The Miner

by Sōseki Natsume

  Just three feet ahead of me, Hatsu suddenly went down on all fours. Shocked to see that he had tripped, I planted my feet to keep myself from stumbling into him. This required a real effort since the slope of the road threatened to send me tumbling forward. I leaned the upper part of my body back, waiting for Hatsu to regain his footing, but this he made no move to do. He stayed down on all fours.

  “Is something wrong?” I asked from behind.

  He did not reply. I was sure he must have hurt himself and I was about to ask again if he was all right when he coolly began to move off.

  “Are you sure you’re all right?”

  “Crawl!”

  “What’s that?”

  “Crawl, I said!”

  His voice was moving slowly away from me. And the sound of it I found puzzling. Granted, Hatsu was facing the other way, but his voice was still emerging from a point close enough so that it should have been perfectly audible. Instead, it was suddenly being swallowed up. And not because the voice itself was thin. It was Hatsu’s normal voice made vague, as if it had been sealed in a bag. Something out of the ordinary was going on, I realized, peering into the darkness. Then I understood. At this point the tunnel, in which it had been possible to walk in the usual upright position, narrowed down so suddenly that crawling was the only way you could make it through. Hatsu’s legs were sticking out of the narrow opening. His upper body was inside. Then one of his legs went in. And, almost immediately, the other leg went in. Now I resigned myself to having to go down on all fours. No wonder Hatsu had ordered me to crawl. I did as I was told. Or at least I tried to. I was holding the lantern in my right hand. When I slapped my wide-open left palm against the ice-cold mud (or rock, or clay, or whatever it was), the cold seemed to leap up my arm through my shoulder and into my heart. Trying not to set the lantern down, I had to bring my right hand up close to my face until it was almost touching—a very inconvenient arrangement. I froze in this position, wondering what to do. I looked at the lantern dangling from my right hand. Just then something dripped from the tunnel ceiling. The lantern flame hissed. A wisp of soot grazed my chin and cheek. It went into my eye, too. But I continued staring at the flame. Far off, I heard a clanging sound. There were miners at work somewhere, no doubt, but how far away and in what direction, I couldn’t tell. It was not a sound from a world where north, south, east, or west meant anything. I made myself crawl ahead two or three “paces” in this position. True, it was inconvenient, but not impossible to move. The one thing that concerned me was the occasional drip from the ceiling and hiss of the lantern. Hatsu had left me behind with nothing but the lantern to rely on—a lantern that was hissing and threatening to go out. Each time it happened, though, the flame would grow bright again. And as soon as I began feeling reassured, another drop of water would fall. Hiss. Flicker. Now I was sure it was going to go out. In fact, water had been dripping from the tunnel ceiling all along, but with the lantern hanging down below waist level, I had probably not noticed the problem. It was only after I had brought the lamp close to my ear and heard the hissing that it made me nervous. Which slowed down my crawling even more. I had still gone no more than three paces when Hatsu’s voice rang out.

  “What the hell are you doing in there? Come on out! Hurry up or the sun’s gonna set!”

  No, I hadn’t misheard him. Down here in the darkness, Hatsu had actually said the sun was going to set.

  Crawling along, I looked in Hatsu’s direction, thrusting my chin out so hard my Adam’s apple was ready to pop. Six feet ahead there was something like the opening to a bear’s den, from which protruded Hatsu’s face—or what seemed to be his face. He was bent over and peering into this passage where I was taking too much time. I don’t recall how I managed to get through the remaining six feet. I crawled to the end of the hole as quickly as possible and poked my head out, by which time Hatsu had withdrawn his face and was standing outside the hole, his legs now in front of my nose. I was happy to crawl the rest of the way out.

  “What were you doin’ in there?”

  “It was so narrow.”

  “If you’re gonna let narrow places scare you, keep outa the mine. Any dope knows there’s no ground to stand on down here like on the land.”

  No, I hadn’t misheard him this time, either. Hatsu had actually said that there was no ground to stand on in the mine as there is on the land. I’m making such a point of assuring you that he actually said these things because Hatsu was a man who often came up with wholly unexpected remarks.

  Since Hatsu would come down hard on me every time I tried to make excuses for myself, I mostly kept quiet, but this time I let slip with, “I was worried the lantern was going to go out.”

  Hatsu thrust his lantern at me and began to examine my face in great detail. Then he gave me an order.

  “Put it out.”

  “But, why?”

  “Because I said so. Put it out.”

  “Blow it?”

  Hatsu burst out laughing.

  I looked at him in amazement.

  “Look, don’t be stupid. Whaddya think is in these things? Rape-seed oil! It takes more than a drop of water to put ’em out!”

  This finally set my mind at ease.

  “Feel better? Ha ha ha ha!”

  Every time Hatsu laughed, the whole tunnel shook. And when the sound died, the place seemed twice as quiet as before. Just then there came the clanging of hammers and chisels.

  “Hear that?” Hatsu asked, flicking his chin toward the sound.

  “Yes, I do,” I said. I stood there listening for more, but Hatsu urged me ahead.

  “Let’s get goin’ now. And stick close to me this time.”

  Hatsu was in a very good mood, probably because I was entirely at his mercy. It didn’t matter how harshly he might criticize me, as long as he was in a good mood. In this sense, “not mattering” means making things work to your own advantage. Having fallen so low, I was satisfied to go sniffing after Hatsu’s tail. The road took a sharp turn to the left and sloped down again steeply.

  “Watch it, now, time to go down,” Hatsu called to me without turning around. The way he did this reminded me somehow of the way Tokyo rickshaw pullers warn their passengers about steep hills, which, despite the agony, made me want to laugh. Hatsu, quite unaware of this, started down. I followed, not to be outdone. The way proceeded down in terraces cut out of the earth. It turned every twenty-five or thirty feet, but altogether the descent must have been as much as at Atago Shrine.16 With a tremendous effort, I stayed with Hatsu on the way down. At the bottom, I heaved a great sigh, which seemed to give me some pain. I assumed it must be the bad ventilation deep down in the mine, but in fact my health was suffering even then. After another fifty or sixty yards of painful breaths, the look of the place changed again.

  Now Hatsu lay on his back with his hands on the ground and inserted everything from the waist down into a hole. The passage was so low and narrow that the only way to negotiate it was with this special bottom-first technique.

  “Look how I get through here. You do the same.”

  Almost before Hatsu had finished speaking, his trunk and head slipped out of sight. Impressed by the skill he had acquired through long experience, I stuck one foot through the opening, groping for a foothold with my sandal but encountering only empty space. The other side of the hole had to be a sheer cliff or a very steep slope. Meaning that if you went through headfirst, you’d also fall headfirst and injure yourself, and if you just shoved your feet through, you’d stumble. Realizing this, I stretched my legs out stiffly and set my hands on the ground behind me. I did this so clumsily, however, that the moment my hands hit the ground, my bottom did, too—and with a loud slap. The impact must have been pretty strong because it hurt a little even through the seat-pad strapped across my buttocks. While cursing myself for having made a mess of it, I stretched both legs through the hole. They dangled down a foot or so, but still encountered nothing. All I could do now was move my hands and
bottom forward, stretching my legs out farther. This caused me to slide down as far as my thighs, when at last the soles of my sandals landed on something hard. Just to make sure, I tapped the hard thing with my feet, figuring that if it felt all right, I would let go with my hands and stand on it.

  “What’s this with the feet?” growled Hatsu from below. “Don’t be scared. Just put your weight on it and stand up.”

  The moment he said this, the upper part of my body slipped through the hole and came upright.

  “Just like an umbrella monster,” Hatsu said, looking at me. Having no idea what that was supposed to mean, I didn’t feel like smiling.17 Instead, I answered gravely, “Who? Me?”

  Hatsu seemed to find this very funny for some inexplicable reason, and he laughed out loud. His attitude toward me changed after this; he treated me somewhat more kindly. You never know when some chance occurrence is going to win someone over to your side. Meanwhile, artful attempts to curry another’s favor rarely seem to have their intended effect. I have yet to witness an act of flattery that managed to work as well as sheer good luck. Over the years I’ve tried to ingratiate myself with many different people in pursuit of some personal advantage, but virtually without success. It’s a scary business because eventually you’re going to be found out, however stupid the other person may be. Rarely has a planned response succeeded as well as my answer did to the “umbrella monster” remark. Having realized how absurd it is to exert yourself and fail, I have lately come to deal with others from a purely fatalistic standpoint. The two areas of difficulty here, though, are speechmaking and writing. Both of these are bound to fail unless I take great pains in preparing for them. And even then I fail. The results may be the same, but even if I don’t win anyone over with a painstaking failure, at least my weak points don’t show, so I always do that much. Sometime I’d like to give a speech or write something that a Hatsu would like, but people would probably just make fun of me. That’s why I haven’t done it yet. (None of this has anything to do with anything. Let me get back to the story of Hatsu.)

  Still laughing, Hatsu said from below, “Hey, stop lookin’ so serious and come down here. And hurry up, a day doesn’t last forever!”

  Yes, he actually said this, too, down here in the mine with his lantern.

  Climbing ten or fifteen feet down terraces cut in the earth, I came to where Hatsu was standing. He turned to the right. Another set of terraces went down twenty-five or thirty feet. At the bottom of those, Hatsu turned to the left. There were more terraces. Turning right, left, right, left, we zigzagged like a bolt of lightning down one level after another—how far down into the earth, I have no idea. It was my first time along this route, of course, and in the darkness of the mine it felt awfully long to me. When we had climbed down to the lowest level, where, it seemed, almost all ties with the world had been lost, we suddenly entered a room perhaps twelve feet by twelve. This “room,” of course, was just a place where the tunnel had been dug out more broadly, the walls of which swelled outward beyond the limits set by the floor and ceiling. It was as if we had fallen into a huge earthenware sake jar. I found out later that this was what they called a work site. They would widen the tunnel like this when an engineer had concluded that a vein of ore was present. The work sites were naturally broader than the passages, and each would be worked by a team of three miners on contract. Sometimes a work site estimated to require two weeks would be finished in four days, and others judged to need no more than five days they’d dig for half a month or more. In this way, roads would be dug in the mine, and if by a road they found a vein, they would dig out that spot, following wherever the vein led. This is why the entrance where the trains ran might be level and the tunnel there a single straight line, but once the mine turned down and came to Checkpoint No. 1, branch roads ran off to the right and left with work sites established at scattered points. After a work site was finished, they would find more veins and dig wherever those led, as a result of which the mine was a mass of narrow passages and dark holes—probably something like an ants’ nest. Or it might be compared to the way worms tunnel through a book. Human beings would eat the copper in the earth, and when they were finished eating they would find more copper and go to eat that, as a result of which these roads had been dug every which way. You could go on and on through the mine without ever encountering a miner unless you came to a work site. You’d hear clanging sounds now and then, but by themselves these only made the place seem all the more deserted. Hatsu had apparently been taking me on detours to avoid the work sites, probably because I was here mainly to see what the place looked like inside. I actually saw miners at work for the first time only after we came to the bottom of this long series of terraces. No matter how far we climbed down the lightning-bolt zigzag, it had never seemed to end and we never encountered anyone along the way, so when we entered a work site for the first time and met real, live human beings, I was overjoyed.

  They were sitting on a log. There were three of them. The log had been stripped of its bark and polished. About the size of a railroad cross-tie, it was big and heavy. I couldn’t imagine how they had managed to transport it this far. These things were left in the work sites by the setters to shore up the ceilings, in order to prevent cave-ins when the dug-out areas expanded. Two of the men were actually sitting on the log and the third was squatting down and facing it. In the space between them was a small wooden tub. It lay on the ground, inverted. The third man was pressing it down. All three men were emitting strange cries. The man suddenly lifted the tub, revealing a pair of dice. That was the moment when Hatsu and I entered the room.

  The three men raised their eyes in unison, looking at me and at Hatsu. A lantern had been fastened to the earthen wall. Its dark light shone on the three sets of flashing eyes. Nothing flashed but those eyes—really. The room, of course, was dark. The lantern, which by rights had to be bright, was dark. The way it smoldered, giving off murky smoke, it looked like a cloudy liquid that moved. No sooner did its cloudy tip blacken and turn into smoke than the smoke was sucked into the darkness. For this reason, the interior of the room was hazy. And it moved.

  The lantern was fastened above the three men’s heads. Which is why the only parts of the men that could be seen with some clarity were their heads. But since the three heads were black, they were practically invisible. The effect was especially strange because the three heads had been clustered together, but the moment I entered the room they drew apart. The tub had appeared from among them. And the dice had appeared from beneath the tub. Having seen the tub and the dice and heard the three men’s strange cries, I had next seen their faces—faces I could barely make out. Of one man’s face, only the tip of a cheekbone and a wing of the nose caught the light. Half the brow of the next man shone through. The whole face of the third was dimly visible, but this was because it received light from my own lantern, some four or five feet away from him. In this pose, the three fixed their eyes with a flash—on me.

  Filled with joy though I was at having met up with other human beings at long last, the moment I saw these three sets of eyeballs, I stopped dead in my tracks.

  “Who the hell …,” one man started to say, then cut himself short. The other two kept silent. Still frozen in my tracks, I did not speak. I could not speak. Hatsu answered for me:

  “It’s a new guy,” he said with gusto. To be quite honest, the moment those three sets of eyes shone and I was asked “Who the hell …,” I forgot that Hatsu was next to me and I was aware of nothing but my own fear. Surely what happened to me is what is meant by the expression “to be rooted to the spot.” Just as I became rooted to that spot and was going stiff all over, Hatsu spoke up. His voice emerged from behind my left ear, and as it passed by on its way to the three men, it reminded me that I was not alone. Oh, yes! Hatsu is here! As a result, my stiffening arms and legs returned to normal. I took one step sideways, intending to have Hatsu step out in front of me, which is exactly what he did.

  “Don’t
you guys ever do anything else?” he asked, holding his lantern by his side and looking down at the tub and dice on the ground in the midst of the three men.

  “You want in?”

  “Not today. I’m showin’ this guy around.”

  With a healthy grunt, Hatsu lowered himself onto the log. “How about a little break?” he asked, looking at me. I had been frightened stiff (literally), but his invitation made me very happy and restored my spirits. I sat down next to him, six feet from the nearest miner. Now, for the first time, I saw how the seat-pad worked. It was positioned exactly right to cushion your buttocks. And it kept off the chill. Earlier, I had been feeling a little dizzy and had lost my bearings—if it was possible to have bearings down here in the mine. Let’s just say I wasn’t feeling too good. But sitting down and relaxing like this was a great relief. The four men had all kinds of things to talk about.

  “Know about the new girl in the Hiromoto?”

  “Yup.”

  “Buy her yet?”

  “Nope. You?”

  “Me? I’m—ha ha ha!”

  This was the man whose face had been dimly visible in its entirety. It was still visible—dimly. For example, its shape seemed to stay pretty much the same whether the man laughed or not.

  “You get around, don’t you?” Hatsu said, and he gave a little laugh, too.

  “I’m not the only one. You could die any time in this hole.”

  “That goes for all of us,” one of the other men said, his voice strangely full of feeling. This took me completely off guard.

  Suddenly my nearest neighbor on the log spoke to me.

  “Where you from?”

  “Tokyo.”

  “Well, you won’t make any money here,” one of the others said.

  I had been amazed at the persistence with which Chōzō had showered me with promises of all the money I was going to make, but no sooner had I arrived at the boiler than, one after another, the men had started warning me of the exact opposite—that I would never make any money. From the boiler, I had come all the way down here assuming that, at the bottom of the earth, at least, I would be spared such talk, but now the first words spoken to me by the first human beings I had encountered in the mine were more of the “You won’t make any money” variety. It was so ridiculous I wanted to say as much, but I decided to hold off. I knew I’d be beaten to a pulp if I didn’t watch my step. Of course, I’d be beaten to a pulp if I said nothing, so I asked, “Why not?”