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

by Неизвестный

  Because Anayama did not get up, the moment for attack passed. In the group were some who thought of us, Anayama and myself and the novice who was hit, as worms in the body of the lion. We ignored the rules and showed no respect for authority. Firm believers were in the minority, but one day, quietly, they would become the core of the sect. They feared decay and wanted a purge. And then there were the practical ones who felt that they would get by somehow once they had found their way into the clergy. Their number was the largest. They cared nothing about the incident that was the occasion for the meeting. Time passed, and no new proposals came forth.

  A fierce combination of red and black, the proctor stood there like Fudō of the Fires. “Well? Nothing more to say? Why did you send for me, then? At the rate you’re going you’ll never make priests or rickshaw boys or anything else.”

  “I wonder if you would mind leaving us,” suggested the head novice, who was sensitive to the mood of the assembly.

  “Starting tomorrow, things will be harder. If a fist doesn’t work, I’ll use a club.” The proctor cast a savage glance in my direction. “I don’t remember when, but there was a night when a person in an Inverness and a soft hat bribed the gatekeeper and went out through the back gate and got into a taxi.” Someone snickered. “Whoever he is, his day is coming. We’ll find him breaking his vows and maybe killing someone, and the Buddha will see to it that he gets his neck wrung for his trouble. The day is coming, you mark my words. Let him be ready for it. It’s coming, and when it does, watch him wail.”

  (Already evidence was forming to support his prediction.)

  “This world is hell. You didn’t know it? Go around thinking it’s heaven, and you’ll get yourself ground to a pulp, skin and bones and all.” He turned like a master player and made his exit.

  But his words had been too strong a medicine. “We can’t let him get away with it.” That view gained support. “He thinks right is on his side and he doesn’t make the least effort at self-reflection.” A proposal from Anayama’s friend was being taken seriously: “We’ll just have to hit him. That’s the easiest thing.” And the older novice made his proposal again, and more were inclined to accept it: “We’ll leave the temple in a body.”

  There were several volunteers for the hit faction, and they marched up to take their place before the head novice. The leave-the-temple faction began to prepare a circular letter. “We’ll hit him.” “We’ll leave the temple.” The deliberative faction and the activist faction, the legal faction and the extralegal faction. The meeting gathered life, and a pleasant excitement flooded the faces.

  At no other time did those youths fettered body and soul in black and white vestments show such vitality. They said what they thought, and they seemed to live again. Held to one narrow path, forced into an antique mold, they seemed to find in the trivial incident an excuse for breaking away just a little.

  Drops of rain slanted into the light and ran down the windowpanes, glowing dimly against the darkness that widened out to the park. A frog was croaking at the foot of the hill, a full, yet soft croak. In the warm rain, a female frog would be making its slow way through the underbrush with a male frog on its back.

  I looked at all of them in the bright light of the long room, conferring among the braziers and the quilts, and I thought of the groves and something forgotten beyond the lights and voices.

  Frogs crawling on all fours, foam on their ugly drab-and-yellow bodies—I saw them with strange clearness. Crawling from clay holes in the breast of the hill and croaking gué-gué-gu-gu-guru-guru, they were making their way down the steep, rocky path to the lotus pond.

  At the pond, slivers of light were coning through the closed shutters of the tea cottage. Dry lotus leaves, catching sinews of light, were rustling in the wind and rain. The frogs, male and female, slid quietly to the bank, and floated in the water. The one was still mounted on the other, and the backs were shining.

  One bright morning, a young man and woman were watching frogs from the stone bridge. The woman wore a kimono and the man wore foreign clothes. “Let’s go.” The woman pushed gently at the man’s shoulder. She too was still watching the frogs. “Please, let’s go.” She reached for his hand. He nodded, and stood watching.

  “See how calm they are about it. How serious.” He studied the frogs gravely. “The two of them sinking in the water, and they don’t make a move.”

  “Just doing that.”

  They started off as other strollers came near. I was watching from beneath a big maple, high up beside the path. I was hidden by the trunk and by clumps of dry grass. Once a foreign man and woman saw me sitting there alone. Hunching their shoulders, they gave a little cry and shook their golden hair.

  “We’ll take a vote on it. Are there other suggestions?” I heard the unguent voice of the head novice. I came to myself and stood up.

  “I have a suggestion.” It would not do to let them hit the man. I began talking when I had been recognized by the head novice. “I am opposed both to hitting him and to leaving the temple. If we hit him because one of us was hit, we lose the right to raise the issue. And besides, violence is not good Buddhism. I’m absolutely opposed to taking violent measures.” I was conscious of Anayama’s gaze. “It would be meaningless to leave the temple. Every one of us wants to be ordained and go back to his own temple as soon as possible. It would do us no good to break discipline now. We would be the losers. We should therefore take over the Great Hall and refuse to move even an inch from it. We should go on a hunger strike like the great Gandhi. We should hold out until we have a promise that violence will not be used again. We should resist by non-resistance.”

  I had no idea whether Gandhi was Buddhist or a Hindu, but somehow the name Gandhi came to me. There was considerable applause. “A good idea. No need to leave the temple.” “No need to hit him.” The head novice looked around. “I find much to interest me in what Yanagi has just said. How many agree?” More than half the hands were raised.

  “But if you are going to adopt my suggestion, I have one condition: the head novice is to keep watch over the whole class and see that action is united. The policy I have described will be meaningless if, while we are carrying it through, someone hits the proctor.” I looked at Anayama, and spoke with emphasis. “Likewise, anyone who leaves the temple is to be punished for breach of discipline.”

  I repeated the speech I remembered having had from the organizer of a highschool strike. My plan, which would require neither leaving the temple nor launching an attack, pleased the moderates. It meant doing nothing at all. It had almost unanimous support.

  The head novice and two others went to consult with the faculty, the proctor excluded. People gathered around me. “We don’t eat from tomorrow, then?” “Can we drink water?” “No one can complain if we behave like Gandhi.”

  Having suddenly won my following, I was feeling expansive. I sat cross-legged in the middle of the assembly. I knew that Anayama’s resentment would be doubling and trebling, but I did not sense in that figure lying with its back to me the murderous rage that was to break out two days later.

  The other instructors were timider than the proctor, and clever. They took the large view. They foresaw trouble if the novices were to shut themselves up in the Great Hall. If newspapers noticed the incident, the dissident faction would certainly take advantage of it. But most important, there were funerals and other services in the Great Hall every day, and they brought in money.

  The very next day the proctor was sent off to do mission work in the provinces. We escaped without going hungry.

  At midnight, we were to take our vows before the golden Amida deep within the Great Hall. With that solemn ceremony, unchanged for centuries, we became brothers in the clergy. The ceremony was held in the inner sanctuary (ordinary visitors were forbidden to enter) of the five-hundred-mat hall. Silently, in darkness reaching high to the roof and shut in on all four sides, we would take our vows by the light of the single candle passed from novic
e to novice as we advanced in turn to the Amida.

  A national treasure that had survived a number of fires, the Amida was said to draw souls by a strange power of its eyes. The best of the large Buddhist statues, whether of the Nara Period or the Kamakura Period, have somewhere in their grandeur and warmth a strain not exactly of contempt for the creatures of this earth, but at least of willfulness, as if they were quite free to do what they would with us.

  Sometimes, faint on the tight lips, there is a deeply sardonic smile. Sometimes, in the too sharp light from the eyes, there is a rare malevolence. In either case, the sculptor, trembling at the limits of human understanding, at the abyss, in terror perhaps at the inhumanity and the compassion of nature—the sculptor has carved the hard wood and melted down quantities of metal; and around his work, while it is being finished, a record saturated with groans and sobs, and the blood of the weak, spilled as a matter of course, has been made for history.

  Some months earlier a nun had killed herself before the Amida by biting off her tongue. She belonged to a cadet line of the Imperial family. The young body, it was said, had fallen across the powerful knee as though crushed by the great, golden hand. A white hand was raised a little, suggesting that at the end she had been making some sad petition to Amida.

  There was a growing tension as the time approached.

  The soft rain that had been falling from the night before had turned into a storm. Before the seminary door, the white spray soaked the dark earth and gathered in puddles and roared down the glistening pavement. The roof over the hallway was pounded and rocked until it was almost impossible to hear an ordinary speaking voice.

  “You remember what happened yesterday.” It was Anayama’s voice, low at my ear. “You know what to expect. When the vows are over, come out in front.” The voice was without emotion. “When you hear the drum for the last services, come out on the hill. No mistake about it. You’ll come.”

  “I’ll be there,” I answered. I glanced at the sallow, stubble-covered face. It was sullen and twisted. Without looking at me, he turned, blackly silent, to take his place in the procession.

  Our feet and the skirts of our kimonos were soaked by the time we reached the Great Hall. We climbed the side stairs to the high veranda, where a small door was open. The head novice and one other were standing to the left and right. In silence, they poured scented water over our heads, and touched the palms of our hands with a fine, brown incense powder. We stepped into the hall over a wavering violet smoke from burning incense.

  A stout board wall separated us from the Amida, in the room behind which we were assembled. Waiting our turns, we stood in the high, narrow darkness. Our faces and the hands and feet, dim in candlelight from the door, were earthcolored and touched with red. On the walls to either side—the wall behind the Buddha and the white outside wall—there hung respectively two Mandala cycles and a painting of hell.

  On each towering Mandala, innumerable Buddhas in gold and five colors covered a deep purple-blue silk ground. Each Buddha, large and small, had a golden halo, and, in an unbroken network, each sat enclosed in a heart or a flower or an ellipse. The number was overwhelming. Packed tighter than insects in a hive, they sat in calm silence, so crowding the surface left and right and up and down that they seemed to bulge over, and could admit not one thing more. They were quite without expression. The coldness gave one a deeper sense of cruelty than the gaping red and green devils among the crackling, leaping scarlet flames in the hell on the other wall. Over the whole surface one felt an essence of indestructible energy, something not to be budged by any lever.

  The candle was passed to me, and I stepped forward. Two or three turns and I saw the short flight of stairs that led to the Amida. They creaked as I climbed. I looked up, and before my face like a boulder were the folds on the knee of the statue. Half sliding across the uncarpeted dais, I took my place at the center. I was sitting with the Amida.

  The golden Amida, half in light and half in darkness, stared out over a space far above my head. In the candlelight from below, the nostrils had changed shape. The thick flesh was oppressively heavy. The eyes, painted black, were not visible, but the line of the sockets stood out sharply. Those hard eyes were surely open, and looking intently at something. They were eyes that did not for an instant stop their work of seeing, and would forever go on seeing.

  They had no glance for me. They were looking in a wholly different direction. And yet even as they ignored me it was as if they had seen the whole of me, and seen through me. I looked up at Amida, and thought: “I am going out and have a fight. You know as much already. I am going out on the hill and behave badly. You have planned that and led the way. Whether I decide to go or not to go, you have decided everything in advance.”

  The candle moved, and the enormous shadow at the side of Amida fell down on me.

  “You have heard any number of complaints. That nun, and young people and old people who have lost relatives, have poured out their tears by who knows how many tons. Here I am before you. I know it is senseless, but I somehow want to have a serious talk. You are not a human being. You are not a god. You are an ominous, forbidding something. You do not say you are, you do not tell us what secrets you have as a something. Maybe I will be killed, maybe I will kill him. In a little while I may be a renegade and a murderer. You will watch in silence. A something from centuries ago, and from centuries before that, watching us. All right, something, stay with it. I have made up my mind to go out on the hill tonight.”

  From the darkness below came the dull, muffled sound of a wooden gong. The sound of the wind, too, was muffled.

  “No matter how many times a day I call your name, I cannot make a vow to you. But if I live, I will remember, perhaps unconsciously, the something that you are.”

  That in substance is what I mumbled as I turned, deeply uneasy, to climb from the black dais. I circled the room and walked out, and the cold, wet wind struck my neck.

  YASUOKA SHŌTARŌ

  Japanese readers often regard Yasuoka Shōtarō (b. 1920) as one of the few Japanese postwar writers to use humor creatively in his stories, despite a debilitating physical illness that sent him back as an invalid from the Manchurian front in 1944. Yasuoka’s mother nursed him with great affection, and his eloquent tribute to her constitutes much of the material used in the composition of his best-known novella, A View by the Sea (Umibe no kōkei, 1959). “Prized Possessions” (Aigan, 1952), the story translated here, is typical of the masochistically humorous stories Yasuoka produced early in his career, evocations of the physical and spiritual deprivations that were either produced or magnified by his war experience.

  PRIZED POSSESSIONS(AIGAN)

  Translated by Edwin McClellan

  “Cleaned out” is what they say, as if poverty were something that cleansed. We—Father, Mother, and I—have been virtually without income for some years now, and I know that it isn’t quite like that—empty rooms, cold clean air blowing through, simple living, and that sort of thing. Rather, poverty to me is more suggestive of something warm, sticky, and messy that clings to you; it means disorder and sickly stuffiness. There is nothing at all bracing or simple about it.

  Father used to be a professional soldier but, probably because he was a veterinary officer, managed to avoid being accused of war crimes. It is four years now since he returned home safely from the South Pacific. In all that time, he has hardly ever stepped out of the house. Apparently he had some pretty intimidating experiences during internment, for he is still fearful of being beaten up. Mother, by nature a more enterprising and outgoing person, would, it was thought, show her mettle in times like these; and she did indeed get into the business of peddling saccharine, but the venture quickly ended in disaster when our neighbors found out that she had been selling them very questionable stuff at an appallingly high price. Her reputation was ruined for good, it seems; for our neighbors have remained openly suspicious of her whenever they have any dealings with her, such as when it�
��s her turn to help with the local food rationing. She suffers from a terrible inferiority complex now, and is unsure of herself no matter what she does. It’s the way she handles money that worries us particularly, of course. She seems to have lost the ability to add and subtract, and when she goes out to do her day’s shopping, she hands her purse over to the shopkeeper and asks him to take out the right amount. It’s that bad. Then there’s my own illness. I got Pott’s disease while in the army, and I still haven’t been cured. Much of the day I loll about in bed, recuperating, so to speak.

  The kind of confusion that can take over a family which has lost all capacity to manage its affairs has to be seen to be believed. Open a drawer in our tea cupboard and you will find, no doubt to your surprise, a saw. That’s there because Mother, in one of her weaker moments, imagined that it was a plane for shaving dried bonito. Father, for his part, hoards and jealously guards everything he deems potentially useful as though he were still at the front. Piled up in some strange order on the staggered shelves on the side of the alcove are such items as his veterinarian’s saw, scalpel, glass fragments, seeds of unusual plants, his old rank badges, khaki-colored thread wound around a leather bobbin, and so on. Once swallowed up in this whirlpool of rubbish, his handkerchiefs and socks, even his shirts and underpants, are no easier to extract than salt from the sea. I need hardly say there are cobwebs all over the house—on the transom work, ceiling, electric light cords, anywhere you can think of. They are different from ordinary cobwebs, however, in that clinging to them are thin, fluffy bits of white stuff, resembling flowers growing out of mildew. They are in fact bits of angora rabbit fur. Let me say here that even cats I have never liked very much. I have always wondered at those people who seem to adore these impertinent beasts that come and rub their hairy bodies against your skin and stink up the house with their pee. But I have learned that compared to rabbits, they are immeasurably more tolerable.