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

by Неизвестный

  I did not leave my study until Keisuke came home later that night. I heard him in the dining room, talking to Misa in that wheedling way of his. He seemed to be eating. I could hear a clatter of dishes.

  I walked down the hall and slid open the door to the dining room. Keisuke’s student uniform was unbuttoned and the white lining was in full view. The sight of him there quite at his ease, with Misa to serve him, was too much for me.

  “Get out of here. I won’t have the likes of you around the house.”

  Keisuke pulled himself up. His soft eyes were turned to the floor.

  I shouted at him again. “Get out of here! Get out!”

  He quietly left the room and went upstairs.

  I did not think he would really leave the house, but at about nine o’clock, when Misa went upstairs to look for him, he was gone.

  From the next day Misa refused to eat. I thought little about the matter, however. Keisuke being Keisuke, I was sure that he would be crawling home very soon.

  I have no idea how she was able to learn so much, but Misa reported that the girl, in spite of her youth, was a formidable creature indeed. She had already had one child, and she had had no trouble in making a plaything of Keisuke.

  “Whether he was the deceiver or the deceived,” I answered, “the end result was the same.”

  Just as I had expected, a telephone call came from Keisuke. It was the third day after he had left home. Quite by accident I was looking for medical magazines in the next room, where my books were stored. I thought there was something very strange about Hiroyuki’s smothered voice. I went out to the veranda, where he and Misa were whispering to each other, and asked if the call hadn’t been from Keisuke. Neither of them answered for a time, but Hiroyuki finally admitted that it had been. They had apparently meant to tell me nothing. Keisuke, it seemed, was staying with the woman at the Lakeside Hotel in Sakamoto, and Hiroyuki was to take him money.

  The next afternoon, brushing aside Misa’s misgivings, I went by taxi to the Lakeside Hotel. I asked at the desk to have Keisuke called, and a minute or two later there was a slapping of sandals on the wide staircase before me, and a young girl appeared. Her hair was cut in bangs after the schoolgirl fashion. She wore a cheap kimono tied with a narrow reddish obi. Careless, childish if you will—in any case it was an odd way to be dressed. She came halfway downstairs and threw a glance in my direction, and when she saw who it was her expression quickly changed. She stared at me for a moment with wide, round eyes, then turned and ran back upstairs with a lightness that made me think of a squirrel. It was hard to believe that she was pregnant.

  Another minute passed and a worried-looking Keisuke came down. I went with him into the lobby, where we sat facing each other over a table. I handed him the money he had asked for.

  “You are to go home today. You are not to go out of the house for the time being. You are not to see that woman again. Misa will take care of her.”

  “But . . .” Keisuke hesitated.

  “You are to go home today,” I said again.

  Keisuke asked me to let him think the matter over until the next day. I was so furious that I shook, but I could say nothing. There seemed to be a wedding reception somewhere in the hotel, and people in formal clothes were giving us vaguely curious glances. I stood up.

  “Very well. You have your choice. Either that worthless woman or your own father.”

  I ordered him to come to Katada with his answer by noon the next day.

  “Yes, sir,” Keisuke said quietly. “I’m sorry to have bothered you.” He turned and went back upstairs. I had the man at the desk call the Reihōkan—Katada was not far away—and presently I stepped from the taxi and was back at this inn for the first time in thirty years. The Keisuke affair had exhausted me mentally and physically. The next day was Sunday, and I looked forward to a good rest.

  The innkeeper came up to my room. He had aged, but I could still see in his face the face of thirty years before. I telephoned the house in Kyoto to tell Misa briefly what had happened. How many years since I had last spent a quiet evening alone, reading nothing and writing nothing? It was a little early for duck, but the fish from the lake was very good. I slept beautifully.

  There was a telephone call from Kyoto at ten the next morning as I was sitting down to breakfast. The voice over the wire was not Misa’s usual voice.

  “Word has come from the hotel that Keisuke and the woman drowned themselves in the lake this morning. Please go to Sakamoto at once. We are just leaving the house.”

  I was stunned. What had the fool done? He had taken the woman and discarded me. That was very well. But did he have to pick such an unpleasant way to answer his own father?

  I did not go to Sakamoto.

  At about three Hiroyuki came to the inn. I was sitting on the veranda in a rattan chair, and I looked up to see Hiroyuki glaring at me, his face pale and grim.

  “Don’t you feel the least bit sorry for him?”

  “Of course I do. I would feel sorry for anyone who could be such a fool.”

  “They haven’t found the bodies yet. All sorts of people have been helping, and you ought to show your face.” He threw the words out, and turned to leave. He had come all the way to my inn just to say that.

  About an hour later Misa came, with Kyōko and Takatsu, who was then Kyōko’s fiancé. Misa came into the room and started toward me as though she wanted to throw herself at my feet. Then she reconsidered and sat down in a corner, silent and motionless, her face buried in her hands. I knew that she was trying very hard to keep from sobbing.

  “Maybe they will come up before evening,” Takatsu said. He meant the bodies.

  I disliked having him around at such a time. I had of course been opposed from the start to his marrying Kyōko. His father, the most successful or possibly the second most successful businessman in Osaka, was an uncultured upstart who cared less than nothing for scholarship. His sneering arrogance thoroughly displeased me. “I think I can see to the money for your publishing,” he said the first time I met him. Misa and the children visited his house once, and I gather that the power of money swept them off their feet. “The house is enormous, and the living room is magnificent, and he has a country house at Yase and another at Takarazuka,” and so on and so on—I found the liveliness most distasteful.

  That was not all. The son, Takatsu himself, had been in France for three years, but all he could talk about was the Louvre. He didn’t study when he was in France and he didn’t drink. All he did was wander around looking at pictures, though he was no painter. He frittered away his time. And up he came to Kyoto every Sunday, rain or snow, without waiting to see whether we would let him marry Kyōko. He’s a sort I will never understand. When I said I was opposed to the marriage, Kyōko burst into tears. I was incensed. I asked how the others felt, and I found that all of them, Misa and the children, took Kyōko’s part. Takatsu had apparently made a good impression on everyone but me. Neither Keisuke nor Hiroyuki had any interest in scholarship, and Sadamitsu was not to be depended upon, and I thought that at the very least I would have Kyōko marry some fine young man prepared to devote his life to scholarship. But now I was forced to give up that hope too.

  In any case, I was most unhappy to see Takatsu pushing his way into an important Miike family conference, even before the wedding date had been set.

  “Kyōko can go back to Sakamoto. I want to talk to her mother alone,” I said.

  Kyōko and Takatsu had the people at the inn make them a lunch, and called a taxi, and in general raised a commotion suggesting that the whole affair was a picnic for them.

  When they had left and the room was quiet, I thought I would like to say something comforting to Misa, but instead I found myself scolding her.

  “It’s your fault that Keisuke has come to this. You spoiled him.”

  Misa sat with her head bowed, her face in her hands, so still that she might have been dead.

  “Hiroyuki, and Kyōko too. All of them are
worthless. I have stood all I can.” Misa got up and staggered to the veranda. She put one hand to her forehead and, leaning against a pillar, looked at me. Only one time in her life did Misa look into my eyes in that quiet way. After a time she sank to the floor as though her legs would no longer support her.

  “I think at least half the fault is yours. What have you ever done for the children?”

  She usually had so little to say that her talkativeness made me wonder whether the affair might not have deranged her.

  “You were away in Germany when Keisuke was small. You went for three years and you stayed eight. The last five years you sent no word either to us or to the ministry. I don’t think you can imagine how terrible those years were for us.”

  It was as Misa said. I saved the money the Ministry of Education had given me for three years’ study and stayed eight years. I had no wife and no children and no house. I lived in a cheap room and ate black bread, and I kept my eye trained on scholarship, that distant eminence, lofty as the Alps. Otherwise I would not have been able to do the work I am doing today.

  Misa went on. “Research, research, you say, and you have no Sundays and no holidays. When you have spare time you prod your corpses. And when you come home you say you’re tired of the smell of corpses and you start drinking. You never even smile when you’re drinking, and you go on writing away at that German. What have you done for the children? Have you even once looked at a report card? Have you once taken them to the zoo? You’ve sacrificed the children and me to that research of yours.”

  That I should have to hear this from Misa, who had helped me with my research through the long years of poverty, never once stopping to pamper herself!

  I wanted no more of her complaining. “That’s enough. I sacrificed myself too,” I said.

  I was staring absently at the lake, as I had been all the hours since breakfast. When I raised my eyes from the lake, there was Hira, wrapped in the deep colors of autumn, spreading its quiet form grandly before me, as if to embrace me.

  “I’m going, back to the hotel,” said Misa coldly. She stood up and turned to leave. “I don’t know what happened yesterday, but I imagine the boy died cursing you.”

  Perhaps she had wept herself out. Her eyes were dry, and her face was strangely composed as she arranged her shawl. She almost snatched up her bundles, and she turned her back abruptly and marched from the room as if she meant never to come back to me.

  An inexpressible feeling of loneliness came over me. That will do, I said to myself, and stood up. I sat down again. I did not know what it was that would do.

  I called the desk and asked for a notebook. I had not thought of him in years, but I sat down to draft a letter to Tanio Kaigetsu. Tanio Kaigetsu was neither an anatomist nor an anthropologist. For seven years I studied under Professor Schalbe at Strassburg, doing research principally on birthmarks, but also laying the foundation for my life’s work, non-osseous anthropology. Afterward I spent a year at the Leyden Museum—actually it was something of a detour for me— measuring the crania of some thousand Filipinos. A bar run by a Japanese woman was the congregating place for Japanese scholars in Leyden, and it was there that I met Tanio Kaigetsu.

  He was a priest, a rather unusual priest, who was studying Sanskrit, also at the Leyden Museum. He was a little older than I, and he was a good toper—that expression fitted Tanio Kaigetsu perfectly. I was much taken with his dashing, lighthearted way of drinking. Even when he was drinking, his mind was on scholarship. I knew nothing about his research, and doubtless he knew nothing about mine, but we were exactly suited for each other. We both knew the dignity of scholarship, and we respected each other as scholars. When I left Leyden, Tanio Kaigetsu said he wanted to give me the most valuable farewell present he could. He would like to know what I needed. “Let me have your body to dissect when you die,” I said.

  Kaigetsu took out pen and paper on the spot, and wrote down his testament. “I give my body to the anatomist Miike Shuntarō.” To his own copy he added an injunction: “My relatives are not to challenge the validity of this testament.”

  I had not seen Kaigetsu since I said goodbye to him in the doorway of the Leyden Museum in 1912. I knew, however, that he had come back to Japan some years after me and that he was alive and well, the resident priest in a little temple somewhere in the mountains. I was sure if I asked at the university someone would know the address of Tanio Kaigetsu, obscure old scholar of Buddhism.

  I thought to get through the day by writing to Kaigetsu. The promise he had given me, I almost felt, was the only promise I had left in the world. It was the only bit of human intercourse, the only incident in my relations with mankind, in which I could have confidence.

  But I sat there with pen in hand, not knowing how to begin. It seemed immeasurably difficult to communicate the warm, flowing human affection I felt for Kaigetsu after years of neglect.

  I laid down my pen and looked out. The surface of the lake was aglow in the autumn twilight. Far to the east some dozens of boats were floating motionless, like fallen leaves. Keisuke and that girl—I could only think of the woman who had died with Keisuke, the woman I had seen halfway down the stairs at the Lakeside Hotel, as a young girl—the boats clustered there, I said to myself, are perhaps looking for the bodies of Keisuke and that girl.

  I did not write to Kaigetsu. Instead I sat on the veranda, with the lake for my partner, trying to endure, to resist. When night came, I went back into the room and sat rigid before the desk. Now and then I stood up and looked east over the lake. There in the same spot, on into the night, were those dozens of little boats, like lights strung out for decoration.

  The third and most recent time I saw Hira from the Reihōkan was in the darkest days Japan has known. My heart, the heart of the nation, was plunged into a darkness that held not a fragment of hope.

  We did not know when the air raids would begin, and every day the newspapers and radios were shouting at people to leave the cities. With the war situation growing worse, blackness hung ready to envelop the country. It was then, in the spring of 1944, that I was brought to Katada by Atsuko, Haruko’s youngest sister. Atsuko was in her fifth year of high school. Nearly twenty years had gone by since the Keisuke affair.

  I was alone in the Kyoto house with only a maid. At the beginning of the year, Hiroyuki had been transferred to the Kanazawa branch of his company, and Haruko and the four children had gone with him. I say that he was transferred. Actually Hiroyuki himself had wanted very much to flee the city and the bombings, and the initiative had been his. For a man with four children, the oldest of them only eleven, I suppose this was most natural.

  It apparently bothered both Hiroyuki and Haruko to leave an old man alone in Kyoto. Although they persisted in trying to make me go with them, I would have none of it. I suppose they took my refusal for the stubbornness of the old, but it was not. My work was important to me. No one, however long he argued, could pry me loose from my desk.

  Hiroyuki said that my research depended on my life, but for me it was the opposite: my life depended on my research. My work was everything, and I could not proceed with my work away from the university. I had to go to the anatomy laboratory, and I could not be cut off from the libraries. If I were to leave Kyoto, my work would stop.

  I could go on with my research only as long as I lived, Hiroyuki said. To me, at seventy-three, the matter was more urgent. Every morning as I sat down and began to write, a picture of my own circulatory system would float before my eyes. I knew that my veins had so degenerated that they would crumble between the fingers like scraps of biscuit. Even had there been no war, I would have been in a race against death. Each day lived was so much gained. If things progressed smoothly, I would be ninety-three when I finished The Arterial System of the Japanese. I knew therefore that I could never expect to see the end of my work, and I wanted to get out the last chapter and the last sentence I could. I worked out a plan for publishing in successive volumes, each part to be sent arou
nd to the printer’s as it was finished. The times were such, however, that I could not be sure when the printer would close shop.

  And even if by good luck I should succeed in having several volumes published, the possibility of sending them abroad was as good as gone. I had thought, through the good offices of the German consulate in Kobe, at least to send my work to universities in the Axis countries, but it seemed that the war in Europe had succeeded in denying my last wish.

  I sat at my desk those days literally begrudging the passage of each minute. I must write, and if I wrote, everything would somehow be all right. Years, tens of years after my death, by whatever devious course, my work would come to be recognized in the academic world for what it was. It would become a rock that would not wear away. Scholars would follow in my footsteps and non-osseous anthropology would be brought to maturity. So I thought, so I believed, as I drove myself on.

  For all that, I often dreamed I saw my manuscript licked by flames, blazing up and dancing into the heavens with the smoke. Each time I had the dream I awoke to find my eyes wet with tears.

  There was a small second-hand bookshop near the university that I used to dread going by. I knew that buried under layers of dust in one corner of the shop was a manuscript on the topography of Kyoto. I do not know who the author was, but the manuscript was written neatly in the old style on Japanese paper. It may or may not have been of value. In any case there it was, laboriously put together by someone, and, for nearly three years after I first noticed it, lying in the same corner of that bookshop, held together by a thin cord. I could not bear to think that the manuscript of The Arterial System of the Japanese, with its hundreds of illustrations, might have in store for it the fate of that unhappy work on Kyoto topography. I would think, as I passed, of the dark destiny that might be lying in wait for my work, and a feeling of utter desolation would come over me.