by Ivan Morris
“You can’t be enjoying the work very much if it makes you say things like that,” I said.
Yashiki pulled his shoulders back and shot a glance at me, then passed the moment off with a quick laugh.
I made it my policy to let him plot as he would. A person of his ability would no doubt have seen everything in a single trip into the darkroom, and, having let him see, one could do nothing, short of killing him, except take the consequences. Perhaps one should rather be grateful for having met such a remarkable person in such an unlikely place.
I went even further: I came to think that it would be a good thing if, in the course of time, he did succeed in taking advantage of the master and stealing our secrets.
One day I said to him: “I don’t mean to stay here long myself. Do you know of any good openings?”
“I meant to ask you the same thing. If we’re alike even in that, what right have you to be lecturing me?”
“I see what you mean. But don’t misunderstand me. I don’t mean to be lecturing and I don’t mean to be prying. It’s just that I respect you, and I thought you might let me be your pupil.”
“Pupil?” He smiled wryly. Then, abruptly, he was sober again. “Go and have a look at a ferric-chloride factory, where the trees and grass have died for a hundred yards around, and talk to me again afterward.”
I had no idea what the “afterward” might mean, but I thought I caught a glimpse of his reasons for thinking me rather simple. But what were the limits to which he would go in making me look foolish? They seemed far out of sight. Gradually I lost interest, and as I did so I thought I would have a try at making him look foolish. I had been attracted to him, however, and the effort was abortive—in fact it was comical. These superior people put one through a harsh discipline!
One day when we were about to finish the rush order, Karubé threw Yashiki on his face under the cutter. “Admit it, admit it!” he said.
Apparently he had caught Yashiki sneaking into the darkroom.
Astride Yashiki’s back, Karubé was pounding at his head when I came into the shop. So it’s finally happened, I thought. But I felt no impulse to go to Yashiki’s rescue. Indeed, I was rather a Judas, curious to see how the man I respected would respond to violence. I looked coolly into Yashiki’s twisted face. He was struggling to get up, one side of his head in some varnish that was flowing across the floor, but each time Karubé’s knee hit him in the back he fell on his face again. His trousers were pushed up, and his stout legs were bare, threshing awkwardly at the floor. This rather spirited resistance struck me as utterly foolish, but revulsion was stronger than disdain, as if the face of the respected one, ugly from pain, showed an ugliness of spirit as well. I was troubled less by the violence itself than by the fact that Karubé could force a person to wear such an ugly expression.
Karubé had no eye for expressions, ugly or otherwise. He seized Yashiki’s neck in both hands and pounded his head against the floor. I began to doubt whether my indifference to suffering was entirely proper, but I felt that if I were to make the slightest move to help one or the other, I would be guilty of still greater impropriety. I also began to wonder whether Yashiki, not prepared to confess in spite of the pain to which that ugly, twisted face testified, had actually stolen anything from the darkroom, and I turned to the task of reading his secret in the furrows of his distorted face. From time to time he glanced at me. To give him strength, I offered a contemptuous smile each time his eyes met mine. He made a really determined effort to overturn Karubé. He was helpless, however, and there was a new rain of blows.
Starting up whenever I laughed at him, Yashiki was showing his true colors. The more he moved himself to action, it would seem, the more he gave himself away. Though I tried to continue laughing at him, I began to feel something more like contempt, until, as the moments passed, I was no longer able to laugh at all. Yashiki had a way of choosing the least likely moments for his struggles. A most ordinary human being he was, no different from the rest of us.
“Suppose you stop hitting him,” I said to Karubé. “Won’t it do just to talk to him?”
“Stand up!” Karubé gave his victim a kick and poured metal fragments over his head, much as he had buried my head in similar fragments.
Yashiki edged away and stood with his back to the wall. He explained rapidly that he had gone into the darkroom in search of ammonia. He had been unable to clean glue from sheet metal with caustic soda.
“If you needed ammonia, why didn’t you ask for it?” said Karubé, and hit him again. “Anyone ought to know that there’s no place in a name-plate factory as important as the darkroom.”
I knew that Yashiki’s explanation was absurd, but the thunder of Karubé’s fists was too violent. “You ought at least to stop hitting him,” I said.
With that Karubé turned on me. “It’s a plot between the two of you, is it?”
“You can answer that yourself if you give it a little thought,” I was about to say; but it occurred to me that our actions not only could be thought a conspiracy; they might, in fact, be something very like one. I had calmly let Yashiki go into the darkroom, and even thought myself less of a person for not stealing the master’s secrets. The result was, in effect, a conspiracy.
As my conscience began to trouble me, I assumed a confident manner. “Plot or no plot, I think you’ve hit him enough,” I said.
With that Karubé hit me on the jaw. “I suppose you let him into the darkroom.”
I was less concerned about being struck than I was eager to show Yashiki, who had already been struck, how I was now being struck for taking his crime upon myself. I felt almost exhilarated. “Look at me now!” I wanted to cry. I had a strange feeling, however, that Karubé and I must now seem the conspirators. Yashiki must think that I could so unconcernedly allow myself to be hit only because we had arranged this in advance. I glanced up at him—he seemed to have come to life now that there were two of us.
“Hit him!” he cried, flailing away at the back of Karubé’s head.
I was not particularly angry, but because of the pain I took a certain pleasure in the exercise of hitting back. I hit Karubé in the face several times. Thus assaulted from before and behind, he turned his main attention to Yashiki. I tugged from behind, and Yashiki, still flailing away, took advantage of the opening to knock him down and sit on him. I was astonished at how lively Yashiki had become. Doubtless it was because he thought that I, angry at having been hit without reason, was with him in the attack.
But I had no need of further revenge. I stood silently by and watched. Effortlessly, Karubé overturned Yashiki, and began pounding him more fiercely than before. Again Yashiki was helpless. After Karubé had pounded Yashiki for a time, he suddenly stood up and came at me, perhaps thinking I might attack him from the rear. It was a foregone conclusion that I would lose in single combat with Karubé. I kept my peace once more and waited for Yashiki to help me. But Yashiki began hitting not Karubé but me. Unable to cope with even one adversary, I could do nothing against two. I lay there and let them hit.
Had I been so wrong? As I lay doubled up with my head in my arms, I wondered if I had so misbehaved that I must be hit by both of them. No doubt my conduct had been surprising, but had the other two not also chosen courses that could be called strange? At least, there was no reason for Yashiki to be hitting me. It was true that I had not joined him in the attack on Karubé; but he had been a fool to expect me to.
In any event, the only one who had not been attacked by the other two simultaneously was Yashiki. The one who most deserved to be hit had most cleverly escaped.
By the time I began to think I’d like to give him a cuffing for his pains, we were all exhausted. The cause of the whole senseless fight had clearly been less that Yashiki had gone into the darkroom than that we were exhausted from having made fifty thousand name plates in such a short time. Ferric-chloride fumes wore on one’s nerves and disordered one’s reason, and instinct seemed to reveal itself from
every pore. If a man chose to be angry at each small incident in a name-plate factory, there would be no end to anger.
I had, nonetheless, been hit by Yashiki, and the fact was not to be forgotten. What was he thinking? If his behavior gave me the occasion, I’d find ways to make him ashamed of himself.
When the incident stopped—though one could hardly have said that it had an ending—Yashiki turned to me. “It was wrong of me to hit you, but I had to finish the business. There was no telling how long Karubé would go on hitting me. I’m sorry.”
That was true, I had to agree. If I, the least guilty, had not been hit by both of them, the fighting would have gone on and on. I smiled wryly. I had, then, been protecting Yashiki in his thievery. And I must forego the pleasure of making him ashamed of himself. The man was an astonishingly able plotter.
In some chagrin, I said to him: “If you’ve been so clever at using me, I’m sure you’ve been just as clever at getting secrets from the darkroom.”
“If even you think that, it’s only natural that Karubé should have hit me.” He laughed his practiced laugh. “Weren’t you the one who turned him on me?”
I could offer no explanation if he chose to think that I had provoked the incident. Perhaps he had hit me because he suspected that I was in league with Karubé. It was becoming harder and harder to know what these two thought of me.
In the midst of all this uncertainty, however, there was one clear thing: Karubé and Yashiki, in their separate ways, were both suspicious of me. But however clear this fact might seem to me, was there any way for me to know how clear it really was? In any case, some invisible machine was constantly measuring us all, as if it understood everything that went on, and was pushing us according to the results of its measurements.
Even while we nursed our suspicions in this way, we were looking forward to the next day, when the job would finally be over and we could rest. Forgetting our exhaustion and enmity in pleasant thoughts of payment, we finished that day—and the next day a new blow hit.
On his way home, the master lost the whole of the money he had received for those fifty thousand name plates. The labors that had not allowed us a decent night’s sleep in ten days had come to precisely nothing.
The sister who had first introduced me had gone with her brother, foreseeing that he might drop the money—and at least that much had run true to form. He had said that for the first time in a very long while he would like to have the pleasure of holding the money we had earned, all of it. Quite understanding, his sister let him have it for a few minutes. And in those few minutes the flaw worked like an infallible machine.
Though we did report the loss to the police, naturally none of us thought the money would ever be seen again, and we just sat looking at each other. We could no longer expect to be paid, and exhaustion suddenly overtook us. For a time we lay motionless in the shop. Then, smashing some boards that lay at hand and flinging away the pieces, Karubé turned on me.
“Why are you smiling?”
I did not mean to be smiling, but since he said I was, presumably I was. No doubt it was because the master was so comical—the comedy being probably a result of long years of exposure to ferric-chloride fumes. I felt anew that few things were to be so feared as mental disorder. What a wondrous system it was whose workings made a man’s defects draw others to him, leaving them unable to fear!
I did not answer. It would do no good to explain.
Then Karubé stopped glaring at me. “We’ll have a drink!” he said, clapping his hands.
He had spoken at a moment when one or another of us was to speak. Inevitably, our thoughts turned to liquor. At such times there is nothing for young men to do but drink. Not even Yashiki could have guessed that because of the liquor he would lose his life.
That night we sat drinking in the shop until after midnight. When I awoke I saw that Yashiki had mistaken leftover ammonium dichromate for water, had drunk from the jug, and had died. Even now I do not think, as the men from the shop that sent him here seem to, that Karubé killed Yashiki. Although it was I who had again that day done the gluing in which ammonium dichromate is used, Karubé and not I had suggested that we drink, and it was natural that suspicion should fall more heavily on him. Still, it did not seem likely that Karubé could have conceived the dark plot of getting him drunk and killing him unless we had thought of drinking much earlier in the evening. Karubé was nonetheless suspected, probably because of the threatening manner that revealed him as one who liked violence.
I do not say with finality that Karubé did not kill Yashiki. I can only say that my limited knowledge makes me able to conjecture that he did not. For I know he, like me, must have thought, upon seeing Yashiki go into the darkroom, that there was no way short of killing him to keep him from stealing the secrets. I had thought that the way to kill him would be to get him drunk and give him ammonium dichromate, and the same thought must have run through Karubé’s mind. Yet not only Yashiki and I were drunk. Karubé was too. So it seems unlikely that Karubé gave Yashiki the poison. And if the possibilities that had troubled Karubé through recent days had worked in his drunken mind to make him offer Yashiki ammonium dichromate, then perhaps, by the same token, it was I who was the criminal.
Indeed how can I say absolutely that I did not kill him? Was it not I, rather than Karubé, who feared him? All the time he was there, was it not I who was most on guard to see if he went into the darkroom? Was it not I who harbored the deepest resentment at the idea of his stealing the bismuth and zirconium silicate formula I was working on?
Perhaps I murdered him. I knew better than anyone where the ammonium dichromate was. Before drunkenness overtook me, I kept thinking about Yashiki and what he would be doing somewhere else the next day, when he would be free to leave. And if he had lived, would I not have lost more than Karubé? And had not my head, like the master’s, been attacked by ferric chloride?
I no longer understand myself. I only feel the sharp menace of an approaching machine, aimed at me. Someone must judge me. How can I know what I have done?
THE MOON ON THE WATER
BY Yasunari Kawabata
TRANSLATED BY George Saitō
Yasunari Kawabata was born in Osaka in 1899. His father, a physician with a special taste for literature and art, died when Kawabata was three years old; his mother died in the following year. Kawabata was then brought up by his grandfather and grandmother. The latter died when he was eight years old and his grandfather died in 1914. Kawabata was then put in the care of his mother’s family.
In his primary-school days he wanted to become a painter, but when he was about fifteen he decided to become a novelist instead. In his fifth year in middle school he started contributing essays and stories to a private literary magazine and to local newspapers.
His diary, written just before the death of his grandfather, was later published as “Diary of a Sixteen-Year-Old.” During the three years when he was a student at the First High School he devoted himself chiefly to reading Scandinavian literature and works of Japanese authors belonging to the Shirakaba school, which was strongly opposed to the simple approach of naturalism and sought a style suited to sensual expression.
Kawabata entered the English Literature Department of Tokyo Imperial University in 1920 and in the next year he started publication of a literary magazine in collaboration with other students. His story “A Memorial Day Scene,” which was published in the second issue of the magazine, attracted the attention of Kan Kikuchi. At about the same time he also became a friend of Riichi Yokomitsu.
In 1923 Kawabata joined the staff of a leading literary magazine, Bungei Shunjū, and started writing book reviews. He was graduated from Tokyo Imperial University in March, 1924. In September of the same year he began the publication of the literary magazine Bungei Jidai, from which was started the new literary movement of neo-sensualism (shinkankaku-ha), discussed in the note on Riichi Yokomitsu.
“The Izu Dancer” which was published in
the January and February, 1925, issues of Bungei Jidai, is representative of his early writing. It describes a young dancing girl belonging to a traveling entertainers troupe which Kawabata as a high-school pupil happened to have met on a tour of the Izu Peninsula. The story recalls the writer’s younger days and is wrapped in the sentimental atmosphere of youth.
In subsequent works, such as “The Kurenaidan of Asakusa” and “Flower Waltz,” Kawabata deals chiefly with the lives of dancers and aims at evoking the ephemeral beauty of worldly things. In a short story entitled “Birds and Animals,” published in 1933, he describes the psychology of a middle-aged man who in his loneliness raises dogs and birds. Solitude, loneliness, and a sense of the vanity of things cast their shadow over this work.
In his novel “Snow Country,” which was started in 1935 and finished in 1937, Kawabata describes the relations of the hero, a specialist in Western ballet from Tokyo, with a geisha in a mountain village. The story is dominated by the sparkling love, mingled with the cold realization of actuality, between the hero, who has observed life only through art, and the woman, who has been leading a lonely life in this remote mountainous region.
Kawabata is also an important literary critic. He has discovered many promising young writers, including Yukio Mishima, and he has a keen interest in literature for young people.
In 1948, Kawabata was appointed chairman of the Japanese Center of the P.E.N. Club. After the war he declared that he would write nothing except elegies; in keeping with this resolve he has written several novels, such as “The Sound of the Mountain” and “Thousand Cranes,” which are characterized by a deep sense of solitude and a consciousness of old age and approaching death.
The present story (Suigetsu in Japanese) was first published in 1953, when the author was fifty-four.
IT OCCURRED TO KYŌKO one day to let her husband, in bed upstairs, see her vegetable garden by reflecting it in her hand mirror. To one who had been so long confined, this opened a new life. The hand mirror was part of a set in Kyōko’s trousseau. The mirror stand was not very big. It was made of mulberry wood, as was the frame of the mirror itself. It was the hand mirror that still reminded her of the bashfulness of her early married years when, as she was looking into it at the reflection of her back hair in the stand mirror, her sleeve would slip and expose her elbow.
