Modern Japanese Short Stories

by Ivan Morris

The alarming intelligence that, since the day of the contests, the master had become increasingly subject to fits of evil temper soon made Lord Tadanao an object of terror to everyone in the castle. When on duty in their master’s presence the page boys hardly dared to breathe, their eyes started from their heads, and they would avoid the slightest unnecessary movement. Even the companions of honor took care to stand most particularly upon protocol, never moving a step in advance of, not taking a step in greater length than, their lord. The feeling of ease, which had existed to a considerable degree between master and retainers was completely lost, and the prospect of an audience with the lord filled one and all with gloomy apprehension. On withdrawing from his presence the retainers would feel physically and mentally exhausted, as never before.

  The deterioration in this relationship was not remarked solely by the retainers. one day, when a companion of honor brought him a letter from the family councilors, Lord Tadanao noticed that the man was preparing to crawl to him on his knees from a point some four or five steps away.

  “Don’t be afraid to come close,” he said. “There’s no need for all that ceremony.”

  But this was really spoken less in friendliness than in irritation. The retainer was sufficiently encouraged by the remark to make an effort to recover some of his old sense of ease. but it was a self-conscious easiness, and underneath there was still a hard core of resistance.

  Ever since the contests with naked spears Lord Tadanao had refrained, as completely as if he had forgotten their existence, from any form of practice in the military arts. It was not simply that he discontinued the tournaments, tournaments which had been held so regularly that they had seemed almost like a part of the daily routine; he was never even seen to take a dummy sword or spear in his hand.

  He had been bursting with martial pride, but always gentle; rough-mannered, but basically a most innocent and harmless young lord. Now that he had abruptly withdrawn his interest from swordplay and archery he devoted more and more of his days to drinking. Though he had been addicted to wine since early youth, it had never adversely affected his behavior. Now, as he drained cup after cup, day after day, signs of dissipation and disorderliness began slowly to appear.

  * * *

  It was at a banquet one night. Lord Tadanao was in an unusually cheerful mood. His favorite page boy, Masuda Kannosuké, ventured to make a remark while replenishing his lord’s great wine cup.

  “Why have we not seen your lordship lately in the military drill-hall?” he asked. “We wonder whether your lordship’s satisfaction over your recent exploits has not made you negligent.” By speaking in this way Kannosuké fancied that he was demonstrating, clearly enough, a friendly concern for his master.

  Lord Tadanao went white with rage. Seizing a tray for wine cups which lay at his side he hurled it with the speed of an arrow toward Kannosuké’s face. The violence was unexpected, and Kannosuké blanched; but, rigidly trained as he was in the code of loyalty, he made no attempt to dodge. He took the impact of the tray full on the front of his face and fell prostrate where he was, the blood slowly trickling down his pallid cheeks.

  Lord Tadanao rose without so much as a word and went straight to his quarters.

  A group of fellow pages ran to Kannosuké’s assistance and gently raised him. Kannosuké, excusing himself from further duty that night on a plea of sickness, retired to his lodgings, and before the dawn of the new day he committed suicide.

  When Lord Tadanao heard the news he only smiled, sadly and bitterly.

  Some ten days after this event Lord Tadanao was playing Gobang with his old family councilor Koyama Tango. The old man and Lord Tadanao ranked equal in Gobang, but over the last two or three years the councilor had tended to lose his touch. Today he was defeated three times running.

  “My lord,” he said, with a good-natured smile, “lately you have become exceedingly proficient. An old man like myself is no longer a match for you.”

  Lord Tadanao had been in good spirits until now, apparently highly pleased at his run of victories, but at Tango’s words an expression of melancholy stole across his face; and then, suddenly, he rose and viciously kicked over the small Gobang table set between himself and his opponent. The white and black ivory pieces arrayed on the table flew off in all directions, and one or two struck Tango in the face.

  Why his lord should burst into such a fury, especially when he was winning, was something which Tango was utterly unable to understand. As Lord Tadanao was stalking from the room the old man caught at the hem of his overskirts and addressed him in a voice which quavered uncontrollably.

  “What are you doing? Is your lordship out of his mind? For what reason does he offer such insults to Tango?” Indignation at the impropriety of this treatment blazed uncontrollably in the old man’s stubborn breast.

  But Lord Tadanao was not in the least moved by the old man’s anger. With a curt exclamation he pushed away the hand that clutched at his overskirts and abruptly walked through to his private apartments.

  The old man’s eyes filled with tears. He was mortified that the lord to whose upbringing since his earliest days he had devoted such loving care should have thus outrageously insulted him. As he recalled the respect and kindness shown him by Lord Tadanao’s father during his lifetime, he bitterly repented that he had ever lived on to know such shame. The idea of faking defeats on the Gobang board to flatter his lord was a servile notion which would never for one moment have entered Tango’s honest head.

  But by this time Lord Tadanao had come to interpret every act and gesture of his retainers in only one light.

  That day, on returning to his house, the old man put on formal robes and, with due observation of ceremony, plunged a dagger into his wrinkled stomach, thus ending an existence which had become too shameful to bear.

  * * *

  Rumors of Lord Tadanao’s disorderly conduct gradually spread throughout and beyond his domains.

  Lord Tadanao, avid for victories of any sort, had always been an enthusiastic player of board games, finding real satisfaction in demonstrating to himself his superior skill, but after this incident he suddenly desisted from such pastimes.

  It was natural under the circumstances that Lord Tadanao’s mode of life should grow gradually more wild and uncouth. Within the castle he did nothing but eat, drink, and make love. When abroad his sole pastime was hunting. He hunted birds on the moors and beasts in the mountains. Birds and beasts did not, simply because it was the master of the province come to hunt them, rush voluntarily within range of Lord Tadanao’s arrows. Away from the world of men, in the world of nature, Lord Tadanao felt refreshed, as if he had escaped from behind that barrier of deceit.

  V

  Lord Tadanao until now had always listened attentively to the advice of his senior councilors. At the age of thirteen, when he was still known only by his boyhood name of Nagayoshimaru, he had been called to the bedside of his dying father, and his father had said: “When I am gone listen carefully to whatever the councilors say. Think of their words as if they were your father’s.” He had always respected this last injunction.

  But lately he had begun to place a perverse interpretation upon every word they uttered, even if it concerned matters of the fief’s administration. If his councilors recommended a person for a certain post and lauded his abilities, Lord Tadanao felt convinced the man must be an impostor, and he would stubbornly refuse to make use of the man’s services. If his councilors complained of a person’s conduct and strongly urged punishment by house arrest, Lord Tadanao felt convinced of the man’s honesty and usefulness, and he would forbid them to issue, at any time, an order for his detention.

  The harvest throughout the Echizen fief was leaner this year than it had ever been in recent memory, and this imposed severe hardships on the peasantry. The councilors appeared before Lord Tadanao in strength and pleaded for some alleviation of the burden of rice taxation. But the more eloquently they expounded their case, the more distasteful to Lord
Tadanao grew the idea of acting upon it. In his heart he sympathized with the peasants. It was simply the thought of doing what his councilors wished him to do which troubled him. They droned on with their lengthy explanations until Lord Tadanao could bear it no more.

  “No!” he thundered. “I say it cannot be done, and you will do as I say!” Why he refused was something he did not clearly understand himself.

  The emotional impasse between master and retainers continued unresolved, and meanwhile rumors of the Lord of Echizen’s eccentric behavior reached even the innermost council rooms of the Shogunate at Edo.

  But Lord Tadanao’s distemper now proceeded little by little to gnaw its way into more fundamental compartments of his life.

  One night Lord Tadanao had been drinking steadily from an early hour in the privacy of his own rooms, accompanied only by a small group of his favorite ladies of the bedchamber. Included in the group was the girl called Kinuno, a beauty procured for him from faraway Kyoto, who had recently come to monopolize the whole of Lord Tadanao’s amorous passion and affection.

  The evening light had faded, the dark hours had slipped by, midnight was almost come, and still Lord Tadanao drank on. For the ladies, who do not drink, the time had been occupied solely in the monotonous and endlessly repeated business of keeping their lord’s cup replenished. Lord Tadanao suddenly roused himself from his dim-eyed, half-drunken torpor and glanced across at the dearly cherished Kinuno, seated there in attendance upon him. But these nightly drinking sessions seemingly exhausted her. In the very presence of her lord she appeared to have lost all consciousness of what she was doing. Those superb double-folded eyelids were slowly falling, and Kinuno was about to slip drowsily away to a moment of sleep.

  As he gazed intently into her face Lord Tadanao was seized by yet a new anxiety. He thought he saw there, clearly revealed in that unguarded weariness of expression, all the sadness of a woman at the beck and call of a great lord whose power is absolute, a woman unable for one moment of the day to exercise her own will, moving only to her master’s wishes, like a puppet.

  Lord Tadanao considered things further. It was unlikely that this woman, any more than other people, felt any genuine affection for him. Her smiles, her alluring glances—these were all tricks of art, things which had no deep significance. Having been sold, body and soul, for a sum which made any refusal on her part impossible, and set down, whether she liked it or not, to serve a great and powerful daimyō she had no choice but to act as she did. Her last chance of escape from the misery of her present situation lay in doing everything she conceivably could to win the affection of that powerful person who controlled her fate.

  But it was not only this woman whose love Lord Tadanao now questioned. He began to wonder whether any single woman, among all those others he had loved in his life, had ever loved him in return.

  He had lately become increasingly aware that throughout his life he had been denied the normal, everyday sympathy which men feel for their fellow beings. He had never known even the sympathy extended to a friend. From his childhood days numbers of page boys of his own age had been selected to keep him company. But they had not associated with Lord Tadanao as friends. They had merely offered submission. Lord Tadanao had loved them. But they had never returned that love. They had been merely submissive, from a high sense of duty.

  And what, if this was the nature of his friendships, was he to think of his relationships with the opposite sex? Since early youth he had had about him, at his disposal, many beautiful women. Lord Tadanao had loved them. But how many had loved him back? Though Lord Tadanao had given them love they had not offered love in return. They had merely offered him their submission. Just that. He had still about him, in his service, a large number of these human creatures. But, in place of human feeling for a fellow human, they offered only that one token—submission.

  It had become clear to Lord Tadanao that he received submission as a substitute for love, submission for friendship, and submission for kindness. Of course, there might have been cases, somewhere in the midst of all this, of true love based on human feeling, of true friendship, and of sincere kindness. But these, as Lord Tadanao tried to recall them in his present frame of mind, became hopelessly confused in the general pattern. The ramifications of that one word, submission, seemed to have robbed him of all else. A man raised by his fellows one degree above the normal world of human feeling, a man in daily association with a multitude of retainers, yet conscious of complete isolation—that was Lord Tadanao.

  He saw that even his home life, the life he lived in the intimacy of these rooms, had been a dreariness of solitude. The impurity of every love he had ever known from women seemed now clearly revealed. If ever he had set his heart on a woman she had gratified his wishes to the full, without hesitation. But, for her, this had had nothing to do with love. It had been simply the fulfillment of a duty, the retainer’s duty to the master. He was sick and tired of receiving dutiful submission in the place of love.

  * * *

  From this time there was a change in the settled pattern of Lord Tadanao’s private life, corresponding with the change in other spheres. He began to think that, instead of the usual passive puppets, he should like to love some more spirited, resilient type of woman. If such a woman loved him in return, well and good. But, even if she did not, at least she would show some resistance. She would treat him like a human being.

  By way of experiment he caused a succession of the daughters of his more highly placed retainers to be sent to him in his apartments. But to these women, too, Lord Tadanao’s words were simply the words of the lord of the castle, and they did as they were told in complete resignation, as if obeying an order which it was beyond anyone’s power to question. Feeling only the nobility of their own sacrifice, like maidens offering themselves upon the altar of some awesome divinity, they lay down beside Lord Tadanao. And Lord Tadanao, even as he held them in his arms, felt not the slightest sense of illicit pleasure.

  After things had continued for some time in this unsatisfactory state it occurred to Lord Tadanao that he might achieve better results from women already promised to some particular person in marriage. Surely they, at least, might resist, if only a little. Accordingly he obliged a selection of the girls in his household who were shortly to be married to attend him. But these too proved a disappointment. They held the will of their lord to be absolute, and they offered their services to Lord Tadanao in untroubled serenity, as to someone quite distinct from the human male.

  From about this time criticism of Lord Tadanao’s unseemly conduct began to be voiced even among the lord’s own retainers. But Lord Tadanao’s disorder had not yet run its course.

  The experiment with girls promised in marriage having brought no relief, he proceeded to an even more shocking defiance of morality. He ascertained, by private enquiries, which of the wives of his retainers in the Echizen fief possessed the greatest beauty and most lovable dispositions; he summoned three of these ladies, as if on urgent business, to the castle; and he refused to return them to their husbands.

  To many this action seemed the final, incontrovertible proof that his lordship was truly mad. The husbands made repeated entreaties to Lord Tadanao, but their wives were not returned to them. The senior councilors strongly urged their lord to reconsider an action so manifestly inhuman; but the more loudly they remonstrated, the more pleasure Lord Tadanao derived from persevering in his project.

  The three retainers whose wives had been stolen soon discovered the true nature of the cruel deceit practiced upon them by Lord Tadanao. Two of them, apparently believing that even this sort of thing did not absolve them from their samurai duty of obedience, thereupon committed suicide.

  When notification of their deaths arrived, forwarded from the district inspectors, Lord Tadanao drained at a gulp the cup of wine he was holding, smiled wearily, and said nothing. The members of his household, however, were loud in their expressions of sympathy and admiration for the two decease
d retainers. “True faithful warriors!” “Magnificent deaths!”—their eulogies even included phrases of this kind. But, as for the cause of these two noble deaths, there was no one who thought of this as anything but a heaven-sent mischance, a visitation of ineluctable fate.

  Now that these two were dead the attention of the whole household was concentrated upon the solitary injured husband who lived on, a man called Asamizu Yojirō. There were many who bewailed the cowardice of a fellow whose wife had been stolen and who yet hesitated to plunge a dagger into his stomach.

  Four or five days later the man himself appeared abruptly at the castle and informed the reception official that he desired an audience with Lord Tadanao. The official did his best to dissuade him.

  “Whatever has happened, the other party is your lord. If you were to see him now it could only result in your attempting revenge. His lordship has behaved most improperly, and we all realize that. But, whatever he has done, he remains your lord.”

  But Yojirō was insistent.

  “That is as it may be,” he flashed back, “but I request an audience. I must see Lord Tadanao, whatever the consequences. Please forward my application.”

  The official, left with no choice, passed on the request to a councilor who was then conducting some business in the anteroom.

  “This Yojirō fellow seems to have lost his wits,” muttered the old councilor when he had heard the official’s explanation. “His lordship has used him badly, but in a case like this the proper thing for a retainer to do is to register his protest by a formal suicide. The other two understood that perfectly, but his losing his wife seems to have completely deranged Yojirō’s mind. I had thought better of him.”

  Still grumbling away to himself the councilor summoned a page boy and, with evident distaste, communicated the request to Lord Tadanao.

  Lord Tadanao’s reaction was surprisingly good-natured.

  “What!” he cried. “Has Yojirō come to see me? This is indeed a welcome visit. Show him in at once! The audience is granted.” He was shouting loudly but his features were animated, for the first time in many days, by a flickering, playful smile.