by Неизвестный
Leaning against the railing, I gazed at the firefly. For a long time, the two of us sat there without moving. Only the wind, like a stream, brushed past us. In the dark, the countless leaves of the zelkovia rustled, rubbing against one another.
I waited forever.
A long time later, the firefly took off. As if remembering something, it suddenly spread its wings and, in the next instant, floated up over the railing into the gathering dark. Trying to win back lost time, perhaps, it quickly traced an arc beside the water tower. It stopped for a moment, just long enough for its trail of light to blur in the wind, then flew off toward the east.
Long after the firefly disappeared, the traces of its light remained within me. In the thick dark behind my closed eyes, that faint light, like some lost wandering spirit, continued to roam.
Again and again, I stretched my hands out toward that darkness. But my fingers felt nothing. That tiny glow was always just out of reach.
NAKAGAMI KENJI
Nakagami Kenji (1946–1992) began his life in a slum and suffered through a series of family crises, including the suicide of his older brother. He began his writing career while working in a factory, and his powerful stories of the lives of people who inhabit the ghettos of the “outcast” class, or burakumin, have made him one of the most consistently admired writers of his generation. Less well known, perhaps, are his stories set in historical times, which have a special mythic power that is almost unique among contemporary writers in Japan. “The Wind and the Light” (Sōmoku, 1975) reveals Nakagami’s narrative force.
THE WIND AND THE LIGHT (SŌMOKU)
Translated by Andrew Rankin
He met a man in the mountains. It was deep in the hills, about an hour’s walk from Odaigahara. The man was crouching down with his back against the base of a tree and breathing with great difficulty, his shoulders heaving. Broken arrows protruded from the thigh and calf of his left leg and blood was seeping from both wounds. One of his eyes was closed up with bloody pus.
The man looked up at him. He showed no surprise, as though he had always known that he would be found. He was like a wounded animal unable to hide itself any longer.
At first he wondered if the man might be a god living here in the Kumano mountains. A great one-legged, one-eyed god.
He stood in front of him.
“What happened to you?” he asked.
The man shook his head in silence.
Perhaps he was an illusion. In the mountains, people often see visions of relatives who have passed away or distant loved ones. He had seen such a vision himself. With the sound of the cicadas rasping and ringing through him, he had seen his dead brother pass right in front of him. That was real, he’d thought, a genuine vision of a human soul.
“What happened to you?” he asked again.
“I got wounded, didn’t I?” the man said savagely, and glared at him with a look that seemed to say: Make one false move and I’ll tear your throat out.
He knelt down in front of him and offered him the water bottle he kept hanging at his waist. The man gave him another hard glare and then snatched the bottle from his hand. He removed the cork with his teeth and drank. The water spilled from his lips and ran down his chin and neck. Some drops fell on the hairs on his chest through a rip in his tattered and muddied clothes. But it wasn’t a rip, he realized. The man was wearing a thick tunic, tied at the front like a judo suit.
He certainly was a strange-looking creature. It was hard to know whether he was human or animal.
The man drank until the bottle was empty, then handed it back. He gave a deep sigh. He tried to rise, but lurched so hard that he stepped on his own wounded foot. Blood spurted out. Putting his back against the tree, he then straightened his legs and stood up. The man was taller than him, he noticed.
The sound of cicadas in the distance. The damp scent of cedar.
“I lost,” said the man. His manner had changed since accepting the water. Now he sounded ashamed of his injuries. He shook his head as though his blind eye was bothering him, and pressed his hand to it. “I lost. They beat me good an’ proper. It’s the end for me,” he said. Then he laughed,
“Which way are you headed?” he asked the man. “Are you going to Ise, or back to a village in Kumano?”
“Where would I be going to? There is no place for me to go,” said the man, shaking his head. “You just tell me where it is and I’ll go there. Don’t mind where.”
The man managed to take one step but wobbled on the next.
He extended his arm as support. The man angrily resisted but then fell down, landing on his backside and knocking his head against the tree. He put an arm around the fellow’s waist to help him up. This time he didn’t refuse, and meekly allowed himself to be lifted to his feet.
The man stank like an animal. Or was that what people actually smelled like? He remembered the time he’d been hospitalized after catching his leg under a crate at work. Unable to take a wash, it wasn’t long before his head, his belly, and his crotch began to stink like a beast.
With the man’s arm around his shoulders they made their way together through the trees. Shortly they came out onto a ridge. The cliffside undergrowth shimmered a strident green in the glare of the sun. He heard the man’s breathing, a short wheeze following each injection of air into his lungs. He sat him down on a patch of rocky ground.
A gang of crows came swirling up from below the ridge.
The man looked at him.
“Might as well leave me here and be on your way,” he said glumly. “Or maybe you’d do me the favor of throwing me off this here cliff?”
He assumed the man felt bitter about not being able to walk by himself. From where he stood he could see the mountains stretching away. There seemed to be no end to them. He knew they had two more mountains to cross before they would find a place with hot water. Given time to sit here and think about it, the man’s resentment at being rescued by a complete stranger would only increase. He decided not to waste any more time.
“Let’s get going,” he said. He lifted the man to his feet and they made their hazardous way down the path that led from the cliffs until they found themselves in another grove of tall cedars. Soon the cliffs were lost behind them.
The hum of the cicadas was punctuated by the breathing of the two men as they pressed on through the trees.
The man kept rubbing his blind eye.
It reminded him suddenly of the pet birds he’d left behind in Tokyo. Just for a moment, it seemed as though they were the illusion.
He’d noticed it just before coming back to Kumano for his brother’s memorial service. One of the finches that had left the nest that spring was blind. He had no idea what caused it. Possibly a lack of nutrition while it was a chick, or maybe a stroke of genetic bad luck, with recessive genes just happening to coincide, resulting in this blind finch also being white all over. And yet its father had the usual black-and-white speckles and was as fit as a fiddle. He wondered whether it might be something to do with inbreeding. He’d bought the birds in the pet section of a department store. Later he found out that males and females sold in the same shop often come from the same parents. That gave him a bad feeling. What was he supposed to do? After all, they were just birds, not people. Keeping a blind bird as a pet wouldn’t be much fun. And anyway, they were only Bengal finches, not especially pretty to look at or to listen to. Their strong point was that they were as tough as weeds. They were perfectly happy just cheeping and flying about and weren’t bothered by a bit of hardship. If there was a nest box available they laid eggs and raised the chicks and three months after hatching the chicks were grown up.
The blind albino finch was perched on the wire netting. Should he kill it? He gave it a poke. When he touched its beak it scurried out of reach. He’d lost count of how many finches he had altogether. The cage he’d built specially for them was three feet high and three feet wide and the perch inside was crowded to the limit. The blind bird wasn’t strong en
ough to shove its way in with the others. It fell straight down and landed, quite by luck, on the food tray. Its eyeballs were a cloudy white.
It was a beautiful little finch.
It perched a second time on the netting and just sat there dopily as though it was looking at something. After a while it turned and fluttered down to the food tray. It pecked at the food and drank some water and then flew up and perched on the netting again. It repeated this routine endlessly.
He kept wondering if he should kill it, pretend it had never existed.
He slipped his hand inside the cage. The finches panicked and scattered. Three sides of the cage were boarded up with planks and when the birds slammed into them they fell spiraling down. Others hid behind the nest boxes.
The blind bird was in one corner of the cage. It extended its neck and peered cautiously around, ready to take off at any second. He snatched it up in his massive hand. The finch made frantic efforts to flap its wings, as though it knew it had been caught by something vastly bigger than itself. It wriggled vigorously as it tried to escape. The glare of the sun lay on it.
He began to squeeze.
The little finch struggled. If he squeezed any further he would crush its frail bones and it would die. He’d killed some of the budgerigars like that before. They were the weakest. He kept on buying new ones and they just kept on dying. They’d be full of energy when he left for work in the morning, but by the time he got back their feathers would be puffed up and they’d be tottering about, unable to climb onto the perch. He tried everything. He warmed the cage. He forced medicine down their throats. He kept the cage by his bedside at night, and heard the birds’ wings tapping the sides of the cage as they made unsuccessful attempts to fly. At some point he would fall asleep. When he awoke, the birds would be dead. He couldn’t bear to watch them vomiting all the time and in obvious pain, so he ended up crushing the life out of them with his bare hands. It wasn’t exactly euthanasia. He just didn’t want to have to watch them suffer. It was enough that human beings, with their human knowledge, their self-awareness, should suffer. But the blind finch he held in his hand now was too small for that, too indifferent to its own blindness. He put it back in the cage.
He was a big man. To others, he didn’t look like the sort who would be interested in raising finches. Seeing him looking after these fragile creatures with his great rough hands, people often said he was like the “gentle giant” in the fairy tale. There was something funny, something eccentric, about a man his size taking care of little birds and their nests. It was almost heartwarming. At least, it would have been if the birds weren’t plagued by death and deformity.
The blind finch sat on the edge of the food tray. It didn’t try to eat. It just sat there, its neck extended, its wings tucked tightly against its body, gazing at him with its sad white eyes as though it were praying to something, calling to something. The healthy birds jostled for room on the perch or gripped the netting. The blind albino finch stayed in the center, the others darting wildly around it, pecking at the food and drinking the water, as if some magnetic force were given out by the white bird’s feathers.
At one time, he had tried separating Goldcrests into two cages: one for males only, and one mixed. The mixed cage had one male and four females in it. He knew they were laying eggs, but he thought, what’s the point, and he left them there. They were such cowardly birds. One sound would send the whole cage into a commotion. He glued paper over the netting so that they couldn’t see outside, but it made no difference. One sound was all it took. The birds erupted into a wild frenzy. The chicks they’d spent such a long time rearing were kicked out of the nest or trampled on. The chicks died.
So many had died that way. They looked like hairy caterpillars. Others fell and died with flecks of blood on their heads. When he cleaned out the mixed cage with the five birds in it he removed all the eggs. He tossed a couple straight into the garbage can without even bothering to crack them open. He picked up another. Might as well take a look, he thought. He cracked the shell. He saw red flesh wriggling inside. He gasped.
The beat of a tiny heart, exposed to the open air, twitched in the palm of his hand.
He hadn’t meant to kill it. It was a mistake. Just a mistake.
Forgive me. Buddha, god, whoever you are, forgive this wretched sinner. Forgive me for what I’ve done to this naked, skinless lump of life.
Never had he felt the light of the sun so strongly on him. It seemed to burn him, scorching his body as though it was his own life that had been laid bare. His own life, squirming, pulsating, exposed to the sun and the air.
He had broken eggs accidentally like that four times before. Of course, even if they had hatched, the chicks might have been blind or deformed. But he felt he was sharing the experience of the falconer in the Hosshin-shū who looks on helplessly as a living thing appears from the belly of a dog he has fed to his hawk, a life too young to have grown fur, something made up only of red skin and flesh. It was not the blood that horrified him, nor the red flesh. It was the life itself, the small, squirming, immaculate life formed in the darkness of its mother’s belly, that horrified him.
The sound of the cicadas swept over him in waves. He heard the man’s sharp breath, and his own, like tens of thousands of people inhaling and exhaling. The man weighed heavily on his shoulder as he carried him along. Beads of sweat trickled into his eyes.
He began to feel as if he was the one being led through the mountains by this man. It was his eye that was sightless, his leg that was injured.
The dense cedars continued endlessly. The sun was directly above, but the light was obscured by canopies of branches.
I was the one born blind. I was the one hidden in a darkness that was abruptly shattered and exposed to the sun. It was me, my flesh, squirming in the light.
Shakily, he walked on.
Passing around a patch of bare rocks he came across a spring. A grassy slope descended gently away from him. He let the injured man down by the water.
“Just leave me here,” said the man. “Why d’you try and help me?”
He didn’t answer. He took a sip from the bubbling spring and poured water over his head and onto his chest. Forgetting himself for a moment, he lay down on his stomach and thrust his head under the flow and splashed the water over himself again and again.
The man was wheezing badly. He filled the bottle with spring water and offered it to him, but the man only groaned and shook his head. His chest was pumping.
He emptied the bottle over the man’s head. He took the towel he kept tucked into his belt, soaked it in the spring and wiped the man’s dusty face, taking care not to touch the clotted blood in his left eye. Then he soaked the towel again and wiped the man’s belly and armpits.
“Thank you.”
The man reminded him of someone. But who?
He dipped the towel again in water and wiped the area around the broken arrows embedded in the man’s leg. The arrowheads were sunk in too deep to be pulled out by hand and both shafts had snapped off. He needed a doctor quickly or it would be too late. But they were still not even halfway over the first mountain.
What had happened? Who could have done this to him?
A solitary kite circled above. There was no sound.
“Right, let’s get going,” he said.
The man refused to move. The cicadas started to rasp. The man’s left eye was blind, his left leg lame. He let out an anguished cry.
Leave me here. Here, sitting in the grass, motionless. Wounds fester and the body grows feverish. Every brush of the wind is agony. Then life ends. The body rots. The crows flock around the corpse. They pluck out the eyes and rip the belly and peck at the flesh. Then they vanish into the sky.
He helped the man to his feet. He set off again, taking the man’s weight on his shoulder. But it wasn’t him who was walking now: it was one red, shapeless, squirming thing helping another piece of wounded, squirming flesh.
He thought of nothing. He
felt nothing.
They made their way down along the line of the cliffs, climbing over damp, mossy rocks and following the faded traces of the mountain path. Now the man seemed almost weightless. The sounds of human breathing had multiplied. He heard a huge number of them, all panting and wheezing, hundreds of pieces of living flesh moving together, the fit assisting the wounded. They were behind him, too. He could hear them all.
The man moaned.
They descended a slope and were soon engulfed by trees again. There was no light. The sun seemed to have been swallowed up by the sky.
Suddenly the man burst into tears.
“Kill me, kill me here!” he cried. “I beg you, kill me!” His voice quavered like a broken flute. “I don’t know who you are, sir. But I’m blind and lame. Strangle me, bash my head against a tree, crush my skull with a stone, but for god’s sake kill me!”
He set the man down at the foot of a cedar with his back resting against the trunk and tried to calm him. The man extended his sickly colored left leg, bent his right knee, curled up like a spring and struck the back of his head hard against the tree trunk. Then he tried to turn himself about on his knees, but lost his balance and fell over sideways.
“Look at me, I can’t even die by myself,” he wailed, opening his mouth wide. All his lower teeth were missing.
“Who gave you these wounds?” he asked.
But the man made no reply. He lay on his side and covered his face with his hands to stifle his tears. Had one of the villagers attacked him? Or were his injuries sustained in some ancient battle? Could he be the spirit of some warrior of old, vanquished in battle? He didn’t know what to think. He still wasn’t sure whether the man was real or imaginary.
