by Ivan Morris
What made me begin to hate my new occupation, however, was not just the feeling that I was prostituting such talents as I might have; it was the relentless monotony. I soon learned that almost all the workers with whom I had now come to spend my time suffered to a greater or lesser extent from this same sense of monotony. They were forever discussing possible ways of breaking the tedium of their lives.
We would gather in the evening by the benches near the suburban tenements where we lived. One by one we arrived from different directions, exhausted at the end of a long day’s work in the heat. We sat down heavily on the benches or, if there was no longer any room, squatted beside them on the gravel, and indolently fanned ourselves as we chatted away, oblivious to the passing of time.
Along came a couple of young street-acrobats. One of them danced round with a lion’s mask while the other accompanied him on a tambourine. A girl wearing a red sash came out of the ice-cream parlor opposite where we sat and gave the boy a copper. Later a young woman strolled past with a samisen, her hair fastened in a bun with a green comb, and carrying a baby on her back.
“Not bad looking, eh?”
“I bet she’s an ex-geisha or something. What do you think?”
She walked up and down the street in front of us. Occasionally she stopped and strummed on her samisen. Later a huge, dirtylooking woman in an advanced state of pregnancy waddled past us. We looked at her in fascination. She was the most repulsive woman we had ever seen. So that day drew slowly to an end.
“A good job? Hell, there’s no such thing as a good job! It’s all a lot of sweat! If anyone thinks it’s fun making a living, he’s crazy.”
“No, we’ll never get anywhere this way. Just sweat away till we croak, that’s all! The only way to make money is gambling.”
“Gambling, eh?” said a large, dark-skinned bricklayer who was squatting next to the bench in his undershirt. “I’ll tell you about gambling. When I lived in Shitaya, there was a girl in the neighborhood about twenty-four years old. She was a pretty little piece, I can tell you! I used to watch her passing outside my window. She strutted past in her straw sandals with her head high in the air. She wore a big gold chain over her breast and always carried a shining patent-leather handbag. She had a gold chain on the bag also. She lived in a poor-looking sort of house and I got to wondering how she could afford to doll herself up like that. Then I heard she’d been gambling and made quite a pile. ‘That’s how to get rich,’ I thought to myself. ‘Even women can do it.’ Then early one morning on my way to work I saw a girl hurrying out of a low-class brothel. I just saw her back but there was something familiar about the way she walked. I followed her for a while and then saw her face as she got on a tram. It was the girl with the gold chain, all right! So much for gambling!”
“That’s right,” said a serious-looking man on the bench. “You can’t always hit it lucky. And even if you do, it doesn’t always work out. Why, only last week I saw in the paper that a certain man won a gambling pool or something. He’d been hard up all his life and then all of a sudden about half a million yen fell in his lap. What did he do? He went stark raving mad and murdered his wife with a hatchet! No, it’s no good when things change too much…. I’m not so sure it isn’t best to jog along the way we do.” The man sat looking straight ahead after he had spoken. He seemed quite moved by what he had said. After a while he got up and left. Then one by one the others began to leave, some to start their night shifts, some for the public baths, some for home. Soon they had all gone except myself, a tinsmith called Chō, and two others.
“Is it hard to learn the flute?” said Kichikō, an engineer’s mate. “I’d like to play the flute.”
“What an idea!” said Chō with a smile. “How’s a clumsy ox like you going to play the flute? Anyhow it takes years before you can play an instrument.”
“I suppose you’re a great hand at the flute,” said Kichikō.
“No, I can’t play. I like listening, though,” said Chō.
“Well, you’re a fine one to tell me I can’t play the flute. You’re a clumsy brute yourself.”
“I may not be able to play, but at least I know what it’s all about. You haven’t got the vaguest idea what art is. It’s not something you can learn like playing tiddlywinks!”
“Oh yes, I’d forgotten. You’re a great artist, aren’t you?” said Kichikō laughing. “A great artist when it comes to singing songs in the beer parlor, I mean!”
“I’m good at standing on my hands,” announced Chō, beaming all over but with a touch of genuine pride. Chō was a rather silent man. He had a large round face—almost bloated, in fact. There was something about his expression that made one feel he was smiling inwardly all the time in a warm, pleasant way.
“Standing on your hands? What a very original art!” I said without thinking. We all laughed, including Chō.
I did not know why, but for some reason Chō’s handstanding excited my curiosity. In time I came to learn from Chō himself and from some of his friends how he had acquired this avocation. It appeared that he had once seen a girl doing a handstanding stunt in the circus. Standing upright on her hands, she had crossed a long narrow plank suspended between two platforms high over the arena. Chō had been greatly impressed. There seemed to be no catch in this as in so many other circus tricks; it was purely the result of long practice. Suddenly it occurred to him, as he sat there in the circus, that he could learn the trick himself.
From then on, he began practicing handstands whenever he had time—after meals, in the evenings, and in the brief rest periods between work. At least it broke the monotony.
Often he was discouraged and felt that he would never be any good. Yet he persevered. “It’s that girl,” he told me once, “that girl at the circus. I just can’t get her out of my mind. She was a real beauty, you know. Fine white teeth, red lips, lovely breasts, big, dark, mysterious eyes—she’s the prettiest girl I’ve seen.”
He had never seen her again but by his handstanding he kept her memory alive. Apart from this there was, I guessed, a hidden motive that made him continue his exhausting pastime. By becoming an expert handstander himself, as great as this girl if not greater, was he not in some way derogating from the perfection which he had originally seen in her, thereby making her, in this respect at least, less wonderful? By surpassing her in the art of handstanding, by taking for himself the praise that had originally all been hers, was he not somehow punishing her for being so completely unattainable?
“The trouble was,” said Chō, “I didn’t have a high narrow plank to practice on. But I got round this in the end. I found a straw mat with a thin black border to do my handstands on. This black border becomes the plank and both edges become sheer drops hundreds of feet high. So when I practice walking along the edge of the mat on my hands, I’m as frightened of falling as I would be in the circus. Well, I’ve got now so I can do it every time without even swaying. And if I can do it on the mat, I don’t see why I couldn’t do it in the circus like she did…. But of course I’ll never really know.”
“That girl certainly did something to you,” I said to Chō one day. Chō looked at me seriously. “It’s the same as painting,” he said. “When you see something beautiful, it gets you in some way, doesn’t it, and that makes you want to paint it. You’ll work away like mad trying to paint it, won’t you? Well, it’s the same with me. Only I can’t paint so I’ve got to imitate what I’ve seen. Is that so strange?”
His explanation struck me as quite reasonable.
“Look, Chō,” said Kichikō that evening when I first heard about the handstanding, “why don’t you let us see you do it now?” He laughed and looked round. The last rays of the summer sun were fading; the sky had lost its brightness and become a light transparent blue. A slight wind had blown up and dull, vaguely colored clouds scudded past high above us.
“Would you really like to see?” said Chō cheerfully. He stood up, and leaned forward on one of the benches. As he put
his weight on it, the bench shifted slightly on the gravel.
“I’d better do it here,” he said. He planted his hands firmly on the ground next to the bench and raised himself a couple of times, falling back lightly in the same place. Then, keeping both legs closely together, he moved slowly up until he was standing vertically in the air. The soles of his straw sandals faced the surface of the limpid evening sky. His plump arms were slightly bent as they supported his heavy, squat body. As the blood ran to his head, his face became so dark that one could hardly distinguish it from the earth.
Kichikō whistled with admiration. “That’s good,” he said. “That’s pretty damned good!” Quite a few people had gathered from the neighborhood to watch Chō’s performance and they were all exclaiming their admiration as he held his feet immobile in the air. When he stood up again, a couple of the local errand boys and a few other enterprising young fellows began to try the trick. After I left, I turned back and saw them all in their light shirts standing upside down by the benches in the gathering dusk.
* * *
There was a large steelworks in the neighborhood. Most of the workers were regular employees, but there was also quite a number of casual laborers who drifted in from the other factories or from the mines and usually left again after a time. One evening as we were gathered by our benches, a small, intelligent-looking man joined us. “You’re new around here, aren’t you?” I said.
“That’s right. I’ve just got myself a job as a lathe man in those ironworks over there. I’ve got lodgings near here, too.”
He soon established himself as one of our group. We all found him interesting because he had spent his life moving from place to place and could describe all sorts of things that were unfamiliar to us. Although uneducated, he was a good talker and, as he told us of the hardships he had undergone, the strange places where he had worked, the odd customs he had observed in other parts of Japan, and the efforts of workers to improve their conditions, we felt that we were being lifted out of the prisons of our narrow lives.
His lively eyes shone as he described life underground in the Aso mines where he had formerly worked. “To get to the first pit, you go down a hundred and fifty feet in the cage. Then down you go another hundred and fifty feet to the next pit. There are twelve pits altogether. In the bottom pit the temperature was nearly a hundred degrees just from the heat of the earth. There was a whole lot of us working down there. The air was pumped down from the pit-head. But after you’d been down there a while, it got so damned hard to breathe your lungs were fit to burst. I was in the war and I can tell you that to spend eight hours down there in that mine was worse than twenty-four hours under enemy fire.
“And don’t let them tell you mining isn’t dangerous! Down there you’re at the mercy of machines and they’re always going wrong. One of the fellows I knew was pulling a loaded trolley onto the elevator. At least he thought the elevator was there but something had gone wrong and instead he stepped backward into the empty shaft and went shooting down hundreds of feet with the loaded trolley on top of him. You could hear him screaming right down to the bottom.
“You see, the strain down there makes you careless in the end. Lots of the fellows get blown to smithereens by the dynamite they’ve planted themselves. Sometimes they even knock down the props when they’re working and get buried alive.
“But I’ll tell you something funny. While you’re down there in the mine, you’re so busy with your work, you’re so damned glad you haven’t had an accident yourself and trying so hard to watch out in the future, that you don’t have time to worry about anything else. It’s when you come out on the surface after a day’s work that you start thinking. You see other people walking about up there who’ve never been down a mine in all their lives. And you get to asking yourself: ‘What the hell! I’m no different from them. What do I spend all day down in that damned hole for?’
“That’s the way lots of us began figuring. It wasn’t hard to get the other fellows to see our point of view. What the hell, we were risking our lives down there every day to make profits for the company. We all got together and were going to make a set of minimum demands for our safety—not wages, mind you, just for our safety. But we had an informer among us. Our plan leaked out and the company put a stop to it all.
“Later on, a couple of smooth, well-dressed men came along and told us how we ought to organize ourselves. They’d never been further down a mine than the pit-head but they pretended to know all about it. Well, we miners were a pretty uneducated bunch but we could tell fakes when we saw them. If these men really had our interests at heart, we’d have felt it and gone along with them all the way. But it didn’t take us long to see they were the type who make their living out of our troubles—and a damned good living too. ‘Better honor than life,’ they used to teach us in the army. Well, these men wanted honor and life—and plenty of both—all at our expense. The dirty rats—what could they teach us? It’s lucky for them they cleared out before I got my hands on them!
“No one who hasn’t really been a worker knows what it’s all about. You can’t learn it out of a book. You’ve got to be a worker, you’ve got to live like a worker, day after day, year after year. That’s the only way to get to understand the ‘labor problem.’
“We weren’t born to live like slaves or animals! We workers deserve the same share of the country’s wealth as everyone else. That’s what I’d like to tell society.”
“A socialist,” I thought to myself and wondered whether all the others realized it. They used to sit listening to him in silence and occasionally I noticed Chō sighing as if moved by something the man had said.
One day as I was strolling down the sunlit street, I stopped dead in my tracks. Some of the things the little man had said suddenly came back to me with extraordinary force. It was as if I had been walking along a narrow single-track railway bridge and had abruptly been struck by the thought “What shall I do if a train comes rushing toward me?” Perhaps the time would come when I’d have to make such a decision. The idea made my heart pound like a hammer.
The little man told us one day about a derelict mine. The ore had given out and the miners had all moved to other pits. The power was still connected, however, and one morning the lights were turned on for a party of visiting journalists. One of the men got separated from the rest of the group and, before he knew it, he was hopelessly lost in the maze of tunnels and passages which twisted about underground like the coils of some immense serpent. He must have rushed round, gradually becoming panic-stricken, in those weird, deserted corridors hundreds of feet below the ground. His shouts for help would have been deadened by the thick walls. And then he ran headlong into the open elevator-pit and fell hundreds of feet into pitch darkness.
This story made a great impression on me and it was long before I could rid my mind of the terrifying vision.
Gradually I came to think that, however monotonous and unrewarding my present work might be, I should at least be grateful that it was safe. “After all,” I said one evening, “why do we work anyway? When all’s said and done, surely it’s so we can earn enough to keep alive. In that case, it’s a complete contradiction to take a job where you’re risking your life.”
It seemed unbelievable to me that anyone should be so mad as to do work in which he might at any moment be killed. Later I was to learn that such logic does not always apply and that to break the unendurable monotony of their lives, some people will in fact do things which can only be classed as insane.
Chō and the little man became friends and I often saw them together. One evening as I was calling for Chō on my way back from work, I found him standing outside his shop talking to the little man. They both nodded to me. The man had a map in his hands. “Here it is,” he said, pointing to a small corner of land sticking out into the blue northern sea, “here’s Nikolaevsk. That’s where I’ll be heading now. A friend of mine’s working up there and he’s asked me to join him.” He looked up at the d
eep blue sky. “When I decided to leave the mines,” he continued, “I first thought I’d try my luck somewhere really far away—Sakhalin, Kamchatka, or somewhere. But then I thought if I came to Tokyo, I’d meet a lot of interesting people, people I could talk to, people who felt like I did about things. I’ve always been a great talker, you know, ever since I was a youngster. Well, I’ve got to like a lot of you fellows, but I’m not really your type. So now I’m pushing on. I won’t be going straight to Nikolaevsk. I’ll spend the winter working in Hokkaido and try crossing over to the mainland next spring.” He paused for a while. “I suppose the fact is I’m just a born wanderer,” he added laughing. We said goodbye, and Chō and I stood watching him walk away in the distance.
“He asked me if I wanted to go with him,” said Chō. “And I would have, too, except for my old mother. She’d be lost without me.”
We started walking along slowly. A few sprigs of wilted morning-glory stood in a black, unglazed vase in a window opposite the shop. It was really amazing how blue the sky was. Under this deep, weird, silent blue, the black-tiled roofs of the houses seemed to roll sadly into the distance like dunes along a seashore.
None of us ever saw the little man again. We heard that he had found a job in a factory at Oi. No doubt he made his way to Hokkaido and perhaps he even reached Nikolaevsk. Wherever he may be, I am sure he is heatedly expounding his theories.
I thought about him often. I remembered the clear look in his eyes when he was not talking. In them were reflected the images of far-away mountains, of clouds floating across distant skies, of infinitely remote stars, and sometimes of the dark, raging ocean. Yes, he was a wanderer and I felt that like the wanderers of old he had within him a song that comforted him in his weariness and that constantly spurred him on to discover new places and new ideas. Compared to him the members of our group, rooted here in our dreary suburb, seemed to me men exhausted by the monotony of work, men in whom all spirit of adventure had atrophied. At least, that is what I thought until the following incident.
