Modern Japanese Short Stories

by Ivan Morris

  But the cell boss already knew. He didn’t trouble to answer, but rose swiftly and took out the food he had put away only moments before.

  To have to look at the hideous color and manner of the man was to have an enormous weight on top of one’s head. We all wanted intensely to move away with him from that dangerous hour.

  He began eating. Only a moment ago he had been unable to eat a single mouthful, and now he shoveled the food into his mouth with amazing relish. Quickly he disposed of one meal, and not many minutes later he’d finished the other two. His was indeed a formidable appetite. His spirits had recovered completely.

  It began when somebody asked me: “And what’re you in for?”

  For some minutes, the talk was of my criminal record.

  “Say, old man, today why don’t you finally tell us the details of that rape, murder, and public indecency of yours?” Seeing the cell boss in a good humor, someone asked him this question. As a matter of fact, this was exactly the lurid account I too had been wanting to hear.

  The beaming face of the cell boss suddenly turned grim.

  “That’s one thing I don’t want to be asked.”

  His tone was heavy. For some time now I’d been darting glances in his direction, my face alight with a conscious youthfulness. I was giving him these meaningful little glances to let him know I’d be interested in making peace with him. For the life of me, I couldn’t make myself say the words outright. So I’d taken this rather crafty way of making amends.

  Soon he was taken out again for exercise.

  “‘Robbery, rape, murder, public indecency.’ What did he do anyway?” I asked the fortyish fellow. I’d memorized the list of crimes attributed to the cell boss though I’d heard it only once.

  “Well, he seems bent on keeping that a secret if it’s the last thing he does, but as a matter of fact, there’s this.”

  He pulled a document from among the personal effects of the cell boss. It was the decision on a preliminary hearing.

  The other men apparently had seen it already and I was the only one to extend my hand. It was couched in the stilted language of official documents, but as I read it, an image of the event formed itself, piece by piece, in my mind.

  * * *

  The season was spring; the scene, the lush pine woods of northern Kanto. Among the evergreens could be seen spring flowers, and to the nostrils came the strong odor of chestnut blossoms. From somewhere not far off sounded the song of a thrush. The time was just past noon and the air had the breath of late spring, almost like the soft touch of flesh.

  For some time now the shrill voices of young girls had been coming from the other side of the woods. Soon, glimpses of school uniforms could be seen as the girls came filing down the hill through the straight-standing spruces.

  “Looks like a picnic.”

  Two construction workers, on their way up the hill to where a power station was being built, were sitting on rocks by the road and smoking.

  “There still must be snow at the top.”

  “No, not any more. The azaleas are in bloom.”

  The two fell silent. It was a meaningful silence.

  Just then: “Go on. Go ahead. Don’t look back. Don’t.”

  Waving toward the group she’d just left, a schoolgirl of about eighteen ran behind some trees. Before the spot where the two workers were sitting there was a tangled thicket of withered pampas-like grass. The stems were graying and broken, but there were traces of green at the roots. The schoolgirl, worried only about whether she could be seen by her companions, pulled down her underpants and crouched down. Only the white calico showed clearly.

  One of the workers whispered something to the other. Without replying, the latter rose and hurried off. The first jumped in front of the schoolgirl, who was still squatting down. The snapping of grass stems could be heard. In an instant she was overpowered. Her shrieks only echoed through the spruce branches. It was over in a matter of minutes. Then the other worker, who had been standing watch, came back and changed places with the first. It was No. 170, our cell boss.

  The schoolgirl lay face upward, her soft hair wet from the oozing mire. The second worker did as the other had done. The schoolgirl had lost consciousness. The breath came from her dainty nostrils like a soft whisper.

  With his big hands, the worker strangled her. And as he stood up, he saw the girl’s tiny red purse lying a couple of feet away. It had so many bills in it that its clasp would not close. He picked it up and put it inside his waistband.

  The two men dragged the body to soft ground and buried it. Cautiously, they left in different directions. Probably the other man hadn’t thought of killing the girl.

  * * *

  When night begins to fall, there comes a moment when everyone becomes a bit emotional. I noticed the cell boss sitting perfectly still, facing the wall and murmuring a Buddhist prayer.

  I slept little better that night. Occasionally, he’d roll over and kick me. I’d awake with a start, as if dashed with cold water. Even if he’d forgiven me, he hardly needed a pretext to commit another murder, It was I, close at hand, who had the greatest chance of becoming the victim.

  But nothing unusual happened. With the morning there came again those terrible agonies we could hardly bear to watch. And yet at noon he’d be able to eat not only his own but other people’s lunches too.

  One day my chance came to make peace with him.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “We’ll win this war soon, and then everyone will get a pardon.”

  It was nonsense. But if I was to say anything to him at all, what else could I say?

  “Think so? But even if I should get out, I wouldn’t have anything to wear.”

  “Oh, you don’t have to worry about things to wear. A long time ago they had an amnesty when the Constitution was promulgated, and they say a market was set up outside the prison. I’ll lend you a little money.”

  But one morning, at about eight o’clock:

  “No. 178—visitor!”

  Almost immediately the door opened. I’ll never forget the look on No. 170’s face as the guard said “one seventy …” and then added “eight.” His face became chalk white, his eyes jerked upward, his whole body started to tremble. But it was just that one of the fellows in the Kawanaka gang had come to see me.

  On the following morning, the same thing happened again. The shock was the same as it had been the day before. I could hardly stand to watch him.

  Without saying why, I told the fellow from the Kawanaka gang not to visit me again. I’d begun to have a strange liking for the cell boss. You may laugh when I tell you the reason. You may not be able to understand. In a word, it was because he wasn’t going to kill me.

  I’d been thinking over and over again the frame of mind in which I’d killed Shida, and the frame of mind the cell boss must have been in when he’d killed the schoolgirl. They were deeds that couldn’t be undone. But isn’t it remarkable that this man would forego killing me, who slept beside him, and thus forego his chance to live longer? Isn’t it wonderful that man is unable to kill without reason, even given his burning desire for life?

  I asked that erudite fellow in his forties: “I’ve heard that men who’ve been sentenced to death think of killing someone else in prison. I wonder if anything like that has ever actually happened?”

  “Well, it’s something they often talk about, but I’ve never heard of an actual case.”

  I don’t know why, but I thought happily: “Why, of course.”

  It was one morning some days later. An order was shouted by a guard to a man who had gone out to write a letter.

  “Stop writing!”

  I was the first to start up. When I was still in solitary, I had once heard that same order: “Stop writing!” I had wondered what it meant and later had asked one of the trusties.

  “Yesterday, the janitor went in to sweep out the cellar room just under the gallows trap. That means there’ll be a hanging today. Guess it’ll be
the German spy whose sentence was confirmed the other day.”

  As I recalled this, I thought: “Well, this is it!” I stole a glance at No. 170. In Cell Block Five there were three men sentenced to death, but it was only No. 170 whose sentence had been confirmed.

  “Could be a news bulletin,” someone was saying. Decidedly it couldn’t be anything like that, however.

  Soon there were footsteps and two guards stood at the entrance to our cell.

  “No. 170. Visitor!”

  The cell boss was ashen. He sat transfixed.

  “Out, No. 170! Out! Visitor!”

  The guards came inside without removing their shoes. They pulled No. 170 to his feet, supporting him from both sides. Swaying and staggering, No. 170 reached the cell door. One of the guards urged him to put on straw sandals, but his feet trembled so he couldn’t keep them on.

  He went off down the passage toward the women’s cells, supported by two guards. The straw sandals lay on the concrete corridor where he had dropped them, a pace or so apart.

  “Well, I wonder which guard will pull the rope today. He just has to pull that rope and he gets a whole bottle of saké, some eats, and the rest of the day off.”

  The fortyish fellow seemed quite proud of his store of knowledge. My face felt pale, I had an urge to slap him. But I fell silent, my head bowed.

  THE IDIOT

  BY Ango Sakaguchi

  TRANSLATED BY George Saitō

  Ango Sakaguchi was born in 1906 and graduated from the Department of Indian Philosophy, Tokyo University, in 1930. It was through his first two short stories, “Dr. Kaze” and “Kurotani Village,” written soon after his graduation from the university for the group magazine of which he was one of the editors, that he first made his name in literary circles. He did not become widely known, however, until the publication after the war of a series of novels and essays.

  His eccentricity, as reflected in the titles he chose (“Overcoat and Blue Sky,” “Wind, Light, and I at Twenty,” “A Woman Who Washes the Loincloth of a Blue Ogre,” “Tale of Nippon—A History Begins with Sukiyaki,” etc.), did not permit him to accept conventionality or established social institutions. His life was devoted to a search for a flowering Utopia amid the chaos of worldly cares. In this respect he is reminiscent of Osamu Dazai. The yardstick that he used was himself. He therefore almost completely disregarded existing rhetorical mannerisms and created a unique style of his own. Practically none of the established moral or social values could escape his ridicule.

  Just as in his writing Sakaguchi revolted against all accepted concepts, so his fate was that of a man who ruins himself in despair. This courageous man died in poverty in 1933, still making his heavy attacks on pseudo-authority and pseudo-ethics.

  The present story (Hakuchim in Japanese) was first published in 1946, when the author was thirty-seven. Through its existentialist description of man living like trash under the gigantic force of war, the story results in focusing the reader’s attention on the emptiness and corruption of wartime Japan. The description of the hero’s painful solitude as he wanders aimlessly in the desert of debris can be read as a realistic picture of the author’s own plight.

  VARIOUS SPECIES LIVED in the house: human beings, a pig, a dog, a hen, a duck. But actually there was hardly any difference in their style of lodging or in the food they ate. It was a crooked building like a storehouse. The owner and his wife lived on the ground floor, while a mother and her daughter rented the attic. The daughter was pregnant, but no one knew who was responsible.

  The room that Izawa rented was in a hut detached from the main house. It had formerly been occupied by the family’s consumptive son, who had died. Even if it had been assigned to a consumptive pig, the hut could hardly have been considered extravagant. Nevertheless, it had drawers, shelves, and a lavatory.

  The owner and his wife were tailors. They also gave sewing lessons to the neighbors, and this was the reason that the son had been placed in a separate hut. The owner was an official of the neighborhood association, in which the girl who lived in the attic had originally worked. It appeared that while she was living in the association’s office, she had enjoyed sexual relations indiscriminately with all the officials of the association except the president and the tailor. She had thus had more than ten lovers and now she was with child by one of them. When this unfortunate fact became known, the officials collected a fund to take care of the child when it was born. In this world nothing goes to waste: among the officials was a bean-curd dealer who continued to visit the girl even after she had become pregnant and had taken refuge in the attic. In the end, the girl was virtually established as this man’s mistress. When the other officials learned of the situation, they immediately withdrew their contributions and asserted that the bean-curd dealer ought to bear her living expenses. There were seven or eight of them who refused to pay, including the greengrocer, the watchmaker, and the landlord. Since they had been giving five yen each, the loss was considerable and there was no end to the girl’s resentment.

  She had a big mouth and two large eyes, yet she was fearfully thin. She disliked the duck and tried to give all the leftovers to the hen, but since the duck invariably butted in and snatched the food, she would chase it furiously round the room. The way she ran in a strangely erect posture, with her huge belly and her buttocks jutting out to the front and the rear, bore a striking resemblance to the duck’s waddle.

  At the entrance to the alley was a tobacconist, a thickly powdered woman of fifty-five. She had just got rid of her seventh or eighth lover, and rumor had it that she was now having trouble making up her mind about whether to choose in his stead a middle-aged Buddhist priest or a certain shopkeeper, also middle-aged. She was known to sell a couple of cigarettes (at the black-market price) to any young man who went to the back door of her shop. “Why don’t you try buying some, sir?” the tailor had suggested to Izawa. Izawa, however, had no need to call on the old woman since he received a special ration at his office.

  Behind the rice-supply office diagonally opposite the tobacconist’s lived a widow who had accumulated some savings. She had two children: a son, who was a factory hand, and a younger daughter. Though really brother and sister, these two had lived as man and wife. The widow had connived at this, feeling that it would be cheaper in the long run. In the meantime, however, the son had acquired a mistress on the side. The need had therefore arisen to marry off the daughter, and it had been decided that she should become the bride of a man of fifty or sixty who was vaguely related. Thereupon the daughter had taken rat poison. After swallowing the poison, she had come to the tailor’s (where Izawa lodged) for her sewing lesson. There she had begun to suffer the most atrocious agonies, and had finally died. The local doctor certified that she had died from a heart attack and this had been the end of the matter. “Eh?” Izawa had asked the tailor in surprise. “Where do you find doctors who’ll issue such convenient certificates?” The tailor had been even more surprised. “D’you mean to say they don’t do that sort of thing everywhere?” he said.

  It was a neighborhood where tenements were clustered together. A considerable proportion of the rooms was occupied by kept women or prostitutes. Since these women had no children and since they were all inclined to keep their rooms neat, the caretakers of the buildings liked having them as tenants and did not mind about the disorderliness and immorality of their private lives. More than half of the apartments had become dormitories used by munitions factories and were occupied by groups of women volunteer-workers. Among the tenants were pregnant volunteers who continued receiving their salaries even though they never went to work; the girl friend of Mr. So-and-So in such-and-such a section of the government; the “wartime wife” of the section chief (which meant that the real wife had been evacuated from Tokyo); the official mistress of a company director.

  One of the women was reported to be a five-hundred-yen mistress and was the object of general envy. Next door to the soldier of fortune from Manch
uria, who proudly boasted that his profession used to be murder (his younger sister studied sewing with the tailor), lived a manual therapist; next to him lived a man who, it was rumored, belonged to one of the traditional schools that practiced the fine art of picking pockets. Behind him lived a naval sublieutenant who ate fish, drank coffee, feasted on tinned food, and had saké every day. Because of the subterranean water which one found on digging a foot or so below the surface, it was almost impossible to construct air-raid shelters in this neighborhood; the sub-lieutenant, however, had somehow contrived to build a concrete shelter which was even finer than his actual apartment.

  The department store, a wooden, two-story building on the route that Izawa took on his way to work, was closed because of the wartime lack of commodities; but on the upper floor gambling was being carried on every day. The boss of the gambling gang also controlled a number of “people’s bars.” He got dead drunk every day of the week and used to glare fiercely at the people who stood in queues waiting to enter his bars.

  On graduating from university, Izawa had become a newspaper reporter; subsequently he had started working on educational films. This was his present job, but he was still an apprentice and had not yet directed anything independently. He was twenty-seven, an age at which one is likely to know something about the seamy side of society; and in fact he had managed to pick up a good deal of inside information about politicians, army officers, businessmen, geisha, and entertainers. Yet he had never imagined that life in a suburban shopping district surrounded by small factories and apartment buildings could be anything like this. It occurred to him that it might be due to the roughening effect of the war on people’s characters, but when he asked the tailor about it one day, the man replied in a quiet, philosophical way: “No, to tell the truth, things have always been like this in our neighborhood.” But the outstanding character of them all was the man next door. This neighbor was mad. He was quite well off and one way in which his madness revealed itself was in an excessive fear of intrusion by burglars or other undesirable people. This had led him to choose for his house a place at the very end of the alley and to construct the entrance in such a way that one could not find it even if one went up to the house and past the gate. There was nothing to be seen from the front but a latticed window. The real entrance was at the opposite end of the house from the gate and one had to go around the entire building to reach it. The owner’s plan was that an intruder would either give up and beat a hasty retreat, or else would be discovered as he roamed about the house looking for the elusive entrance. Izawa’s mad neighbor had little liking for the common people of this floating world. His house was a two-story building with quite a large number of rooms, but even the well-informed tailor knew hardly anything about the interior design.