by Ivan Morris
“What do you mean, you’ve resigned?” said the horse-faced man.
“That stubborn fool in there wouldn’t get out and push when I told him. So I had to give him a good beating. But first I resigned, because employees aren’t allowed to hit the passengers. Once I’d resigned, I was a private citizen and could give him the beating he deserved.”
“Look here,” said the horse-faced man, “you’ve gone too far this time. And who do you think is going to drive if you don’t?”
The driver shrugged his shoulders. He glanced disdainfully at the passengers assembled beside the bus.
“I can’t drive any more,” he repeated stubbornly. “I tell you I’ve resigned.”
At this point a tall old man stalked out of the farmhouse.
“I’ve had about enough of this!” he shouted to the driver. “I’ve seen everything that’s gone on. I saw you attacking that peaceful couple. What do you mean by behaving like that in front of my house?”
“I’m a private citizen,” said the driver. “I’ve got a perfect right to strike anyone I want to.”
“Don’t talk like a fool,” said the old farmer. “And kindly get your bus away from my house. I’ll help push the damned thing in place of the honeymoon couple if that’s what’s bothering you. My old woman can give a hand too. You get in and steer!”
We all followed the old couple to the back of the bus, and as I passed one of the windows, I glanced inside. The young man was lying back pale in his seat. He had some tissue paper stuffed in his nostrils and one of his eyes was red and swollen. The girl in the green dress had apparently just finished swabbing his face; she took the bucket to the back of the bus and handed it to one of the passengers, who returned it to the well.
The driver stood with his arms folded and refused to get into his seat. The old couple began pushing the bus with all their might. It would not budge.
“Hey, all you others,” shouted the old man, “give us a hand!”
“Right you are,” said the horse-faced man and ran to the back of the bus. “Come on, all of you,” he shouted, “push away! Yo-heave-ho!”
We all pushed. The bus began to move. The driver opened his eyes wide in amazement. “Hey, wait a minute!” he shouted. “Don’t be crazy! Wait till I get hold of the wheel.”
He ran after the bus, jumped on to the driver’s platform, and grasped the steering wheel before even sitting down. We all pushed now with redoubled vigor, spurred on by the feeling that we had taken matters into our own hands, at least temporarily. The road was fairly straight and the bus ran along at a steady speed.
“Hey, driver,” shouted the horse-faced man, “can’t you get the engine started? Are you sure you aren’t doing it on purpose?”
“Don’t be so suspicious,” answered the driver. “It’s not my fault it won’t start. The engine’s worn out. The battery isn’t charging right either. But of course you people wouldn’t know about such things.”
“That’s right,” said a man who was wearing a light yellow shirt and a surplice inscribed with a Buddhist prayer. “We laymen are only good for pushing. ‘Push and don’t ask questions!’ That seems to be the motto of this bus company.”
“Yes, it’s going a little too far,” said the horse-faced man. “We’ve got to push whether we want to or not, and no one even bothers to tell us what’s wrong with the damned bus. I’m exhausted!”
The driver turned round with a cigarette in his mouth.
“Hey there, you two,” he shouted to the honeymoon couple, “did you hear what that passenger said just now? He’s exhausted. They’re all exhausted because of your damned selfishness! Aren’t you ashamed of yourselves? Listen to the voice of the people back there! Get out this minute and push—both of you!”
“Are you still worrying about us, you poor fool?” said the young man. “I’ve told you already—leave us alone and concentrate on the engine or the battery or whatever it is. First you charge us high fares and then you try to make us do a lot of useless pushing. I’ll have something to say about all this when we arrive, I warn you!”
“What’s that, you bastard?” roared the driver. “Do you want another beating?”
“You tell me to listen to the voice of the people,” answered the young man calmly. “Well, by protesting like this, I’m trying to make it penetrate your ears too.”
“So you still think you’re pretty smart, do you?” cried the driver, shaking with fury. “You still think you’re better than everyone else? All right, I’ll show you! You’ve asked for it!” He got to his feet.
“Sit down, sit down!” shouted the horse-faced man, who had now become our spokesman. “Don’t let go of the steering wheel!” Then turning to us, he said: “Come on, push harder! Don’t let the driver leave the steering wheel. Push away!”
We pushed harder than ever and the bus moved rapidly along the straight, narrow road. On the left was a low stone wall beyond which was a steep drop to the paddyfields; on the right was a shallow river. The driver could ill afford to let the bus swerve in either direction. In the distance I noticed a car approaching.
“Stop a minute!” cried the driver. “I’ve got to give that fool another beating.”
“Oh no, you don’t!” said the horse-faced man. “Come on, everyone, push away! Let’s really get this old crate moving!”
We pushed—in fact we almost hurled ourselves at the back of the bus. In our excitement we had forgotten that the driver could stop the bus whenever he wanted simply by applying the brakes. We were all out of breath by now, but this did not deter us.
“Hey, what’s wrong with you all?” shouted the driver. “Why do you stand up for that insolent bastard anyway? It’s his fault you’re all worn out.”
“Don’t worry about us!” said the horse-faced man. “Just keep steering! If you let go of that wheel, you’ll really have something to worry about.”
“That’s right,” added the man with the surplice. “You’ll be with your ancestors before you know it.”
Just then a large van approached from the opposite direction. The bus jerked to a sudden stop which almost knocked us off balance; it was a moment before I realized that the driver had applied the brakes. We exchanged disappointed, frustrated looks.
“Well, at least we’ve arrived at the crossroads.” remarked the horse-faced man. “We’ve pushed it four miles already. Quite an achievement, I must say! But I’ve had enough. I’m taking the proper bus from here on.”
He gave his luggage check to the conductor, loaded his rucksack on his back, and started walking toward Three Corners Crossing. I also decided to take the other bus; so did the man in plus-fours, the girl in slacks, and a few others. The rest said they would continue pushing—some because they were convinced the bus was about to start, others to prevent the driver from attacking the honeymoon couple, still others because they did not want to lose their fares. The refractory couple decided to remain in the bus. The man in plus-fours went to fetch his luggage and joined us at the crossroads.
“They’re sitting in there having lunch,” he reported. “They’ve taken out a tin of dried beef.”
“What about the driver?”
“It looks as if he’s going to leave them in peace to enjoy their meal. They’ve got a bottle of whisky too.”
I looked back at the charcoal bus. The driver had opened the hood and was tinkering at the engine with a wrench more for form’s sake than anything, I imagined. The conductor put some charcoal in the burner and began turning the blower furiously. He seemed to have unbounded confidence in the engine. I noticed that the old farmer and his wife were trudging back toward their home.
MACHINE
BY Riichi Yokomitsu
TRANSLATED BY Edward Seidensticker
Like Yasunari Kawabata, Riichi Yokomitsu (1898–1947) gained prominence as a leader of the lyrical school which the Japanese call “neo-sensual” (shinkankaku-ha). The neo-sensualists revolted against two schools of “realism” popular in the mid-twenties: the autobiographic
al reporting of the naturalists and the special pleading of the proletarians. Relying for their effects on startling images, mingled sense impressions, and an abruptness of transition that sometimes calls to mind Gertrude Stein’s automatic writing, the group derived on the one hand from Japanese haiku poetry and on the other from a jumble of European influences—Dadaism, futurism, expressionism, and the like.
Yokomitsu soon found it necessary to moderate the excesses of subjectivity to which this youthful revolt led. Beginning with “Machine” (Kikai) in 1930, he turned to psychological exploration under the influence of Joyce and Proust. From then until his death, his obsessive theme was the plight of the sensitive and receptive intellect assailed by a relentless, contradictory world and unable to know itself. “Machine” may be read as one statement of the theme; and Yokomitsu’s last important work, an unfinished novel, treats of the modern Japanese intellect trapped between irreconcilable East and West.
AT FIRST I wondered sometimes if the master of the place was not insane. He would decide that his child, not yet three, did not like him. A child had no right to dislike its father, he would announce, frowning fiercely. Barely able to walk, the child would fall on its face. That gave the man cause to slap his wife—why had she let the child fall when she was supposed to be watching it? For the rest of us this was all fine comedy. The man was in dead earnest, however, and one did begin to wonder if he might not be insane.
A man of forty, snatching his child up and marching about the room with it when for a moment it stopped crying! And it was not only with the child that he seemed strange. There was a suggestion of immaturity in everything he did. It was a home industry, and his wife naturally became its center, and it was natural too that her allies there gained strength from her position. Since my own ties were if anything with the husband, I was always left to do the work everyone most disliked. It was unpleasant work, really unpleasant work. Yet it was work that had to be done if the shop was not to come to a complete standstill. In this sense it was I and not the wife who was at the center of things; but I could only remain silent about the fact. I was among people who thought that the one given an unpleasant job was the one who was otherwise useless.
Still, the useless one can sometimes be strangely useful at a task that baffles others; and in all the many processes involving chemicals in this name-plate factory, the process entrusted to me was richest in violent poisons. My job was a slot made especially for dropping otherwise useless people into. Once in the slot, I found my skin and my clothes wearing out under the corrosive attacks of ferric chloride. Fumes tore at my throat; I was unable to sleep at night. Worse, my mind seemed to be affected, and my eyesight showed signs of failing. It was not likely that a useful person would have been put into such a slot. My employer had learned the same work in his youth, but no doubt because he too was a person who was considered otherwise useless.
Still, not even I meant to linger on there until in course of time I should become an invalid. I had come to Tokyo from a shipyard in Kyūshū, and on the train I happened to meet a lady, a widow in her fifties, who had neither children nor home. She meant, after presuming upon the kindness of Tokyo relatives for a time, to open a rooming house or some such business. I said jokingly that when I found work I’d come and take one of her rooms. She replied that she’d take me to see the relatives she had mentioned. They would have work for me. I had no other prospects at the time, and something refined in her manner told me to trust her. So I trailed after her and arrived here.
At first the job seemed easy. Then, gradually, I saw that the chemicals were eating away my ability to work. I’ll leave today, I’ll leave tomorrow, I would tell myself. But having lasted so long, I decided I should at least wait until I had learned the secrets of the trade. I set about becoming interested in dangerous chemical processes.
My fellow worker, a man named Karubé, promptly decided I was a spy who had crept in to steal trade secrets. Karubé had lived next door to the wife’s family, and, since that fact gave him certain liberties, he responded by putting the interests of the shop above everything, becoming the proverbial faithful servant. He would fix a burning gaze upon me whenever I took a poison down from the shelf. As I loitered before the darkroom he would come up with a great clattering to let me know he was there watching. I thought all this a trifle ridiculous, and yet his earnestness made me uncomfortable. He considered the movies the finest of textbooks and detective movies a mirror of life, and there was no doubt that I, who had wandered in unannounced, was good material for his fantasies. He had ambitions beyond spending the rest of his life here. He meant one day to set up a branch establishment, and he most certainly did not mean to let me learn the secret of making red plates, an invention of our employer, before he had learned it himself.
I was interested only in learning and had not a suggestion of a plan for making my living by what I learned. Karubé was not one to understand such subtleties, however, and I could not in complete honesty deny that once I had learned the business I might consider making my living from it.
In any case, my conscience would be at rest if I could assure myself that it was good for him to be teased a little. Having reached this conclusion, I quite forgot about him.
His hostility grew, and even while I was calling him a fool I came to think that, precisely because he was a fool, perhaps he wasn’t such a fool after all. It is rather fun to be made a gratuitous enemy, because you can make a fool of your adversary while the situation lasts; and it took me a long time to note that this pleasure left a crack in my own defenses. I would move a chair or turn an edging tool, and a hammer would fall on my head, or sheets of brass, ground down for plates, would come crashing at my feet. A harmless compound of varnish and ether would be changed for chromic acid. At first I thought I was being careless. When it came to me that Karubé was responsible for all this, I concluded that if I wasn’t careful, I’d find myself dead. This was a chilling thought. Karubé, though a fool, was older than I, and adept at mixing poisons. He knew that if he put ammonium dichromate into a person’s tea, the result could pass as suicide. I would see something yellow in my food, take it to be chromic acid, and have trouble making my hand move in its direction. Presently, however, this caution struck me as funny. Let him try killing me if it seemed so easy! And so I forgot him again.
One day I was at work in the shop when the wife came in to tell me that her husband was going out to buy sheet metal and that I was to go with him to carry the money. When he carried it himself, he invariably lost it. Her chief concern always was to keep him away from money. Indeed, most of our troubles could be traced to this particular failing of his. No one could understand how he always managed to drop whatever money he had. Lost money will not come back, however much one storms and scolds, but, on the other hand, one does want to protest when the money for which one has sweated disappears like foam upon water. If it had happened only once or twice, things would have been different; but it happened constantly. When the master had money, he lost it. Inevitably, then, the affairs of this house shaped up rather differently from the affairs of most other houses.
A man of forty taking money and promptly losing it—one wondered how it could happen! His wife would tie his wallet around his neck and drop it inside his shirt, but even when the wallet remained on him, the money would have quite disappeared. It seemed likely that he had dropped it when he took something from the wallet. Even so, one would think that as he took his wallet out or put it away again, he might occasionally have reminded himself to look and see if he had dropped anything. Perhaps he did in fact watch himself. If so, could one believe that he really lost all his money so often? Perhaps the story was a trick on the wife’s part to delay paying our wages.
So I thought for a time, but finally his behavior was enough to convince me that the wife’s reports were true. It is said of the rich that they do not know what money is; and in a somewhat different sense our employer was wholly indifferent both to the five-sen copper for
the public bath and to the larger amount of money for sheet metal. There was a time in history when he would have been called a sage and a saint; but those who live with a saint must be alert. None of the shop work could be left to our master, and what he should perfectly well have been able to do by himself, two men had to go out to do. It is impossible to calculate the needless labor caused by that one man. All this was true; yet the place would have been far less popular had he not been there. The business may have had its detractors, but not because of him. Not everyone approved of his subservience to his wife, but he was so good-natured, so small and docile in his chains, that on the whole he pleased people. He was even more charming when, free for a moment from his wife’s sharp eye, he scampered about like an uncaged rabbit and threw money in all directions.
I am therefore constrained to say that the heart of the house was not the mistress, nor Karubé, nor myself. Clearly I was an underling, with an underling’s devotion to his master; but I liked the man and that was that. To imagine the sort of man he was, you must think of a child of, say, five who has become a man of forty. The very thought of such a person seems ridiculous. We wanted to feel superior to him, and yet we could not. The unsightliness of our own years was revealed to us paradoxically as something fresh and new. (These were not my thoughts alone. Much the same thoughts seemed to move Karubé. It occurred to me afterward that his hostility came from a goodheartedness that made him want to protect our master.) The difficulty I found in deciding to leave the shop stemmed from the unique goodness of the master’s heart; and the dropping of hammers on my head seemed to come from the same source. Goodness sometimes has strange manifestations.
Well, the master and I went out that day to buy sheet metal, and on the way he said that he’d had an interesting proposal that morning: someone wanted to buy the red-plating process for fifty thousand yen. Should he sell or shouldn’t he? I could not answer, and he continued: no question would arise if the process could be kept secret forever, but his competitors were feverishly at work. If he was to sell at all, he should sell now.
