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

by Неизвестный

  As though remembering his duty, Anayama would occasionally give a growl. There was something coarse in the growling, and at the same time something weak. “Anayama! Still at it?” “Look at him go!” In the beginning his two friends had snickered and urged him on; but now they were silent. The silence was punctuated by the rattling of the door and the breaking of the taut paper. Finally that too stopped.

  After a time there was a long, tired sigh from Anayama. Then, in a voice too devoid of art, too beaten, to be called satisfied, he muttered: “Heaven. That’s what it is, heaven.”

  I felt as if the great, heavy, iron door of heaven had fallen before my nose. Or as if a warm void, starless and lightless and without night birds or insects, had spread without limit, and was about to suck up everything. And only the smell of my fevered skin under the quilt, and the unpleasant taste in my mouth, rose up into the void.

  Spring was coming. A cobble stone path and steps led for about a hundred yards from the gate up to the Great Hall. There were always beggars and pilgrims on the path, which we took many times each day for six regular services—matins, noon prayers, vespers, and three nocturnal services—and for countless obeisances between. There were women pilgrims too, and simply women out walking. The cheeks and fingertips of women in gay kimonos were rosy. The arms and legs protruding from sweaters and skirts, told of release from the cold. The bright clothes, down to handkerchiefs and gloves, intimidated us like the warning coloration of an insect. Like a flower petal, a parasol slanted and opened. Beads in hand we formed our column and started up the path toward the Great Hall, its tiled roof a burnished silver, and even those among us most given to coarse talk fell silent.

  They knew, as if they had discussed the matter and come to an accord, that we were the eccentrics, the misshapen ones. Our smallest act could seem clumsy and comical to the people of the world. Stop and look back at a girl, and that, something as trivial as that, could seem grossly inappropriate, contradictory, unbecoming.

  The bell tower and the charnel house, the groves of gingko trees not yet in leaf, the pines, the hillocks covered with dead grass, and, giving color to the ashen space that included them all, white and deep pink peach blossoms. When, small and far away, the figure of a young girl came into the space, it burned brighter and fresher than the peach blossoms or a drop of blood. The world took flame from it and changed color. But in that column of black, even Anayama glowered like a bear in a cave, and fought to keep his thick neck from turning.

  With the help of the houseboy from my temple, I left the seminary one evening.

  I put on an Inverness and a soft hat, changed straw sandals for wooden pattens, and got into a cab. I alighted at the bright center of the city. In the restaurant, the people of the world were laughing and talking, among the lights and the smells of the world. The lights were bright, the automobiles rushed by, the radios and phonographs sang. I drank red wine and ate a thick cutlet and fragrant ice cream. In the vase was a delicately crinkled carnation, tight against glossy leaves. The silver spoon and fork made pleasant noises against the dishes and glass.

  No one would notice that I was an eccentric from a seminary. I turned to the polished mirror and very slightly tipped the soft hat that was my disguise. A shaven strip, not quite face and not quite skull, was exposed. I stared at it as if I were staring at my soul.

  A pretty waitress, small and plump—a bud, if she was to be likened to a flower—noticed the strange gesture. In the broad mirror, obnoxiously well polished, she stared in fascination, and the round little hand clutched at the edge of her apron.

  “She has reason enough. Reason enough,” I muttered to myself; and turned away. The horror in those clean eyes, as if she had seen a leper, was only natural. I was after all a grotesque.

  I knew when people would come calling us. In a certain house a certain person dies. A person of this world disappears from this world. Those who are left come to think that we are necessary. They remember that in this world there is a group of aliens who have connections with the other world. They come for us. We take our places like experts beside the corpse. They weep, they are sad. The corpse, no longer of this world, is cooled by bits of dry ice and warmed by the charcoal brazier. In attendance upon it, we seem at home for the first time. People never think of sharing their happiness with us. They come for us when they have sorrows.

  In sum, our reason for being is recognized only when the thing called the other world has clouded people’s heads a bit. But while people are in this world they hate and dread the other. They therefore hate us specialists in black who remind them of it.

  “But to me too this world is a thousand times and ten thousand times dearer than the other. I will give all the other heavens to whoever wants them. This is the one for me.”

  I wanted to shout it out. I looked around lovingly at the bright center of the world. There the streets were, showing their unconcerned faces as if, whatever Mikkai’s teachings, they meant to stand for a hundred billion years. People might suffer, but they clung to these streets, not to be separated from them by a foot or a second. And I too. What relation to these streets, these people, me, were the destruction and annihilation and upheavals Mikkai had going on somewhere always?

  To become a specialist in heaven, I returned to the seminary.

  The training was almost over. I became involved with Anayama in an incident which, pushed but a little further, would literally have seen me to heaven.

  I might give myself up to willful fancies, but for novices from poorer temples, seminary life was not so easy. Some were there on money borrowed from teachers and friends, and others, like Anayama, had been left in temples when small and, after cruelly restricted lives, had been sent to the seminary to work off their indebtedness. From these lower levels of the clergy, so to speak, were several novices who had thrown themselves into seminary life with considerable earnestness. It was the starting point toward independence and toward somehow taking care of parents and brothers and sisters and their own children. Earnestly they went though elementary Buddhism, and on to the technique of bell ringing, the beating of gongs and clappers, the intoning of sutras, and, much the most important, the saying of requiems. At the other extreme, quite indifferent to our duties, were Anayama and I.

  My temple owned land and had room for luxury. It made little difference if a son or so played for a while. My relatives were leaders in the government of the denomination, and deans and professors in the denominational university—I was a child of the highest clerical aristocracy. The rich supplies of food and toilet articles that came to me almost every day were distributed to the novices around me. Several were indebted to my family in other ways, and they were careful to see to my comfort. The head novice, who had been generously tipped, would usually consent to look the other way. In short, I was prepared to enjoy the favor of everyone in sight.

  I had had some slight acquaintance with barracks and jails, and seminary life was no trial at all. My indifference to duty was as uncomplicated as the escapism of the truant high-school boy.

  With Anayama, matters should have been far different.

  The others had left for the lecture hall. The floor, a hundred mats spread over it, was slightly ridged and pitted. In the morning sunlight, it stretched away like the side of a lonely hill.

  Hidden behind a heap of quilts in the sunlight, I stretched my arms and legs, a little stiff from services the night before. To the rear of the building, a steep hill gave way to a wooded park. In the quiet I could hear the far-off roar of the city and above it the chirping of birds.

  I sat up and looked toward the door, at the edge of the mountain of quilts. Anayama, always as ready as I to have a rest, lay glaring up at me.

  “Suppose you go die,” he said. When I did not answer, he said it more loudly, this time to the ceiling.

  “Oh, I’ll still be alive for a while.”

  “So will I,” he retorted irritably. “Go on out and die. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t.
With me it’s different. I’ve got things to do yet.”

  “What’ve you got to do?”

  “Nothing a child would understand. All sorts of things.”

  He was five or six years older than I, but he looked a good ten years older. Nihilism from long persecution had thrown one more shadow over the already murky pools of rebellion and lust.

  “Just children. You go around saying you’ll do this and that, and never get around to doing anything. There’s nothing I haven’t done. But I’ll invent things to do if I have to.”

  “What do you think a preacher can do?”

  “Why you . . .” He threw a pillow and an ashtray at me. “Looking down on us because you read all the answers in a book somewhere. But that’s not the way things come.” He started toward me. Then, reluctant to show his bad leg, he stood with the other leg thrust forward and bawled at me as if someone had touched a match to him. “What would a spoiled brat like you know about me and what makes me run and the plans I’ve got?” The powerful back swatted the floor again, and he lay face-up.

  Thus we approached our final clash. It came when the proctor hit one of the novices.

  The hitter was the big priest I had gone skiing with, and the hit novice was one of Anayama’s cronies. The drum would boom, and the novices would straighten their clothes and start for the lecture hall. Some of the less earnest had a way of being late. The novice in question was that day late with two or three others. He had become friendly with Anayama and made use of Anayama’s violence, and he was shrewd in a way Anayama was not. The proctor reprimanded him in the hall. He turned and proctor floored him.

  The head novice, with Anayama standing beside him, reported on the incident after dinner that evening. He had taken part in left-wing activities in the denominational university, and he was a clever talker.

  “It is not just X here who got hit. It is of all us. If he was late too often, why didn’t they point the fact out quietly? How do they justify violence in this holy seminary? And on the part of a man who should be our leader? And what of the language he used—like a sergeant dressing down his platoon. We might as well say that he used the same language on every one of us. He insulted every one of us. And unless we protest, he will show his contempt by using force time after time.

  “This meeting has been called at the suggestion of Anayama,” he added.

  Anayama was silent. It was pressure from Anayama, however, that forced the head novice on. The latter only wanted to see these last days safely through. He therefore made it clear that the idea was Anayama’s. We sat in a cluster, our faces a little tense. The head novice called out sharply to those who found their own conversation more interesting than the meeting, and thus made it clear that the matter was serious.

  Comments were requested. One of the older novices stood up. “We should march out tomorrow in a body. It is meaningless to go on. We will march straight out of the place, not just because one corrupt instructor hit one of us, but because we must induce reflection throughout the top levels of the clergy. We will go back to our temples and there put ourselves through rigorous training. The time has passed for old, worn-out methods. Now is our chance to show the strength of the lower orders that are the pillars of the sect.

  “Really, they’ve gone too far.” He looked around for support. “Have you ever heard of anything quite like it? They have no idea how young people suffer and how country temples struggle to get by.”

  I knew this harassed person well, with his pale face and his dry, rustling skin. I knew that he belonged to the dissident faction. There were two main factions in the sect. One, now in control of the organization, was led by a man who had studied in Germany, who knew Sanskrit, and who had revived the teachings of primitive Buddhism. It was, if one must give it a label, the new, cosmopolitan faction. The dissident faction was led by priests who looked to the Mahayana scriptures in Chinese translation, and sought thereby to preserve the traditions of the sect. It could be called the old, national faction. I did not know which was right, but I knew at least that the struggle was between old and new, national and cosmopolitan. The statement we had just heard was but a small outcropping of a basic disagreement.

  The head novice stood up again. He offered us an oration on the social environment in which our sect found itself. The grandeur of his style was somewhat disproportionate to the size of the incident, but the young novices were excitable and listened with attention.

  “Christianity is gaining,” he said. “The political situation shows signs of increased tension. On the left and on the right are accumulations of power large enough to crush our denomination at a blow, and right here before us they are joining battle. Bloody incident follows bloody incident. The times are as they were when the founder of our sect, disgusted with hidebound priests who fawned upon authority and thought only of warming and fattening themselves, began a new religious movement for the common people, driven mad by hunger and deprivation.”

  Like an elegant leader of the French Revolution, he waved away a clinging sleeve with a flick of the wrist. He became intoxicated with his own eloquence. “Are we to survive or are we not to survive? Having come upon these degenerate latterday happenings, we of the younger clergy must squarely face the issue. One blow of this hand, one kick of this foot, can decide the fate of our whole denomination. The violent incident we have just witnessed will decide whether we broaden and strengthen our organization and insure the prosperity and independence of our faith, or whether we fall into the ruin we deserve as time-servers and betrayers.”

  An elbow against the brazier, Anayama was smoking and looking bored and sullen, and somehow apart from the rest of us. When the oration was over, he glanced up. “I should have taken a poke at him. I should have just gone and taken a quiet poke at him.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I’ll just run over and hit him. I don’t need any help.”

  I sat in the back row with my eyes lightly closed. I was still in this world, deposited in the very center of it, no choice in the matter. It was a chilly fact, and an itchy fact.

  And since there were human beings in that world too, there could be no doubt that they took their quarrels with them. I opened my eyes a little, and had evidence of it in the motions of people in black and white that passed through the two lines of skin and two rows of eyelashes. I had come to feel that if there was right, it lay beyond the realm in which I could act; and the beautiful too was with the impossible. If, then, there was either right or beauty in the scene, bathed in orange light, that came creeping through my half-closed eyes, it was where I could not reach it, could not touch it, perhaps could not envision it. There would be no sense either in joining the commotion or in running away from it.

  I must recognize that there was also a certain cunning in my position, the cunning of one who flees to a quiet refuge in times of turmoil. For an instant I inclined very slightly toward Mikkai’s view of the universe.

  “But it’s the proctor they’re going to hit. The big fellow.” Suddenly the thought came to me. I was looking in another direction while my skiing companion was on the way to being hit. That small fact opened my eyes. It was a sensually repellent fact. I must at least stop the plans to hit him.

  Another novice stood up. He had been most diligent in studies and rituals.

  “I have doubts about making a hasty decision,” he said timidly. “How would it be if we were to call him here? He may apologize, and he will have things to say for himself, and we can make our decision afterward.”

  Everyone agreed. The head novice and two others went for the proctor, and came back to report that he would be with us in a moment.

  We heard a heavy step far down the hall. A threatening step, which approached at double the usual speed of the proctor. One of the twenty white doors at the veranda was shoved roughly open, almost torn from the groove, and the swarthy face and the massive black-wrapped body appeared. He seemed to have come from the bath—his face and neck were flushed. Th
ere was defiance in the folded arms and the feet planted wide apart.

  “You had something to talk about? Get it over in a hurry. Who’s your delegate?”

  “We want an explanation of why you hit X,” said the head novice. “Why I hit him?” The face had become an unrelieved crimson. “You want to know why I hit him? You called me here to tell you why I hit him? And what exactly are all of you doing? You call this discipline? There you go straggling along like a line of goldfish droppings, some of you still coming into the lecture hall five and ten minutes after the drum. You think I’ll let you get by with it? If you have to hit people to make’em understand, well, you hit’em. Straggling along, and straggling along, just like a line of goldfish droppings. Maybe you could brace up just a little?”

  “Why did you have to use force?” someone asked in a low voice.

  “So you’re going to cross-examine me, are you? I did what was right, and I’m not one to be scared by the whole mob of you. Step up, anyone that has a complaint. Step up in a mob, if you want to.” He glowered fiercely.

  I knew why Anayama was ignoring the challenge. He was making plans for single combat. He would knock the big fellow down and possibly disable him. If Anayama had stood up to land the first blow, the others would have been with him as if afraid to be left out. But Anayama did not mean to waste his time on mass violence. That was too easy, it was childish. Nothing heroic in it, neither the dark taste of conspiracy nor the exquisite taste of blood.

  To him there was no question of new and old factions, or of the independence and prosperity of the sect. He only wanted to carry out the conclusions to which the darkness of his days has brought him. There was anarchism in his manner and glance, and his intentions were clear from the gloomy silence he preserved through the rest of the long conference.