Modern Japanese Short Stories

by Ivan Morris

  But now Miyoshi came hurrying back from the inner office, where he and the legal-affairs officer had been discussing matters with the superintendent, and called to Yaé: “Look, it’s all right for you to go now, so do you think you could take this woman with you and put her up at your place? How do you feel? Will you do that? We’ll talk about the details later, eh?”

  Yaé, squatting on the floor, turned cumbrously to face Miyoshi.

  “That’ll be fine, officer. If you’ve no objection, there’s plenty of room at my place,” she replied, looking as if this was just what she had been hoping for; and at once she started making her preparations.

  Soon the station car was noisily starting up its engine outside the crowded entrance way, and Yaé, holding the baby in her arms, squeezed herself through the car door with the greatest difficulty and settled down in the seat beside Yoshie and her daughter.

  “Drive slowly,” she exhorted Constable Kobayashi at the wheel; then, turning earnestly to the crowd of policemen gathered to see them all off, she called out: “If you need my help again, just send for me!”

  MORNING MIST

  BY Tatsuo Nagai

  TRANSLATED BY Edward Seidensticker

  Tatsuo Nagai, who was born in 1904, began writing short stories and plays while still in his twenties. Except for a period of silence during the war, he has followed a double career as journalist and writer. “Morning Mist” (Asagiri), which was published in 1950, is characteristic of the work for which he is perhaps best known today, half humorous, half pathetic sketches of unimportant people and their eccentricities.

  Although it is somewhat nearer the objectivity of the conventional short story than most of Nagai’s work, “Morning Mist” is nonetheless representative of a peculiarly Japanese genre, part essay and part fiction. Japanese writers of fiction have traditionally felt free to step forward and comment in their own voices, and the contemporary story-essay, if such it may be called, offers evidence that the break with the past in modern Japanese literature has not been so complete as many historians would have it.

  “I SHALL see you later, then.”

  “Yes.”

  Having carefully tied his shoes, the solidly built old man stood up, deliberately turned around, and, as always, took a large watch from his pocket.

  “This evening, I think I shall be home at about—five-seventeen.”

  “Yes.”

  In contrast to the elaborate formality of X’s speech, this second quick “yes” from the old wife, who was seeing him to the door, was dry and terse as only long years of married life could have made it.

  X’s black briefcase was always puffed like a small pig. The question of what it contained will come up for discussion later; for the present, let us say that I imagined it to be stuffed with textbooks, reference works, examination papers, and the like.

  He picked it up, put his hand to the glass door, and started out. There was a certain hesitation in his step, however. He laid the briefcase down again.

  “I believe I said five-seventeen.”

  “Yes.”

  “That was a mistake. I shall be home at five-seven.”

  “Yes.”

  Briskly and quite without concern, the wife put away the shoehorn and stepped into a pair of clogs. As if to follow him out or perhaps to chase him out, she went to the door, took a broom, and turned the corner of the walk toward the kitchen. She wasted neither time nor ceremony. The walk inside and outside the gate was to be swept.

  The footsteps of X, who must by then have gone some distance, came nearer again.

  “A little while ago—“

  “Yes.”

  “I said five-seven. But today it will be five-seventeen after all.”

  “Yes. I see.”

  Shifting the heavy briefcase to a hand constantly exposed to the ravages of chalk, X set off at his usual pace. The sound of the broom had not stopped.

  My description of this ritual from the distant past, repeated each morning when X set off for work, need not end here. Indeed the retreating figure suggests that he may be back; but I shall eliminate the repetitions.

  One knows that the wife’s answers were not an expression of that drying up of love one so often sees. Quite the reverse: to shore up his feelings of security and to speed his decision, she had to make her answers as unvarying as possible.

  It had taken her some time to hit upon the dry “yes.” If the answer was even a little complicated—“I understand,” or “Is that so?”—or if it was different from the answer of the day before, she would know the sorrow—she had known it more than once—of troubling his decision. One day he had come all the way back from Shibuya to inform her of a change in his schedule.

  He was under no obligation to specify the time of his return. No complications in his family life required it.

  I myself have been working for nearly ten years now; and it rather amused me once to learn that carp in a fishing pond follow fixed and invariable paths. The working man is very much like the carp. He is most reluctant to move from the familiar rut. Except for pressing business or an emergency, he has no wish to change his route to work, even though he ought to be thoroughly sick of it.

  If it were suggested that X’s ritual was unhealthy, I think we could answer that he shared a disease from which all working men suffer to some extent.

  X was living in a suburb of Tokyo.

  He was ten minutes’ walk from the station. At Shibuya he changed from the suburban electric to the government line, which took him to a certain middle school in the heart of the city.

  As if pressed from a die, his teaching life had now gone on for seven or eight years since he bought his house on royalties from Examinations Made Easy, and we may therefore say that his everyday routine, of a sort that the reader will have no trouble in imagining from his own school days, had been rather a long one. If I had feared having X come into the mind as stereotype, I could have used an opening from a short story I happened to have on hand, by M. de Maupassant:

  “Old M. Taille had three daughters: The oldest, Anna, of whom the family seldom spoke; Rose, the second, aged eighteen; and Claire, the youngest, a child of barely fifteen. M. Taille, a widower, was master mechanic in M. Lebrument’s button factory. He was much respected, very honest, and very sober, a sort of model workman. The family lived on the Rue d’Angoulême in Le Havre.”

  Indeed it would have done my story no harm to be transported to a small city in France or America.

  If, having come upon them, I had made use of these random sentences, I would have found that remark about honesty and sobriety quite appropriate. One is not to suppose, however, that X had three daughters, Anna, Rose, and Claire.

  X was not my teacher, and it was by accident that I moved into a house very near his in the last years of his life. This little story really begins with a visit to his house at the invitation of his son, who had been my friend and classmate through high school and college, and whom I chanced to meet, for the first time in some years, on the platform of his suburban station. The war had just begun.

  * * *

  On the appointed Sunday afternoon, I was shown into the sitting room by the old wife. She said that her son would be home shortly. I was much impressed with her close-knit tidiness; then, when the husband sat facing me, I was still more impressed, somehow, by the simple fact that age had come upon him. It was not an impression of unhealthiness. It was a feeling of, literally, age. A general slackening had come over the well-fleshed and rather large figure.

  Apart from that, the careful politeness of his speech was at least twice as pronounced as I had remembered.

  “You know Mr. Iké,” said the wife, introducing me. “He used to come often. A friend of Yoshihidé’s.”

  “Is that so, is that so? It was extremely good of you to come. Yoshihidé is deeply in debt to you.”

  His place by a window seat had a well-used look about it. Clearly it was where the old man sat. Neatly piled by the wall in yellowed b
indings were several of the familiar quick courses in mathematics of which he was the author, membership lists for academic societies, alumni registers for middle and high schools, and the like. But even more familiar was the black briefcase, showing some wear, it was true, but nonetheless staunch on the window seat where he could reach it, and puffed like a small pig, just as I had seen it the day before.

  The wife said that her husband had resigned from a certain middle school three or four years earlier, and that he had now also given up his mathematics courses in Kanda.

  During this brisk narrative, X sat with rigid formality, slightly bowed, hands on knees.

  When his wife left the room, I had no choice but to talk as best I could of the old days, mostly of my friendship with Yoshihidé. He nodded and gravely answered “I see” each time I spoke.

  The door opened. I thought Yoshihidé was back; but I soon knew, from the voice in the hall and the youthfulness of the footsteps, that it was someone else. At the door to the sitting room a loud voice announced that its owner was home. He roughly threw down a bundle, then saw that there was company. It was Yoshihidé’s youngest brother, ten years younger than he. There could be no doubt about the identity of the still-growing boy, perhaps a middle-school student in his third or fourth year.

  “Hello. It’s been a long time.”

  I smiled at him. He stared for a moment, and seemed on the point of saying “Oh, it’s you, is it?”

  Instead he said “It has been a long time” and bowed.

  X, who was sitting stiffly before me, returned the bow ceremoniously.

  “It was extremely good of you to come.”

  The brother was already out of the room. X remained quietly in control of himself, but my own confusion was mounting. He spoke, again with great dignity.

  “I’m very sorry, but might I know your name?”

  “Iké Takeichiro, a classmate of Yoshihidé’s. I called occasionally when you were living in Koishikawa.”

  “I see. A classmate of Yoshihidé’s.” It seemed to me that a touch of liveliness came over his face. He put on his spectacles and had no trouble finding our high-school register in the heap by the wall. Assiduously he ran his finger through the Is.

  “Iké—Takeichiro. Here it is, here it is. Well, well. 15c, C-I, Nishikata-machi, Hongō.”

  “I lived with my father in Nishikata-machi until a couple of years ago.

  His voice had suggested that reminiscences of Nishikata-machi were coming. Instead he flicked over the pages.

  “Nishikata-machi—6E. Itō Shōtarō. Class of 1919, is it? You know him?”

  “Nineteen nineteen. That was some years ahead of me.”

  “I see. Nishikata-machi. Here. Konuma Haruo. Was he near you?”

  “I don’t remember a Konuma in the neighborhood.”

  “I see. Nishikata-machi, 96A. Kawakita Chigusa.”

  So it went. I was offered name after name from Nishikata-machi and when one of them aroused a flicker of a memory, I took my stand. I said I knew him. I thought I had seen the shingle of a doctor by that name. “I believe he was a doctor.”

  At last satisfied, X took his spectacles by the bow and smiled at me. “That’s right. That’s quite right. Tokyo Imperial University Medical School, class of 1928, it says.”

  “Was he one of your students, sir?”

  I thought the question might interest him, but he answered: “Never met the gentleman.”

  He returned the register to its place, reached for the black briefcase in the window, and let it fall heavily at his knee.

  “Something very, very good in here,” he said, opening the briefcase as if it contained rare treasures and taking out several bundles of postcards. “I suppose you know the famous novelist Ōmichi Saburō?”

  “I’ve read his things in newspapers and magazines, I believe.”

  “Of course you have. This one is 1941. This one is 1938. And here—here is Ōmichi Saburō’s New Year card for this very year. His real name is Noguchi Kunihiko—here, in parentheses. And here is Takahashi Goichirō. You must know him. He was elected to the Diet from Chiba last year. He was a hard one to manage, but he’s done well for himself.”

  He shot them at me like the names in Nishikata-machi. I had to view card after card after card from his students. In the case of Ōmichi Saburō I saw cards for the last five years.

  “I take them to school with me. To the lectures in Kanda too. I take them out when I have a minute to spare and look at them over a cup of tea. Endlessly fascinating. Why else would I have kept them these fifteen years?”

  I felt a surge of I hardly know what—call it sympathy, call it pity. “A remarkably good way to entertain yourself,” I was able to say without affectation.

  Yoshihidé’s brother came in with tea, apparently brewed in some haste. I pointed to a tennis racket on the veranda.

  “You play tennis?”

  “My brother does.” Embarrassed, the boy stood up to leave. He turned back from the door. “It’s time to heat the bath, Father,” he blurted out, and almost fled from the room.

  “Tennis is a good game. You let the ball go, and you drive it cross-court like this. That’s when it’s really good.” X showed no sign of having heard his son. Gently raising his left hand with the elbow forward, he clenched his right hand and brought it diagonally down across his chest.

  At this point a somewhat flustered Yoshihidé hurried in, apologizing for his tardiness. He had had business, and one interview had not been enough to finish it. X sat with the briefcase and several bundles of postcards before him, and remarked in the midst of the apology: “You let the ball go, and you drive it cross-court like this.” He served again. I tried not to notice. I said that I was surprised to see how near we lived. I said that the brother was the image of the Yoshihidé of our high school days. X raised his left arm, brought his clenched right hand diagonally forward, and half rose from his seat.

  “You let the ball go,” he said, “and you drive it cross-court like this.”

  Acutely uncomfortable, I fell silent. Yoshihidé stood up and put his arm around his father’s shoulders.

  “You let the ball go….” The left hand rose again.

  “It’s time to heat the bath, Father. Suppose we go.”

  The old man got up without a protest.

  “Suppose I go and heat the bath,” he said.

  After seeing him to the door, Yoshihidé pushed the postcards out of sight. “The old man’s in his second childhood. We don’t know what to do with him.”

  I left toward evening. As I passed the hedge, I saw X squatting by the boiler, busily shoving in wood. I spoke across the hedge to his wife, who was bustling about the kitchen. Though he was less than a yard away from me, X’s attention did not leave the bath. I might as well not have been there.

  * * *

  Some two weeks later, Yoshihidé called me in for consultation. Thereafter I frequently visited the X house. Yoshihidé had chosen the girl he wanted to marry, but his parents would not give their consent.

  To make quite sure of my ground, I met the girl and talked to her. She was bright and good natured, a girl in whom I could find no fault. Everything promised a happy marriage, and I concluded that I must help them. With the girl’s permission, I went cautiously to work.

  On my next visit, I introduced myself as before, and again was questioned about Nishikata-machi. This time Yoshihidé had told me what to do. I expansively admitted knowing everyone on the list. As Yoshihidé had predicted, X’s happiness was extraordinary. His spirits brightened, his memory seemed to come back, and by fits he spoke of how it had been when I had come visiting as a school friend of Yoshihidé’s.

  I even went home with a present.

  It was a commodity new on the market: the spring clothespin. Bringing a large cloth bundle from a back room, X dropped two bunches of clothespins into my hand. He had some days earlier passed a night stall by the station, Yoshihidé told me, and bought out the stock of clothespins.<
br />
  I had heard that X was an expert calligrapher, and I next brought a doorplate to be inscribed. I have said that my name is Iké Takeichiro. Because it can be misread Iketaké Ichiro, I asked him to leave a space between the first character and the other three. He happily agreed, and he did not again forget my name.

  I had been reminded of his talent by the bath pails out drying in the garden. On the bottom of each round and oval wooden bucket, a beautifully written character—“Upper,” “Lower,” “Men,” “Women,” and so on—testified to X’s love of hygiene and order. Somehow those round “Men” and “Women” made me think of masks for “good people” and “bad people” in a morality play—which subject reminds me of another performance.

  X never missed his radio calisthenics. Hardly calisthenics—he moved his arms and legs at random, after a style quite his own. Sometimes he would sit on the parlor floor and flex his wrists, sometimes he would kneel and shake his head. The spectacle was effective comedy; but, for X, radio calisthenics were as serious as prayer.

  Not only was he, like M. Taille “very sober,” he was much attached to life, and he had long made a point of trying out everything said to be good for the body.