Modern Japanese Short Stories

by Ivan Morris

  She was just nineteen. She had begun seeing men when she was no more than thirteen or fourteen, and after leaving home and making the rounds of the provincial teahouses, she had emerged at Shitaya toward the end of her seventeenth year. Suited by nature for the trade she had chosen, she was fairly much in demand, and had decent enough customers; but she was not one to worry about the future. Quite without ambition, she cared nothing about the appearance she made. She simply let the days and months go by—something, you felt, was wanting in her. Yet that very fact made her seem genuine and unpretentious, and somehow sad. I could not see my way toward leaving her. It was, in a word, a ruinous match. I knew how worthless she was.

  As I lived with her, however, I too became insensitive to the jeers of the world and my duties to the world. I too came to care less than nothing about work and appearances. Absently, half in a dream, half immobile, I would lie in bed the whole day, not washing my face and not eating. I thought how pleasant it would be if the two of us could become beggars together.

  After Kimi moved to Yoshi-chō, memories of the slovenly life we had lived together became a nostalgic dream, and my one pleasure in the world was waiting for the day or two a month when she would stop by, as she had promised, on her way to or from the shrine. Since I had made the gesture of giving her up, I was able to approach my old teacher through an intermediary, and I was again allowed to give lessons.

  She did in fact come by two or three times. Although I was far from sure it was proper, she even stayed the night once, and went back toward noon the next day. That was the end. A month passed, two months, the last of the O-tori festivals1 was over, in Asakusa the New Year markets were opening. I heard nothing.

  I shall not forget that night. It was the twentieth of December, there was a heavy snow, and I was on my way home in the evening from a lesson in the stock-market district. I had a drink against the cold, and meant to take a boat across the river. But as I looked out at the snow I felt less like going, and instead stopped by the Fusahana on the strand. All three girls, including Kosono, had been called out, it seemed. The master too was away, as well as the elderly geisha who served as his wife. The man smoking by the brazier, still in his cloak, was Yamazaki the broker. He was in his forties, and he it was who had brought Kosono to this house. I knew him by sight. I asked how he had been.

  He dislodged a cat from a cushion that seemed to be the master’s and offered it to me. “You must be very busy. What a shame that there had to be snow just at the busiest time of the year.” His thin lip curled in an obsequious smile to show an array of gold teeth. “As a matter of fact, sir, there’s something I’ve been thinking I must talk to you about. I would have gone to see you this evening if the snow hadn’t frozen me up.”

  “I’ve come at the right time, then. What’s the problem?”

  “It’s about Kosono, sir. There seems to be no one at home, so perhaps we can have our talk now.”

  It was hard to know which of them had taken the initiative, but shortly after Kimi had come to the Fusahana she had become the master’s woman, and, after some squabbling, the old geisha who had functioned as lady of the establishment had been evicted. Yamazaki had therefore been asked to see me about giving Kimi up. The master would pay whatever I wanted.

  I sat staring at the man.

  “I quite understand, sir,” he went on, “but unless I make a rather embarrassing confession you won’t see why. The truth is that I once had a bit of trouble with her myself.”

  “Oh? You’re one of us, are you?”

  “It was before she came to Tokyo. I’ve had little to do with her since, but I’ve known her for a long time—she couldn’t have been more than fifteen—and I don’t think I’m completely without information about the sort of person she is. It won’t last in any case, sir, so why don’t you just take whatever money he has to offer and let her go? He’ll be lucky if it lasts till the cherries bloom.”

  “Whatever happened to that Shinnai man, Shimezō?”

  “The master here is only worried about you, sir, and has said nothing about Shimezō. I haven’t gone to look for him. I suppose he’s the same as ever.”

  “Has she been called out to a party?”

  “She’s been away on a trip for several days, I’m told. The other two girls say that before they’ll let her be their mistress they’ll move away. I found a place for one of them yesterday in this same district, and I think I’ll have a spot for the other at Omori before the end of the year.”

  “I see,” I said. “I had thought I’d have a talk with her before I decided what to do, but what you say makes it clear that I’ll only lose face the more time I let go by. Suppose I just withdraw and leave you to do what you can. Come and see me in Honjō when you find time.”

  I spoke quietly, and went out into the snow. In the course of the conversation I had made up my mind. I had of course known what to expect when I let her become a geisha again. If a patron had ransomed her I would have had nothing to say, though I might very well have been annoyed. But to give herself to her master and, without a thought for her debts, to take her place by the brazier and play the grand lady—that I could not allow. I bought a knife as I came out on the main Ningyō-chō street. Meaning to take advantage of the snow and hunt her down in the course of the night, I walked the district until my hands and feet were frozen. I found no trace of her. I went back to Honjō to rest, started out again in the morning, and spent the next days and nights on her trail. All in vain. Maybe she had sensed what was happening. To throw her off guard, I withdrew for several days.

  It was the twenty-eighth, three nights from the end of the year. Tonight I would surely find her. I started out as if to have a look at the street stalls, and when the lights were on I did every alley and every lane in all Yoshi-chō. Not a trace of her. The wench was a sly one, I said to myself. She had managed to live beyond her time. I went into a bar, drank from sheer exasperation, and staggered toward home.

  It was on the Honjō strand, exactly where I had run into her after being evicted from Shimbashi. About the place where they put the approach to Kuramae Bridge after the earthquake. A crowd had gathered, and I wandered over to see what had happened. There were various rumors: a woman had jumped into the river; she had been stabbed and thrown in; no, it had been a try at double suicide, and the woman had been held back by the police after the man had jumped in. For no reason at all, my heart was racing. When I reached home I found a penciled note on my samisen scores: “I wanted to talk to you, but you were out. I have to run. I will stop by on the evening of the thirtieth on my way from the hairdresser’s. Take care of yourself. Kimi.”

  My chest tight, I ran to the police station. I had not been wrong. The murdered woman was Kimi. Stabbed in the back, she had fallen into the river, and she was dead when the police pulled her out. I had a knife in my kimono and no alibi. I was about to be arrested when a man was brought in. He had given himself up at a police box: the Shinnai singer Shimezō. From his confession it was apparent that he had seen Kimi several times while she was living with me. He had been driven to murder by exactly what had infuriated me: he could not tolerate the idea of her having given herself to her keeper, of her planning to set herself up as mistress of a geisha house.

  Kimi is dead, and I cannot be sure that she had such ambitions when she gave herself to the master of the Fusahana. To judge from the note she left me, I can scarcely believe that she did. Her great weakness and her great charm was the way she had of accepting everything from the man who had for the time being won her. In the end it killed her. Be that as it may, she would probably not have been stabbed by Shimezō that night if she had not come by my rooms. And if I had been there to see her home she would probably have been safe. Or perhaps I would have played Sashichi2 in Shimezō’s place. One person has the good luck, another the bad. You never know.

  Honjō has changed completely. There is no trace left of that filled-in canal or of Mikura Bridge. I’d like to tell you how I married
my present wife and moved to Yotsuya, sir, but I’ve talked too much already. You must be bored. Possibly I can save that story until I see you again.

  Footnotes

  1 Twice or three times in November.

  2 The hero of a Kabuki play by Mokuami.

  SEIBEI’S GOURDS

  BY Naoya Shiga

  TRANSLATED BY Ivan Morris

  Naoya Shiga was born in 1883 into a well-to-do, upper-class family. He is one of the two great writers of the Meiji period who are still alive in 1961, and it is interesting to recall that, as in the case of both Kafū Nagai and Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, his early work was largely inspired by a reaction against the prevailing naturalism.

  After graduating from the Peers’ School in 1906, Shiga entered the English Literature Department of Tokyo Imperial University, but he soon broke off his studies to devote himself entirely to creative literature. In 1910 he joined a group of young literati, mostly the scions of peers and wealthy families, and helped to publish a literary magazine. This magazine was called Shirakaba (“White Birch”) and it gave its name to an important literary movement that lasted until the early 1920s. The Shirakaba movement was inspired by a very idealistic form of humanism which reacted against the mechanical philosophy and pessimism of naturalism by emphasizing the importance of the individual. In contradistinction to the all-pervading doubt and despair of the naturalists, the young Shirakaba writers proclaimed themselves humanists, for whom the fundamental purpose of existence lay in the development and expression of one’s own inner life. The neo-idealists (as they came to be called) were strongly influenced by the humanism of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky and looked forward to the eventual triumph of love and to the brotherhood of the human race.

  Many of Shiga’s early short stories were written under the spell of high-minded Shirakaba idealism. After a number of years, however, his essentially down-to-earth approach inclined him toward a more realistic form of expression and, like many other members of the Shirakaba school who were to become important writers (e.g., Ton Satomi), he outgrew its rather woolly idealism and launched into his own style of literature with his own ideas. The realism of Shiga’s fiction, especially after 1920, has exerted a particular influence on modern Japanese literature.

  Naoya Shiga is an intensely personal writer. Most of his principal works are virtually autobiographical. Although he did not originate the “I-novel” on the “I-story,” he achieved an unusual degree of literary success in the genre. This inspired many younger writers to follow his example by pouring out on paper the details of their personal experience. All too often their results have been banal or irksome, and in this respect at least it may be said that Shiga’s influence has not always been fortunate.

  Even when Shiga does invent plots, they are usually of a simple, uncontrived nature and almost invariably we are aware of the author’s own powerful personality. His approach is concrete, calm, self-confident. Shiga’s writing reveals an explosive hatred for the various manifestations of falsehood and injustice, and a constant search for the means whereby the individual can attain harmony. There is very little in the way of abstract speculation and theory and despite the preoccupation with human emotions, a minimum of sentimentality.

  Shiga is one of the few important modern Japanese authors who is mainly a writer of short stories. He has now been producing short stories for over four decades. They cover a wide field. Many of them are introspective and autobiographical. Others, like “Seibei’s Gourds,” are brief, delicate, simply-written stories with an undertone of mellow, ironic humor.

  Shiga’s best-known work, however, is a novel “A Dark Night’s Journey” (Anya Kōro); it is considered by many critics to be the great masterpiece of modern Japanese literature, but few foreign readers would share this view. It is a long book written in two parts between the years 1921 and 1937. Strongly autobiographical, it explores the themes of conflict, search, and final serenity. Despite the constant quest for harmony, the dominant mood is one of profound gloom; in this sense it reflects a spirit which was prevalent among Japanese intellectuals during the Taisho and early Showa periods, and which also sets the tone of Natsume Sōseki’s famous novel Kokoro.

  It may seem surprising that despite the relative paucity of his work Naoya Shiga should have achieved such an important position in Japanese letters. The main reason lies in his development of literary style. Shiga spends immense effort on each story and novel that he produces and he always aims at obtaining the best results with the fewest possible words. The result is writing of exceptional beauty and deceptive simplicity which has become known as the “Shiga style.” His language is clear, terse, delicate—and often unusually difficult to translate. Thanks to his sensitive perceptivity, he is able to achieve the most subtle effects by means of simple, objective descriptions. “Naoya Shiga,” as the literary critic Yoshida Kenichi has written, “is one of the pioneers in the creation of a literary style in which to express forcibly and precisely the working of the modern Japanese mind …. Only an original writer like Shiga could weld the disjointed elements of current speech into a literary vehicle adequate for a true and detailed description of the life going on about him.”

  The present story (Seibei to Hyōtan in Japanese) was first published in 1913, when the author was thirty. The collection and preparation of gourds is a well-established practice in Japan, where curio shops often offer gourd bottles of considerable antiquity and price.

  THIS IS THE STORY OF A YOUNG BOY called Seibei, and of his gourds. Later on Seibei gave up gourds, but he soon found something to take their place: he started painting pictures. It was not long before Seibei was as absorbed in his paintings as he once had been in his gourds.

  * * *

  Seibei’s parents knew that he often went out to buy himself gourds. He got them for a few sen and soon had a sizable collection. When he came home, he would first bore a neat hole in the top of the gourd and extract the seeds. Next he applied tea leaves to get rid of the unpleasant gourd smell. He then fetched the saké which he had saved up from the dregs in his father’s cup and carefully polished the surface.

  Seibei was passionately interested in gourds. One day as he was strolling along the beach, absorbed in his favorite subject, he was startled by an unusual sight: he caught a glimpse of the bald, elongated head of an old man hurrying out of one of the huts by the beach. “What a splendid gourd!” thought Seibei. The old man disappeared from sight, wagging his bald pink pate. Only then did Seibei realize his mistake and he stood there laughing loudly to himself. He laughed all the way home.

  Whenever he passed a grocery, a curio shop, a confectioner’s, or in fact any place that sold gourds, he stood for minutes on end, his eyes glued to the window, appraising the precious fruit.

  Seibei was twelve years old and still at primary school. After class, instead of playing with the other children, he usually wandered about the town looking for gourds. Then in the evening he would sit cross-legged in the corner of the living room working on his newly acquired fruit. When he had finished treating it, he poured in a little saké, inserted a cork stopper which he had fashioned himself, wrapped it in a towel, put this in a tin especially kept for the purpose and finally placed the whole thing on the charcoal footwarmer. Then he went to bed.

  As soon as he woke the next morning, he would open the tin and examine the gourd. The skin would be thoroughly damp from the overnight treatment. Seibei would gaze adoringly at his treasure before tying a string round the middle and hanging it in the sun to dry. Then he set out for school.

  Seibei lived in a harbor town. Although it was officially a city, one could walk from one end to the other in a matter of twenty minutes. Seibei was always wandering about the streets and had soon come to know every place that sold gourds and to recognize almost every gourd on the market.

  He did not care much about the old, gnarled, peculiarly formed gourds usually favored by collectors. The type that appealed to Seibei was even and symmetrical.

 
“That youngster of yours only seems to like the ordinary looking ones,” said a friend of his father’s who had come to call. He pointed at the boy, who was sitting in the corner busily polishing a plain, round gourd.

  “Fancy a lad spending his time playing around like that with gourds!” said his father, giving Seibei a disgusted look.

  “See here, Seibei my lad,” said the friend, “there’s no use just collecting lots of those things. It’s not the quantity that counts, you know. What you want to do is to find one or two really unusual ones.”

  “I prefer this kind,” said Seibei and let the matter drop.

  Seibei’s father and his friend started talking about gourds.

  “Remember that Bakin gourd they had at the agricultural show last spring?” said his father. “It was a real beauty, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes, I remember. That big, long one….”

  As Seibei listened to their conversation, he was laughing inwardly. The Bakin gourd had made quite a stir at the time, but when he had gone to see it (having no idea, of course, who the great poet Bakin might be) he had found it rather a stupid-looking object and had walked out of the show.

  “I didn’t think so much of it,” interrupted Seibei. “It’s just a clumsy great thing.”

  His father opened his eyes wide in surprise and anger.

  “What’s that?” he shouted. “When you don’t know what you’re talking about, you’d better shut up!”

  Seibei did not say another word.