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

by Неизвестный

  When he was asked over the telephone by the Foreign Missionary Association about the complaints it had received indicating he had assembled a number of his congregation and allowed a Communist to make a speech before them, Father Gounod replied, “That Communist recently came to Mass.” Although he really could not tell whether or not the labor union theorist and the others were Communists, he thought he might just as well go along with the label which his temporizing believers had seen fit to apply to them. With only this explanation the Association was satisfied that it understood Father Gounod’s intentions.

  Lamenting the fact that the relationship between the Foreign Missionary Association and the ordinary Catholic was as loose as has been indicated, the members of the Church Committee decided to counsel Father Gounod once again. Needless to say, Mr. Nozoe and Mrs. Sakurai took the lead. However, Father Gounod replied harshly that the congregation must obey its priest, a successor of Peter.

  “But Father, our former priest never combined the Young Men’s Association with the Society of St. Mary,” said Mrs. Sakurai.

  “That may have been so, but I am going to combine them.”

  “In other churches, these two groups operate independently,” she insisted.

  “Is that so! Well in this church they will operate together.”

  No matter how long the Church Committee argued, it was to no avail. All their arguments were dismissed in this off hand way.

  One day in the Church Committee meeting, Mrs. Sakurai challenged Father Gounod in a shrill voice. “Father, do you intend to christen a geisha?”

  “A geisha?” Father Gounod vacantly pondered her statement.

  “Yes, a geisha! The geisha from Yanagibashi attends catechism lessons, doesn’t she?”

  Thus it was that about six months after she had first appeared in the church, the identity of Sakai Satoko was finally disclosed. Father Gounod was struck with wonder at the thought of Sakai Satoko being a geisha. From what Mrs. Sakurai told him, it seemed that Satoko came from a poor family of that town and, being rather good-looking, had been sold to a geisha house. She had begun her training in the lower ranks and was now ranked among the first class.

  “Oh, did you say Yanagibashi?” Mr. Nozoe pressed forward. When he heard her name, he said admiringly, “So she’s the Kofumi.” Judging from Mr. Nozoe’s admiration, she was probably a well-known geisha.

  Mrs. Sakurai went on to explain that her middle daughter and grandchild had been visiting her, and when they went to Sunday Mass together for the first time in a long time, her daughter happened to meet Sakai Satoko, who had been a primary school classmate of hers.

  “Instantly I told her to be silent. If a thing like this were to get around, it would be a disgrace to our church.”

  “Why is that?” asked Father Gounod.

  Mrs. Sakurai puffed out her chest. “But Father, don’t you understand? She’s a geisha!”

  “What’s so disgraceful about being a geisha?” he asked.

  Mrs. Sakurai blushed. The priest watched blotches of color appear on her dried-out cheeks.

  Some other members of the Church Committee stepped forward in place of Mrs. Sakurai to explain the sort of life led by a geisha, but as Father Gounod listened with an extremely serious expression on his face, a slight feeling of vague apprehension began to steal over them.

  “In short, her way of life includes the act of prostitution. Otherwise it would hardly be possible for her to be so gaily dressed and to live in such a showy way. Furthermore, any geisha who is ranked as she is, among the first class, must of necessity have a wealthy patron to enable her to retain her fame. The reason why the antiprostitution law was not applied to the geisha world was that the geisha had many customers among politicians.”

  “Father, the life she is leading is contrary to the Sixth and Ninth Commandments. ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery’ and ‘Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s spouse,’ ” Mrs. Sakurai continued.

  They drew closer to him and asked whether he could possibly christen a geisha who had broken these two Commandments.

  “Didn’t she tell you herself that she was a geisha?”

  “No, she didn’t, because I didn’t ask.”

  “Does she want to be christened?” asked Mr. Nozoe.

  “Yes, she has recently indicated that she wishes to be christened.”

  Mrs. Sakurai spoke up in her shrill voice. “Well, Father, how are you going to deal with the matter?”

  Now that Father Gounod knew that Sakai Satoko was a geisha, it seemed obvious when he remembered her grace, sensitivity, and the facial expression which he had rarely seen in the Japanese. In spite of the fact that he knew she was a prostitute, he still was not disappointed in her. After all, he had already gone through the catechism lessons with her and had explained in detail both the Sixth and Ninth Commandments. Even after she knew what Catholicism prohibited, she had still exhibited a desire to be christened and so he thought that she must have come to some decision.

  “Well, Father, has she said that she intends to give up being a geisha?”

  “I don’t know what her intentions are. Since she didn’t say she was a geisha, obviously she couldn’t have told me she intends to give it up.”

  “You will, of course, find out whether or not she intends to give it up.”

  “Why?” asked Father Gounod critically. “It is up to me to decide whom I will permit to be baptized.”

  After a lengthy silence, Mr. Nozoe spoke up. “Well, I don’t think she is about to quit.”

  When asked why, he replied that each time he saw her on Sunday, she was extremely well-dressed. A geisha who has reached the stage where she is thinking of retiring usually shows some sign of fading, but in her case there was no such sign. Furthermore, seeing as how she was the Kofumi of Yanagibashi, renowned for her beauty and skill in the dance, it was extremely likely that she had as her patron some prominent figure.

  Although she was listening intently, Mrs. Sakurai felt obliged to interject some critical remarks. “You’re very familiar with that sort of thing, aren’t you?”

  Mr. Nozoe became flustered and began to make excuses, “Oh, no! It’s just that I happened to hear these things when I was invited out socially to a restaurant.”

  “In any event,” Mrs. Sakurai looked up at Father Gounod as she prepared to leave, “there are, needless to say, many aspects of life in Japan today which are not in accordance with the teachings of Catholicism. It is particularly true in the case of a foreigner that there are many things which he can hardly be expected to understand. I hope that you will not find yourself in any difficulty.”

  That night Father Gounod prayed for a long time in the deserted sanctuary. He was not at all disturbed by the fact that Sakai Satoko was a geisha. He was praying to God for guidance in making Mrs. Sakurai into a true Catholic.

  It was unlikely that she would understand, even if he told her the story of Jesus, who, on pointing to a prostitute, said, “Whosoever be without sin, let him strike her.” For the priest, Mrs. Sakurai, who was convinced she was well versed in Catholicism, was a more difficult sheep to lead than someone who scarcely knew anything about Catholicism.

  V

  One day in late autumn, six months later, Father Gounod had been invited to dinner by the head of the district, Bishop Rogendorf. It was Friday evening, and the fried flatfish lying in his plate reminded him of how long he had been away from sirloin steak. How sick he was of obeying the injunction against eating meat on Friday in a country where the people ate fish and vegetables almost every day.

  After they had talked about various subjects, the bishop casually changed the topic of conversation to church matters.

  “By the way, I hear that there is a geisha in your church,” he said with a slight smile on his face.

  “Yes, there is, among those who seek the truth.”

  Now, thought Father Gounod, he was about to be interrogated as a result of those written complaints, and the anguish he felt as he
looked up at the bishop was harder to bear than that which he felt when he saw the flatfish in his plate. But the next question was friendly and understanding. “Is she beautiful?”

  His spirits raised, Father Gounod replied, “Yes, she is, very beautiful.”

  Mrs. Sakurai, despite her saying that she didn’t want knowledge of this situation to become widespread, had, on her own the following week, stirred up the women of the church who had then gone to see Father Gounod, but the priest would not, in any event, have been so hasty as to christen someone who had been studying the catechism for only six months.

  It was his practice to wait quietly for Sakai Satoko, open the Bible when she arrived, and then talk with her about the significance of the Mass or the lives of the saints, and only once did he pry into her personal life.

  “Are you married?”

  “Why do you want to be christened?”

  He considered her answer to this question remarkable.

  “I feel a bond between myself and the church. It is as if my mother were calling to me. I have had this feeling ever since I first came to church by accident that day I was returning from thirty-fifth-day memorial services for my mother. I believe in everything you say, Father, and I believe that everything written in your books is true.”

  “Go-en ga aru—there is a bond.” The bishop and priest softly repeated these words to themselves in Japanese. Was there any difference in feeling between these words and the words “divine revelation” in the catechism?

  “Her background includes neither Buddhism nor atheism. Of all the believers and nonbelievers in my church I consider her to have the purest most honest soul. And . . .”

  “And what?” the bishop urged.

  Father Gounod regretted that he was unable to re-evoke the mood she inspired. “I don’t know what the situation might have been at some other church, but to have had the opportunity to welcome her to my present church every week has been a blessing of the Lord.”

  Father Gounod confessed to the bishop that Sakai Satoko had been a consolation to him in his efforts to enrich the narrow faith of his congregation.

  “A written report of the investigation into her background has been placed in my hands,” the bishop said.

  Father Gounod assumed that the bishop did not refer to its contents because it probably described the fact that she had a patron and her life as a geisha. He could do nothing but reply sadly, “I must admit that it was prepared and sent to you by a member of my congregation.” This admission made the sweet dessert he was eating taste bitter to his tongue. He recalled the scene in the churchyard when one of the young men of his congregation had been knocked down by a nonbeliever. How impossible it was even to imagine the same scene with Sakai Satoko punching Mrs. Sakurai.

  After Father Gounod had been observing Satoko for a year, he realized that she neither questioned nor was ashamed of her present life. She was the geisha Kofumi to the very bone. Such an unusual concept of morality had been drummed into her head since childhood that she could not possibly imagine that having a patron went against the Sixth and Ninth Commandments.

  “To save her we must eliminate the geisha quarters. But as long as we are not in a position to make a clean sweep of the politicians who allow the geisha to exist, how can we refuse a geisha who wants to be christened?”

  Bishop Rogendorf stood up and patted Father Gounod on the back. “We’ll have to make you run for office under the Japanese Socialist banner.”

  “How about my running as a candidate of the Communist Party?”

  “If they would have you, it would be much more effective.”

  The two priests looked solemn as they jokingly made these remarks.

  After being jostled about in a tram and bus for about an hour, Father Gounod finally arrived at the church, where old Matsutani informed him that Mr. Nozoe had collapsed as the result of high blood pressure and his condition was very serious.

  “I telephoned the Foreign Missionary Association but was told that you had just left. . . .”

  Saying nothing, Father Gounod prepared sacramental oil and rushed from the rectory. Fortunately a small dusty taxi just happened to be passing by the gate.

  Rushing in, he saw a Japanese priest just leaving Mr. Nozoe’s room after having administered the final sacrament of extreme unction. Since it happened so suddenly, a priest from the nearest church had been called when it was learned that Father Gounod was away. The doctor had already left.

  Among the utterly despondent family of the deceased, it was Mr. Nozoe’s second son who appeared to be taking charge of everything. On seeing Father Gounod, he immediately went to him and talked with him about making the arrangements for the funeral. The priest remembered him as the young man who had defended union activity by Catholics, and as Father Gounod quietly knelt at the dead man’s bedside, he contrasted the son’s attitude with that of his father, who had been obsessed with the idea that the Communist Party was synonymous with the devil and who had persistently criticized Father Gounod for allowing a Communist to make a speech before the young people of the church.

  “Lord, may he rest in peace and may Thy eternal light shine upon him.”

  As he uttered the last phrase of this prayer recited after the soul has departed from the body, the priest keenly felt the existence of divine providence.

  The sudden death of Mr. Nozoe following directly on his strained meeting with the bishop left Father Gounod completely exhausted, but he soon had to go out again that day. The geisha of Yanagibashi were holding their annual dance performance at a mid-town Tokyo theater. Sakai Satoko had left him a ticket. “Father, you must come, please?” she had insisted.

  It was at this time that of her own volition she first revealed to him her true identity, and Father Gounod, being deeply moved, wanted to go and see her, from the bottom of his heart: so he promised. He remembered that when he had told Bishop Rogendorf about it, the bishop looked disappointed and said that he had someone to interview at the time of the show. Father Gounod looked at his watch and, seeing that he would arrive in time for the performance even if he took a tram, suddenly felt somewhat relieved. It was because he had taken a tram rather than a taxi returning from the meeting with the bishop that he had been unable to be with Mr. Nozoe during his last moments, and so it was somehow not right to take a taxi to go to a theater.

  Although he had to wait for a fairly long time, finally both a tram and a bus appeared, and when he arrived at the theater, he found that he still had time before Kofumi went on. He bought a thick program, which was luxuriously printed in color, sat down on a sofa in the lobby, and began to turn the pages.

  Under the title “Saigyō in the Rain Shower” were listed the names of the performers Kofumi and Hanaka. Regretting that he had not brought a dictionary, Father Gounod tried to learn something about the dance performance beforehand by reading the outline in the program. To get some idea of the meaning, he had to continually reread those sections which contained words he did not understand.

  He had a good seat, H23, in the eighth row center. Around Father Gounod the air was filled with the scent of wealthy people, even a slight indication of which he had never noticed in his church. He was reminded of how the young people who prayed in a corner of his church could not even go to a movie theater on Sundays because their life was so hard, and this place he was in now made him wonder if it too was located in the same Japan. On his right there were three middle-aged women sitting together. Judging from their conversation, they seemed to be the wives of company directors, and the priest wondered how they had the nerve to cheerfully look forward to enjoying the dancing of geisha. The curtain rose on “Saigyō in the Rain Shower.” Hanaka began her dance in the role of the priest Saigyō, wearing a wig parted in the middle, and Kofumi, wearing the Shimada coiffure and an India ink print–skirted white costume, danced the role of a courtesan. The stage contained only a single dignified folding screen before which their dances were performed in simple costumes.

>   To the accompaniment of the samisen, the song taken from the celebrated nō drama flowed from the mouths of the geisha who were seated in rows on either side of the stage.

  At evening’s twilight in the village of Eguchi,

  Having cast away all worldly desires,

  Standing under the eaves of a brothel,

  Unable to bear the drenching shower,

  When he asked a night’s lodging,

  The harlot who seemed to be the mistress of the brothel

  Sakai Satoko, wearing a large linen shawl with a satin figured pattern, was completely transformed into the courtesan of Eguchi. Her thickly powdered white face contrasting with the redness of the rouge on her lips and the corners of her eyes and the blackness of her eyebrows made her beauty much more apparent.

  The scene arrived in which the courtesan who gave the priest Saigyō a room for the night told about herself.

  Blossoming in the morning of Spring,

  Reddening in the evening of Autumn,

  The colorful mountain’s floral attire.

  Men court her, desire aroused by moon and snow,

  Though their bed is sad. . . .

  Despite his careful reading of the plot, Father Gounod was unable to appreciate Kofumi’s wonderful performance as the ordinary Japanese spectators were able to do, since he was not very familiar with the movements of Japanese dancing; but just as she had submissively melted into Catholicism, he now found himself attracted openheartedly to her dancing as a whole. It seemed to him that he was not seeing the dancing of a courtesan but was watching Sakai Satoko in the village of Eguchi. When Hanaka, who played the priest Saigyō, came to dance the scene in which she prayed to the Bodhisattva Fugen, who appeared to her in the human form of the dancing courtesan, Father Gounod forgot completely the plot of “Saigyō in the Rain Shower.” Watching the dancing figure of Kofumi waving a folding fan, his life of that year passed before him. As he had told Rogendorf, how rich his life had become since she first appeared. He resolved to thank the Lord for His blessings and to repay them.