A Dark Night's Passing

by Naoya Shiga

“Of course.”

  “Do you really mean that?” she asked. And when he reassured her, she said, “In that case, all right.”

  “We’ll both benefit from it, physically and psychologically. Just imagine how marvellous it would be if we could then start a new life together. We will, I promise.”

  “All right.”

  “Do you understand me?”

  “Yes.”

  “There need not be any negative meaning in our being apart for a while. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  That evening Kensaku told Oei of his plan to go away for a few months. She was adamantly opposed to it. She had seen how useless the trip to Onomichi had been, she said; this trip would do him no good whatsoever; no matter how unsatisfactory his and Naoko’s life together might have become, it was most unlikely that they would find new happiness after such a separation.

  Kensaku found it hard to explain his position to her. “You must first of all try to see that my reasons for going away this time are not the same. I went to Onomichi to force myself to get some work done; found that it was too difficult, and I failed. But this time, work is not my primary concern. I’m going in order to find spiritual wellbeing, you might say, and to recover my physical strength. It really isn’t a ‘separation.’ I’m not going to set up house somewhere else or anything like that. It would be appropriate if you could just think of it as a trip I’m taking for the sake of my health.”

  “Where are you thinking of going?”

  “Daisen in Hōki. Last year I met a prefectural assemblyman from Tottori who couldn’t stop boasting about the mountain. It’s a holy place of the Tendai sect, and I understand I can stay at one of the temples. It may not be as bad as it sounds. In fact, staying at a temple may be just what I need right now.”

  11

  Kensaku could hardly pretend that this journey he had resolved to undertake was no different from his other trips; and because it was different, he found leaving strangely awkward.

  “It really doesn’t matter what time I leave,” he said to Naoko as nonchalantly as he could on the day of his departure. “I couldn’t hope to get there in one day anyway.”

  He looked at the timetable. “There’s a train going to Tottori at 3:16. If I miss that, I can catch the one going to Kinosaki at 5:32.”

  “Whenever you need tinned food and that sort of thing, let me know, and I’ll have Meijiya send it to you.”

  “I’m going to try my best to live on whatever I’m given there. If I am reminded too often of big-city comforts, I may find myself wanting to come home too soon. So don’t write too often either. Let’s promise to write to each other only when we have to, shall we?”

  “All right. But do write when you find that you want to, please. I hope you will want to.”

  “Of course I will when I want to. You’re not being unreasonable, of course, but you mustn’t make me feel that you’re waiting to hear from me all the time. That’ll make me nervous.”

  “All right, then, forget what I just said.”

  “Just worry about our baby, don’t worry about me at all. So long as I know the baby is fine, I’ll be able to relax.” He grinned and added, “I can concentrate on attaining Buddhahood.”

  Naoko laughed. “Why, you sound as though you’ve already left us mortals!”

  “That’s right. And the departed shall return as Buddha.”

  “What an inauspicious thing to say just before leaving.”

  “It’s not at all inauspicious. ‘The attaining of Buddhahood in this very life’ as they say. I shall become a Buddha as I am, and return to you with a halo around my head. Anyway, don’t worry about me, all right? And please make sure nothing happens to our baby.”

  “Be a good wet nurse, you mean?”

  “A wet nurse, a mother, I don’t care which, so long as you can for the time being forget that you’re a wife. Pretend that you’re a widow, if you like.”

  “Why do you like saying such inauspicious things?”

  “A premonition perhaps,” he said lightly.

  “What a thing to say!”

  Kensaku grinned. He was indeed leaving in a frame of mind akin to that of a man about to take holy orders, but he could hardly tell Naoko so. It was just as well, he thought, that the conversation had ended on this flippant note. He could now begin to get ready for his departure with good grace. He would catch the Tottori train at Hanazono Station. “You don’t have to see me off,” he said. “I want to leave as simply as possible.”

  Just then Oei appeared with the tea. “I’m leaving at three,” Kensaku told her. He then turned to Naoko again and said, “Will you tell Sen to call a rickshaw? I want it here at three.”

  “Couldn’t we leave together a little earlier, and walk to Myōshinji, say?”

  “It’s too hot to walk.”

  Naoko, looking a little disgruntled, went out to the kitchen to speak to Sen.

  Oei prepared the green tea carefully. “Don’t come back looking as you did last time,” she said, “all skin and bones.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll survive very nicely, you’ll see. I’ll be a different man when I come back.”

  “Don’t forget to write now and then.”

  “As I just said to Naoko, please assume that I won’t write; then if you don’t hear from me, you’ll know that I’m well.”

  “At least, it won’t be so lonely this time, since there’ll be the three of us.”

  “There’ll be four of you, counting the baby.”

  “That’s right, I’d forgotten. As a matter of fact, she’ll be the equal of two.”

  “I haven’t written to Nobuyuki to tell him, so will you, please? Tell him as casually as possible, and don’t say anything unnecessary.” Oei nodded. Kensaku, sipping his tea, looked at the clock. It was a little past two.

  Naoko came in with the baby in her arms. Awakened from her sleep, the baby seemed dazzled by the light and in ill humor. “See how well she’s behaving,” Naoko said. “She’s not going to cry before you leave.”

  “What a scowl,” Kensaku said laughing, and poked her fat cheek with his finger. “Try to look a little more cheerful, will you?” The tiny head bobbed up and down loosely, without control. “If anything happens, get a doctor from the hospital. Don’t ever call a local doctor as we did when poor Naonori was ill.”

  “No, we won’t. But we won’t let her get ill in the first place.”

  Oei said as she poured tea into Naoko’s cup, “There isn’t much to worry about while she’s having only milk, but next summer, when she starts eating all sorts of things, you’ll have to be very careful.”

  Kensaku went to the bathroom and washed himself down with cold water. Not long after he had changed his clothes the rickshaw arrived. With his large suitcase propped up between his legs, and facing the hot sun that was now in the west, he proceeded alone to Hanazono Station.

  The view of the River Hozu from Ranzan to Kameoka was beautiful. And the deep pools were more than beautiful, they seemed so cool and inviting. Above the mountains that rose sheer from the river stood Atago, its peak barely showing. He had always seen it from the east, he thought, and now, so soon, he was seeing it from the west. For a moment his house in Kinugasamura rose before his mind’s eye, very distant and very small.

  Ayabe, Fukuchiyama, then Wadayama. At last the summer sun went down. As the train left Toyooka, Kensaku watched for the famous Genbu cave, but it was a dark night, and all he could see were a few lights shining on the other side of the wide river.

  He got off at Kinosaki as he had planned, and put up at an inn called Mikiya. What he saw of the town as the rickshaw carried him to the inn seemed to him to be pleasingly characteristic of a mountain spa. Through its middle ran a shallow stream that reminded him of the River Takase in Kyoto. On either side of it stood a row of two- or three-storied inns, all with closely latticed windows. Yet for all its resort-town atmosphere, it had a remarkably simple and clean look about it. As they turned
into a narrow street from near a bathhouse called Ichinoyu, Kensaku saw a row of shops specializing in articles made of mulberry wood, in straw work, in Izushi pottery, and so on. The straw work, with the straw split and then pasted together, looked particularly beautiful under the electric light.

  At the inn Kensaku first wanted a bath before he had his dinner. He went across the street to a bathhouse that called itself Goshonoyu—presumably because some imperial personage had once visited it—and there soaked himself in the hot spring water. The bathtub, framed in marble, was very deep, and the water reached his chest even when he stood in it. As he breathed in the fragrant vapor that filled the room, he could feel the tension gradually leave him.

  He could not immediately put on his cotton kimono when he came out into the dressing room, so covered in sweat was his body. Repeated wiping with a towel did no good, so he sat down in front of the electric fan, and picking up a little book entitled A Guide to the San’in Area, leafed through it until the sweating stopped.

  In the book was a description of Daijōji, popularly known as Ōkyo’s Temple. It was in a place called Kasumi, it said, three stations away from Kinosaki. He might go there the following day, he thought, and see what the paintings were like. Not that Ōkyo, or the entire Maruyama school for that matter, had ever aroused much interest in him. Indeed, what he had seen of the master’s paintings—of cavorting puppies, chickens, bamboo and the like—had impressed him not at all. But Ōkyo was a name he had heard since childhood; besides, he might never come to this part of the country again.

  Either Kinosaki was a hot place generally, or it was a particularly hot night; at any rate, the heat prevented Kensaku from having a good sleep. It was probably a better place to come to in the spring or the autumn, he thought, or even in the winter.

  It was about six when he woke up the next morning. He wandered out blearily into the turf-covered garden of the inn, his head heavy from lack of sleep. On the side of the mountain that rose immediately before him was a pine tree with a dead branch on it; and on this branch were perched three or four black kites, crying by turns. In the garden was a pond filled with water drawn from a stream outside, and there a half dozen herons stood, their necks pulled in. Looking at this scene, Kensaku felt as though he was still asleep and dreaming.

  At about ten he caught a train for Kasumi; then from the station there he went to Ōkyo’s Temple by rickshaw.

  When Ōkyo was still a student—so the story went—the rector of his temple gave him fifteen pieces of silver to enable him to go to Edo to study. Years later, when the temple now standing was being built, Ōkyo remembered the priest’s kindness and returned with his disciples to paint all the sliding doors.

  Ōkyo had painted the sliding doors of the study bay and the anteroom, and those facing the altar. Kensaku particularly liked the black-and-white landscape in the study bay, which struck him as remarkably unaffected and true. In the anteroom were two paintings, one of the Chinese general, Kuo Tzu-i, and the other of a pine and a peacock.

  Goshun’s depiction of the four farming seasons was gentle and harmonious. Rosetsu’s monkeys, on the other hand, showed an abandon typical of him; and the last two of the eight panels all too plainly betrayed both in composition and brushwork the artist’s loss of interest. What an amusing contrast, Kensaku thought, as he pictured the drunken Rosetsu working beside his more restrained colleague.

  A copy—reputed to be by Ōkyo and uncompleted—of the Zen master Ch’an-yueh’s painting of the sixteen sages was exhibited on the second floor of the rectory.

  Near it was a pair of eagles by Shen Nan-p’in. Perched on a small rock sticking out above the waves was the female eagle, its wings spread out, legs bent, back lowered, neck thrust out. It looked up at the male eagle standing on top of a large rock above. The male eagle stood straight, and stared back fiercely at the female below. Kensaku was intrigued by the bluntness with which the artist had expressed the female eagle’s instinct to mate; and no less interesting to him was the male’s overbearing posture.

  He turned to the acolyte who stood behind him and said, “Anything else to see?”

  “You’ve seen all the paintings, I think. But on the roof there’s a dragon that is supposed to have been carved by Left-hand Jingoro.” Downstairs the two put on clogs and came out of the rectory. It was now cloudy outside. They went around to the left of the main building. A few feet up the hill from the top of the stone steps was a small open area, and from there they viewed the large dragon in the gable above. No doubt a realistic rendering, Kensaku thought with amusement. “Life-size, isn’t it?” he said grinning; but the acolyte seemed not to understand. On Kensaku’s upturned face a large drop of rain fell. “It’s beginning to rain,” he said, and as they walked back to the rectory, he could not resist another joke: “Brought on by the angry dragon, eh?”

  12

  That night Kensaku stopped in Tottori. The people at the inn pressed him to see the local sights. In the nearby beach, they said, which was seventeen miles long and over two miles wide, there were two hollows, named “the large cone” and “the small cone”; and then there was a small lake by the beach called Tanegaike. But the thought of being dragged around for miles over bumpy terrain on a rickshaw did not appeal to him. He bought postcards instead. The young maid who served him dinner recounted to him some of the local legends, such as the legend of the squire of Koyama and the legend of Tanegaike.

  In Tanegaike there dwelt a young woman by the name of Otane, who had turned herself into a large serpent. Once she chased a Tottori samurai to the gate of his house. The samurai, rushing in, shut the gate in her face. In indignation Otane peeled three scales off her body and stuck them on the gate before going away. Until very recently, the maid said in all solemnity, these scales had been passed down in the samurai’s family from generation to generation.

  Kensaku went to bed worrying about the next day’s weather. If it rained, he would have to spend another night at an inn somewhere. Of course he might quite enjoy staying at another spa—the one by Lake Tōgō, say—but he did want to reach Daisen as quickly as possible and begin a life of quiet on that cool mountain.

  He was awakened in the middle of the night by the sound of a heavy shower. At this rate it might clear up by morning, he told himself, and went back to sleep.

  The next morning indeed turned out to be so clear that he now became apprehensive about the impending journey in the burning sun. He did not look forward either to having to go through dozens of tunnels again as he had done the day before.

  On the train he opened the “Imperial Library” edition of Lives of Eminent Priests that he had bought in town the previous evening, and read a little of the chapter on Gansan. He soon tired of it, however; putting the book down, he gazed out of the window. They were passing Lake Koyama. It was a fine view. According to the legend as told to him by the maid, it had once been ricefields belonging to the squire; but in punishment for his having called back the sun at the end of a rice-planting day, his land had been turned overnight into a lake. Covering a large, flat area stretching between low hills, the lake did look very appropriately like fields covered by flood-water—-at least it could to anyone who had heard the legend. Lafcadio Hearn, Kensaku remembered, had described many of the legends of this area. Might he have written about the squire of Koyama, he wondered, and wished he had brought some Hearn with him.

  Unlike Koyama, Tōgō was a lake with no charm or character to it. Perhaps it also had a legend associated with it; but Kensaku doubted that it did, for he was inclined to believe that every place that had a popular legend associated with it had something about it that appealed to the imagination.

  As they passed Agei, Akasaki, Mikuriya, Kensaku continued to gaze out of the window without tiring of the scene. The vitality of midsummer, or something like that, began to communicate itself to him, reviving in him a rare sense of well-being.

  The rice, grown thick and over two feet high, seemed to sway in the heat of the s
un, though the day was windless. It’s the color of burning green, he thought excitedly.

  The color of the rice really was luxuriant. And so affected was he by the sight of the stalks rippling and jostling, indeed dancing in the brilliant sunlight, that he thought he could hear their joyous song. As though for the first time, he was made aware that such a world as this existed. There are people, he thought, that live like wild cats in a cave, forever snarling at each other; and then there is this life. For him that day, the harsh light of the sun was not at all unkind.

  He got off the train at a lonely station called Daisen. The rickshaw man who came in answer to his call said that Daisen itself was fifteen miles away. The rickshaw could negotiate only seven miles of that; one had to walk the rest.

  “What do I do with my suitcase, then?” Kensaku asked. “Do I hire a packhorse?”

  “Oh, no, I’ll carry it myself,” said the rickshaw man, picking up the suitcase and weighing it. He was a skinny man, somewhere in his fifties.

  “It’s pretty heavy, you know. It has books in it.”

  The man picked up the suitcase again. “It’s not that heavy,” he said, grinning.

  “Have you eaten?” Kensaku asked.

  “Have you, sir?”

  “I had a box lunch on the train.”

  “In that case, you can feed me something at a teashop on the way.”

  The prospect of being on the road together for fifteen miles, it seemed to Kensaku, had already established a spirit of camaraderie between them. As Kensaku got in the rickshaw the man said, “We have a lot of the day left, but it’s going to be a pretty stiff climb after we’ve done the first half.”

  Kensaku looked at the handsome outline of Daisen in the distance, and thought how strange it somehow was that he should be going to that mountain in the scorching heat with this rickshaw man. “I suppose it’s much cooler up there?”

  “Of course. In the old days, all the ice we used to get down here came from that mountain. In the winter we used to pile up the snow up there, then cut it up into pieces in the summer and bring them down. That was our ice. When I was young, I was one of the fellows who made their living doing that.”