them with any clarity. Even so, I envied their quiet, easy closeness.

  A bee with bent wings made a quiet rustling sound as it climbed the paper screen in front of me, unable to fly. Its body stood out sharply against the blurry background. The men noticed the bee too. The older man pointed it out, his voice unusually clear.

  “Look at that hornet! Must be this big,” he said holding up his thumb. The thumb, too, came into focus. The feeling in my gut told me I’d seen this thumb before, and as I stared at it my eyes filled with tears.

  “I once caught a hornet in a glass pipe and sealed the ends with paper. The buzzing of the bee moving around inside made the paper vibrate like an organ.” As his voice became clearer and clearer to me, I was overwhelmed with longing. Something weighed heavily on my heart as I listened.

  “I set the pipe on my desk and my son begged me to give it to him. Kind of a stubborn kid, you see, and once he got started, there was no telling him otherwise. Losing my temper, I grabbed the pipe and marched out to the veranda. The sun was shining on the rocks in the garden.”

  I felt I could see that boat-shaped rock in the garden, shining in the sun. The image was so clear to me.

  “The bee got away when the glass smashed on the rocks. What a goddamn shame.”

  “Father!” I cried out. But my voice didn’t reach him. The men quietly got up and left.

  “Yes! Of course. It’s him,” I thought as I followed them. I wasn’t far behind, but they were long gone. As I searched, my father’s voice sounded in my ears. “Shouldn’t we be heading out again soon?” he’d said when they got up to leave.

  On this moonless and starless night, it was only the top of the embankment that shone with a dim, gray light. At some point the men had climbed the hill, and I could still see their figures trailing off in the faint glow. I tried to make out my father, but the shapes of the men blurred together into an undistinguishable mass.

  I cast my teary eyes to the ground. In the light of the lantern, my shadow loomed large against the black embankment. Watching it, I cried for a long time. With the embankment at my back, I returned on the dark road through the fields.

  TRIUMPHANT MARCH INTO PORT ARTHUR

  (RYOJUN NYŪJŌSHIKI)

  Translated by Rachel DiNitto

  I went to a film festival of old moving pictures at Hosei University on Sunday, May 10, the day of the Imperial Silver Wedding Anniversary Celebration.

  The windows in the lecture hall were covered with black cloth, throwing the room into darkness. Thin shafts of afternoon light snuck in with an eerie blue glow.

  Random, confusing landscapes and faces flashed before me. The shootouts from the Ministry of War advanced with an exciting and rele
ntless pace. Thick smoke enveloped the picture, obscuring clarity. I thought I could see the screen growing brighter through the dissipating smoke, but the images disappeared and the lecture hall suddenly lit up.

  American comedies and newsreels alternately lit up the screen, and next up was the surrender of Port Arthur. An officer from the Ministry of War got up to introduce the feature. The film was originally shot by a German military observer and had only recently come into the hands of the Japanese Ministry. There were scenes not only of the famous meeting at the naval base of General Nogi and General Stessel, but also of the bombing of the fort at Niryuzan. A cinematic treasure, the officer explained, then he disappeared into blackness as the room went dark. But before his khaki-uniformed image faded from my eye, another was projected in its place—a soldier leading a parade of men headed for the front. Troops marched through Yokohama’s Isezakicho behind their bearded platoon leader. The dress braids of his uniform stretched like ribs across his chest, and he swaggered with his sword held high. The soldiers wore solemn expressions. That scene alone was enough to remind me of a twenty-year old military tune I’d long since forgotten.

  I couldn’t understand why I was so moved by the bluish images of the mountains surrounding Port Arthur, but it was like seeing my own memories up on the screen. What a terribly somber mountain it was. A dim glow emanated from behind the hills, but the sky blanketing the peaks was devoid of light. I knew that the port lay under the darkest spot in the sky.

  Soldiers hauled a cannon up the mountainside. The outline of the group blurred as they panted up the dark path. An older enlisted man, standing to the side, waved his hands back and forth, calling out orders. He howled like a beast.

  I turned to the person next to me. “Poor bastards,” I said.

  “Yeah,” someone responded.

  Heads hanging, eyes fixed on the dark landscape, they advanced slowly against the weight of the heavy rope. The headless soldiers moved as an undifferentiated mass. Then one unexpectedly lifted his face. The sky was as black as the road. Cutting through the darkness like a dog with its head hung low, I saw a towering peak jut up before us as I too climbed the mountain.

  “What mountain is that?” I asked.

  “Beats me,” answered a nearby student.

  Cannons shot into the mountainside. In a hollow under the cliff, a group of five or six soldiers furiously fired and reloaded artillery, the machinery rolling back and forth with the force of the recoil. White smoke rose and soon disappeared from the mouth of the cannon. The sound, too, was sucked into the belly of the dark mountain, the echo dying there as well. I felt uneasy not knowing where the shells were landing. Yet there was no choice but to fire. Not firing would be more terrifying. Facing each other across the dark mountain, both sides let loose a deafening barrage of firepower day and night. The fighting changed the shape of the mountain itself. Those soldiers in the hollow acted out of fear. When smoke cleared from the cannon, I grew nervous. If only they’d fire again. Who cares where it landed!

  An ominous cloud of smoke rose from a distant ridge. Tens, maybe hundreds of sparkling objects formed lines in the smoke. This was soon followed by another dark cloud. My eyes welled with tears when I learned this was the bombing of the mountain fort of Niruyzan. I cried for the men on both sides.

  Next came the long-awaited encounter at the naval base. Amidst the bleak scenery I could make out the faint image of a cottage with stone walls. From off in the distance indistinguishable figures on horseback grew in size as they approached, but the blurry image never came into focus. It just faded away.

  A formation of Russian soldiers on horseback rode unsteadily past a row of storehouses. The ceremony at the base was over. Nogi’s and Stessel’s expressionless faces passed quickly before my eyes like a bank of fog.

  The title of the film, The Long-Fought 200-Day Battle, faded from the screen. Troops with neither packs nor guns marched by wearing long overcoats with sleeves hanging down over their hands. Houses lined the roadside, but it was hard to get any perspective on them—how far away they were, whether they had windows or roofs. There was something eerie about these lifeless men. Weren’t they in fact the war dead risen from their graves on the shadowy mountain for one final march? No one averted his gaze. They marched with their eyes on the men in front of them.

  “The Triumphant March into Port Arthur!” boomed the voice of the officer on the stage.

  The audience, crammed into that dark room, broke out in loud applause.

  Tears streamed down my face. The row of soldiers marched on and on. My eyes clouded with tears, obscuring the people in front of me. I lost my bearings and was set adrift in an unfamiliar place.

  “Quit crying,” said a man walking next to me.

  Someone behind us was weeping.

  The crowd kept clapping. My cheeks wet from crying, I fell into formation and was led out into the quiet of the city streets, out into nowhere.

  POETRY IN THE INTERNATIONAL STYLE

  After World War I and into the 1930s, the influence of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century European poetry helped change contemporary Japanese poetry. Translations of the poetry of such French masters as Verlaine, Baudelaire, and Rimbaud into evocative Japanese-language versions by such gifted writers as Horiguchi Daigaku, Ueda Bin, and Nagai Kafū helped inspire these experiments. The following is a small selection of some of the most accomplished work of this period.

  TAKAMURA KŌTARŌ

  Takamura Kōtarō (1883–1956), samples of whose work can be found in the previous chapter, set the tone for this new, European-inspired poetry with “Cathedral in the Thrashing Rain” (Ame ni utaruru katedoraru, 1921), prompted by his sojourn in Paris from 1908 to 1909.

  CATHEDRAL IN THE THRASHING RAIN

  (AME NI UTARURU KATEDORARU)

  O another deluge of wind and rain.

  Collar turned up, getting drenched in this splashing rain,

  and looking up at you—it’s me,

  me who never fails to come here once a day.

  It’s that Japanese.

  This morning

  about daybreak the storm suddenly went violent, terrible,

  and now is blowing through Paris from one end to the other.

  I have yet to know the directions of this land.

  I don’t even know which way this storm is facing, raging over the Ile-de-France.

  Only because even today I wanted to stand here

  and look up at you, Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris,

  I came, getting drenched,

  only because I wanted to touch you,

  only because I wanted to kiss your skin, the stone, unknown to anyone.

  O another deluge of wind and rain.

  Though it’s already time for morning coffee,

  a little while ago I looked from the Pont Neuf,

  the boats on the Seine were still tied up to the banks, like puppies.

  The leaves of the gentle plane trees shining in their autumn colors on the banks

  are like flocks of buntings chased by hawks,

  glittering, scattering, flying about.

  The chestnut trees behind you,

  each time their heads, spreading branches, get mussed up,

  starling-color leaves dance up into the sky.

  By the splashes of rain blowing down, they are then

  dashed like arrows on the cobblestones and burst.

  All the square is like a pattern,

  filled with flowing silver water, and isles of golden-brown burned brown leaves.

  Then there’s the noise of the downpour resounding in my pores.

  It’s the noise of something roaring, grinding.

  As soon as human beings hushed up

  all the other things in Paris began at once to shout in chorus.

  With golden plane tree leaves falling all over my coat,

  I’m standing in it.

  Storms are like this in my country, Japan, too.

  Only, we don
’t see you soaring.