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

by Неизвестный

  Kitayama Toshio’s body shook with the rattle of the carriage. “I can’t walk no more.” From out of that vibration, he heard the voice of the fishmonger Private, Second Class, Nakagawa saying, “I’m going to let go, I’m letting go.” The rattle of the train arose from the depths of Kitayama Toshio’s frame. Some boiling hot thing welled up from the depths of his body. “I’m letting go! I’m letting go!” He felt Private, Second Class, Nakagawa’s body leaving him and advancing on toward death. He felt himself thrusting away the body of Nakagawa, Private, Second Class, to his death.

  With a rattle the train left the tunnel. Kitayama Toshio silently endured the black memory that welled up from the depths of his body. “There was nothing else for it. There was nothing else for it, was there? I abandoned Nakagawa to his fate in order to preserve my own existence. For my own existence. For my own existence. But that’s the only way human beings can live, isn’t it?” He went on reflecting, quietly forcing down his emotion. “There was nothing else to do. And I am still the same person as I was then. I’m in the same situation as I was then, and so, of course, I’m the kind of person who will abandon another human being to his fate. Without a doubt, I’m merely protecting my own existence. And I can do nothing for this person’s suffering.” He felt something like the breath of her heart blowing toward him from the outline of her white face. “I can’t enter into this person’s life! I am inside only my own life!” He felt that he could not properly respond to this wind that was blowing from her heart. “I just can’t. I can’t do anything about anyone else’s life. Something that is protecting only its own existence just can’t protect that of another,” he thought.

  The train arrived at Yotsuya. The train stopped. The doors opened. He saw Horikawa Kurako’s face looking at him. He saw her small, right shoulder inviting him. “Shall I walk her home or not? . . .” “I can’t, I can’t!” he thought.

  “Good-bye,” he said, looking down.

  “Yes,” she replied, instinctively drawing her own face back. Then a pained smile appeared upon it.

  She got off and the doors closed. The train moved off. He saw her face on the other side of the glass, searching for him in the train. There he watched her face become distanced from him as she stood on the platform. He saw her face rubbing against the broken glass of the window. He saw his existence rubbing against hers. He felt that between their two existences was a single, transparent sheet of glass, which moved between them at an infinite speed.

  TAKEDA TAIJUN

  Takeda Taijun (1912–1976) is a relatively unusual postwar Japanese writer in that his chief literary influences and inspiration came from China rather than Europe. Although he began his studies of Chinese literature at Tokyo Imperial University in 1931, he left the following year, turning his full attention to left-wing activities. After he was drafted into the army, he served in China and then worked in Shanghai as a translator immediately after the end of the war in 1945. Takeda’s many works rely on his wide knowledge of Buddhism (his father was a Buddhist priest) and his own sense of guilt concerning the activities of his countrymen in China during the war years. “The Misshapen Ones” (Igyō no mono, 1950) touches on many of these themes.

  THE MISSHAPEN ONES (IGYŌ NO MONO)

  Translated by Edward G. Seidensticker

  Not long ago, I dissented from the views of a certain philosopher. A most earnest thinker on all subjects, he was, though ten years older than I, a good ten times as impassioned. His devotion to art was fanatic, and he was possessed of an intense longing for other-worldly beauty. He may perhaps be counted among those I am fond of. (I cannot, it is true, believe that I really am fond of anyone.)

  I do not know why a philosopher of his standing should have directed those impassioned remarks at me, no more than a drunkard; but he somehow took me for a young man worth talking to. People who have something to pour out, whether in anguish or in joy, always seem to imagine appropriate powers of understanding in the listener.

  I was cool and quiet, a sand pit sucking in all the glistening drops. We were in a teahouse of dubious nature, clammy and cold for such an establishment. A further difficulty was that Hanako, the girl I was living with, worked there. I only had to wait until eleven, when she could leave. I knew how to get along in the world: be moderate in everything, and yet suggest from time to time that the balance can be upset. Though making it seem that I was but sitting there impassively, I contrived to assume a variety of dramatic expressions, and all the while I was reassuring myself. Why, I had plenty of room yet for living. For a long while yet, in pleasure and pain, I would crawl ahead in my way, into infinity.

  But now the philosopher was striking out with question after rapid question. His eyes blazed with something very much like hatred, and his voice was tense with anguish and bitterness. At first it seemed to be advice, good, human advice, on my attitude toward women and particularly on my treatment of Hanako. The philosopher called her the Virgin Mary, he likened her to Gretchen. He had bought her a muffler for two thousand yen and given her five thousand in cash (when asked if there was nothing she wanted, Hanako had come up with a phonograph as the most expensive thing she could think of, and he had given her the money for it), and he had taught her to say “Bon soir, monsieur,” and “Au revoir.” Hanako made the five thousand yen her capital for commodity speculations and in no time worked it up to ten thousand and lost it. Witness to all this, I felt a certain reticence before the philosopher. More than ever like a pit, I took in the glowing words.

  Although there were moments when she seemed like the Virgin Mary or Kannon the Merciful to me too, they were moments of delusion and fleeting excitement. Fearful of expending a vitality of which I had not too large a store left, I had surrendered to the tenets of biology, and made it a policy not to use expressions like “Mary” or “Kannon” or “My life” when other people were around—indeed not when the two of us were alone in the dead of night.

  “It seems that you do not understand what love is,” said the philosopher.

  “Oh, I understand.”

  “Does it make any difference to you whether you hurt the woman you love? Have you ever once thought how your behavior and your general attitude have made her weep?”

  “Certainly I have.”

  “What is love, then?”

  “A mistake. It is built on a mistake.”

  “Well, then.” The philosopher turned his face slightly away, as from some repulsive amphibian creature. “What about Goethe’s love?”

  “The same thing, I would say. Not that I know much about Goethe.”

  The philosopher, an admirer of Goethe, was evidently dazed by the revelation. His face was twisted in an excess of knowledge and an excess of passion, and below the spectacles the cheeks twitched with impatience to convert the benighted person before him.

  “If love is what you say it is, then what is hate?”

  “Very much the same thing.”

  “Hate is a mistake too? Hate is built on a mistake?”

  “Well.” I was tired of the conversation, though I gave him no hint of the fact. “I believe that human beings are incapable of understanding one another. And because they can’t understand one another—with that as a condition—love and hate exist.”

  “You don’t believe in love, then?”

  “And what exactly do you mean by believe?”

  “To feel. To feel with a certainty in your whole body and soul.”

  “Oh, I have my feelings. They are very unstable things, though. Very strange and very unreliable. I hardly know what to say when you ask me if I believe in love.”

  I do not remember what came next. He interrogated me as the guardian of a barrier gate might interrogate a suspicious traveler, and I seem to have given an appropriate answer to each swift, burning question. I do not of course mean a correct answer. I only mean that I managed to make the pieces fit. Finally the philosopher began to shout.

  “What do you think of hell? Does it exist for you, or does
it not?” It was as if he were flinging red-hot rivets at me.

  “Oh, I imagine there is a hell.”

  “And do you think you will go there?”

  “Me? No, I’ll not be going,” I answered pleasantly, as though we were discussing an outing.

  “Well, then.” The philosopher’s face was suddenly radiant. He seemed to have made his point. “I suppose not, I suppose not. But I am going to hell. I will go to hell.”

  I found it hard to understand why he cried “hell” so proudly, why he seemed to fall into a state of rapture, warm with the rays of ultimate truth. He cried “hell” and waved a long, thin hand to the skies, like that Satan of the arts who danced before Dr. Faust.

  “To hell? You are going to hell, sir?”

  “I am. It is a terrible thing, but I am doomed.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.” He said it with greatest eagerness. “I am filled with sin and guilt. Not that you would understand. It is a terrible thing, but there it is. A fact.”

  “Oh, I hardly think so. Imagine it, going to hell.”

  “I am going to hell.” He smiled triumphantly, to brush away my damp sympathy. But in fact I was not sympathizing at all. I had made the remark with what I hoped would suggest the sureness of a prophet. I wanted to protest the ease with which he sent himself to hell.

  “You are going to heaven.”

  “Heaven?” His brow clouded.

  “Whatever you say, you are going to heaven.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “Because we are all going to heaven. It’s settled.”

  He gasped, and looked at me with loathing. No doubt he felt like a university professor who has just been told by a first grader that the one or two figures written large on the blackboard are the end of all calculations.

  “It’s settled,” I said, “and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

  It had been long since I last used the word “heaven.” “Heaven” simply came to me when my adversary cried “hell.” Like a favorite plaything, polished to a glow with the oil from this hand, it came rolling into a useless dialogue between two men brought together by a woman.

  The terror of plunging into hell more swiftly than the swiftest rocket, throat straining with the primeval cry of life, flames of guilt crackling in the ears—this he had sought to establish in the name of science and art. He fell silent. His expression must be described as one of extreme displeasure. The eyes were aflame. He seemed to be gnashing and grinding at the puffy, slug-like thing called heaven, which had broken the speed of his fall.

  Forgive me, O Philosopher! I did not mean to block your way. Because I was once a specialist in heaven (I realized the fact only a week later), I spoke carelessly. In my youth, I was for a time a priest in a certain pietist sect that offers salvation to those who throw themselves at the mercy of the Lord Amida. It was for this reason that I carelessly (though I pile caution upon caution) resorted to low trickery: I sent everyone off to heaven.

  “The Misshapen Ones” is a chapter in my chronicle of heaven.

  I became a priest because I am wavering by nature and because at the time there was no sign of anything better to do. I was neither weary of the world nor possessed of an overpowering zeal. I took the easiest road. To all appearances an eager young socialist of nineteen, quick to take something up and as quick to weary of it and flee, I would not have found it necessary to run off in such haste toward heaven if I had not been born and reared in a temple.

  A boy who has a lively curiosity in things high and low, who tells himself that he has nothing to lose, that he has nothing else to do, that he won’t last long in the work anyway—take such a boy, and he will become a fishmonger if his father is a fishmonger, and a landlord if his father is a landlord. And so I became a priest by trade.

  On the afternoon of the day I decided to enter the seminary, I went to the barbershop and had my head shaved. My hair had been long and uncombed, as became a young socialist. Now it was gone, and I felt no particular sorrow for it. Certain peculiar physical sensations, however, went with having a shaven head. I stroked the top of my head and passed my hand down over my face, and there was no difference whatsoever. The whole was smooth, the head where grew my hair had disappeared. On the crown, the skin was young and fresh, a tender pink, the skin of a baby who has not known the winds of the world. Intelligence, packed inside, could no longer rely on a protective coating of hair. It seemed to shrink back in shame, and, at length resigned, to give itself up to the skies.

  Already I was something different. I was already separated by an immeasurable gulf from those who prosper in the world, have women and families, become famous, build the nation. Probably I would never be one of them again. I would be a faintly repulsive something, a human being and something besides. See, it had begun. Father, who had been affectionately, almost obsessively, sharpening his razor at a strop fastened to the pillar, had stood up, and there he was, looking at my blue-shaven head in the mirror as at a squid left to die in a corner of an aquarium.

  “All right,” I said to no one in particular.

  That evening I loaded my bedding into a cab, put on a white cotton kimono, a black cotton kimono, and a drab surplice, and passed through the big red-brown gate of the seminary. Inside the door, I changed the footwear of the world for rough straw sandals. I went first to the instructors’ quarters. A burly priest, the proctor in charge of the novices, was warming himself over charcoal embers.

  “Well, well. You got here.” He smiled maliciously. He had a remarkably fine physique, and he was swarthy to the point of blackness. The white teeth he bared at me were vicious. “Don’t think it’ll be like a skiing trip. It’ll be rough.”

  “Don’t have to worry about me.”

  I had gone on skiing trips with the big fellow, who would have been the ideal model for a portrait of a malevolent priest. Simple and blunt, he had been left as a boy in a temple on the Chiba coast, and he had once had a quarrel with the young bucks of the disorderly fishing village. Having taken up the challenge, he returned to the temple for a shotgun and fired one shot into the crowd. He was barely conscious of what he had done, but from then on the fishermen showed him the respect due a grown man.

  I had never heard him read a sutra, but I would see him, stately as an elephant, walking back and forth between the Great Hall and the office, which gangs of ruffians sometimes invaded. I found his physical strength most pleasing, and the freebooting arrogance that went with it.

  “You’ll never make a priest, but do your best while you’re trying.” He spoke like the good proctor, then reached for a saké bottle. “It’s still early. Have a drink.”

  “I’ll do what’s to be done. Don’t have to worry about me.” I drank it down with the bravado of the novice at arms who appears at a rival field demanding a match. “Is Mikkai still here?”

  “Mikkai? He’s still here. He’ll probably be in with you. Why?” He looked at me sharply.

  “Well, you see,” I said secretively, “I’d like to talk to him.”

  A Chinese priest had been at the temple for about a year. He said nothing and wrote nothing. He lived in silence, as if feeble-minded, and he had the room off the kitchen. No one knew whether he belonged to esoteric Shingon or to Zen, or perhaps to a newer Mahayana sect.

  “Chinamen are funny even when they’re priests,” the other priests would say. No one bothered to investigate his character or his thought. Interest seemed to focus rather on matters like this: “Prince Chichibu, there’s a real Buddhist for you. Always has a rosary in his pocket, they say.” Or this: “The general in command of the First Division comes straight from this temple.”

  But I was different. I longed for something vast, dim, ineffable, that corner of the universe in a Chinese landscape where the clouds gather, beyond endless masses of rock and water and forest.

  I was immoderately fond of anyone from the continent, student or Chinese cook. Students always seemed to have secret miss
ions toward building a new Orient, and Chinese restaurant keepers had heaps of money and treasure, and slim-waisted beauties hidden away in secret chambers. Perhaps even this ordinary priest had been dispatched by the Kuomintang or the Communists, then preparing to resist the Japanese.

  The next evening I sat opposite Mikkai on the bare wooden floor of the kitchen. Great clouds of steam rose to the high roof. One of the kitchen hands had taken the lid from the rice cauldron, and, humming a popular song, he was stirring the rice with a ladle as big as a baseball bat. Another, a red devil in the firelight, had opened the oven door and was pushing fiercely at a log. The rough kitchen bands were sons of impoverished rural temples. Unable to afford even a technical-school education, they had gone to work as servants, and they awaited the day when they too would be high priests. And they disliked the well-fed sons of flourishing city temples.

  “Could you let me have a little sauce?” I asked one of them.

  “What for? Can’t do it unless you give me a good, clear reason.” The sleeves of the dirty white kimono were pushed up to the shoulders, and a white rag was twisted around his head. He looked peevishly up at me from beside the cauldron. “We’ve got work to do, you know. Can’t go waiting on every last one of you.”

  “I know. It’s for this.” I took out a box of sushi tied up in a white cloth. “You can have some too, if you like it.”

  “Well, as long as you can give me a reason.” Turning to hide the pleasure that had spread over his face, he poured me a generous cup of sauce.

  Fish and meat were forbidden in the seminary. My family was afraid I would run away, however, and frequently sent a houseboy under pretext of inquiring after my health to bring me the dishes I liked best. He had forgotten soy sauce, which I had to have before dividing the spoils in one of the dormitory rooms.