by Ivan Morris
The madman was about thirty; he had a wife of about twenty-five, and a mother. People said that at least the mother should be classed as sane. She had an extremely hysterical nature, however, and was without doubt the most mettlesome woman in the neighborhood, so much so that when she was dissatisfied with her rationed allocations she would rush out of the house barefoot to complain instantly to the town block-association.
The man’s wife was an idiot. One lucky year he had undergone a religious awakening, clad himself in white, and set out on a pilgrimage to Shikoku. In the course of the trip he had become friendly with a feeble-minded woman somewhere in Shikoku: he had brought her back as a sort of souvenir of his pilgrimage and had married her.
The madman was a handsome fellow. His feeble-minded wife had an elegance becoming a daughter of a good family; her narrow-eyed, oval face had the prettiness of an old-fashioned doll or of a Noh mask. Outwardly the two were not only good-looking but appeared to be a well-matched couple of considerable breeding. The madman was extremely shortsighted and wore strong spectacles. As a rule he had a pensive air, as though tired from reading innumerable books.
One day when an air-raid drill was being held in the alley and the housewives were all bustling about efficiently, the madman had stood there in his everyday kimono, giggling inanely as he observed the scene. Then he had suddenly left and reappeared wearing an air-raid uniform. Grabbing a bucket from someone, he had started to draw water and to throw it about the place, uttering various curious exclamations all the while. After that he placed a ladder against the wall, climbed to the top, and began shouting orders from the roof, ending in a stirring admonitory speech. This was the first time that Izawa had actually realized that the man was mad. He had, it is true, already noticed certain eccentricities in his neighbor. For instance, the man would occasionally break through the fence into the tailor’s garden and empty a bucket of leftovers into the pigpen; after this he would suddenly throw a stone at the duck or, with an air of perfect nonchalance, start feeding the hen and then abruptly give her a kick. But on the whole Izawa had taken the man to be compos mentis and he used to exchange silent greetings with him when they happened to meet.
What was the real difference, he wondered, between the madman and normal people? The difference, if any, was that the madman was essentially more discreet. To be sure, he giggled when he wanted to, gave a speech when he felt like it, threw stones at the duck, and would spend a couple of hours poking a pig’s head and rear if the spirit so moved him. Nevertheless, he was essentially far more apprehensive of public opinion than normal people and he took special care in trying to isolate the main part of his private life from others. This was another reason that he had placed the entrance to his house on exactly the opposite side from the gate. On the whole the madman’s private life was devoid of noise, he did not go in for useless chatting, and he lived in a meditative way. On the opposite side of the alley was an apartment from which the sound of running water and of vulgar female voices constantly encroached upon Izawa’s hut. The apartment was occupied by two sisters who were prostitutes. On nights when the elder sister had a customer, the younger one would pace the corridor; when the younger sister had a customer, the elder one would walk up and down deep into the night. And people considered the madman to be of a different race, thought Izawa, merely because he was in the habit of giggling.
The madman’s feeble-minded wife was a remarkably quiet and gentle woman. Her speech consisted of a timid mumble; even when one could make out the words, her meaning was usually obscure. She did not know how to prepare a meal or boil rice. She might have been able to cook if she had had to, but as soon as she made a mistake and was scolded, she became so nervous that she began to spill and drop everything. Even when she went to get rations she could do nothing herself; she merely stood there and let the neighbors manage for her. People said that since she was the wife of a madman it was quite appropriate that she should be an idiot and that the man’s family could hardly expect anything better. The mother, however, was greatly dissatisfied and was constantly complaining about the misfortune of having a daughter-in-law who could not even boil rice. As a rule she was a modest and refined old woman, but owing to her hysteria she could become even fiercer than her mad son once she had been aroused. Among the three unbalanced occupants of the house it was the old mother who uttered the loudest screams. The idiot wife was so intimidated by this that she was in a perpetual state of nerves, even on peaceful days when nothing had gone wrong. The mere sound of footsteps would fill her with alarm. When Izawa greeted her on the street, she would stand there petrified, with a vacant look on her face.
The wife, too, occasionally came to the tailor’s pigpen. Whereas the husband broke in openly, as if the house belonged to him, and threw stones at the duck or poked the pig’s jowls, the feeble-minded woman slipped in silently like a shadow and hid behind the pigpen. In a way this had become her sanctuary. After she had been there for a while, the old woman’s croaking voice would usually come from the next door, shouting “Osayo, Osayo!” and the idiot’s body would react to each call by crouching further in the corner or by bending over. Before reluctantly emerging from her hiding place, the wife would time after time repeat her impotent, worm-like movements of resistance.
Izawa’s occupations of newspaper reporter and educational-film director were the meanest of the mean. The only thing such people seemed to understand was the current fashion, and their lives consisted of a constant effort not to be left behind by the times. In this world there was no room for personality, or the pursuit of the ego, or originality. Like office workers, civil servants, or school teachers, their daily conversation abounded with such words as ego, mankind, personality, originality. But all this was mere verbiage. What they meant by “human suffering” was some such nonsense as the discomfort of a hangover after a drunken night during which one has spent all one’s money trying to seduce a woman. They absorbed themselves in making films or writing fanciful pieces of colored prose which had neither spiritual value nor any element of real feeling but made ample use of such clichés as “ah, how inspiring the sight of the Rising Sun flag!”; “all our thanks to you, brave soldiers!”; “despite oneself the hot tears well up”; “the thud-thud of bombs”; “frantically one hurls oneself to the ground”; “the chattering of machine-gun fire”; and they firmly believed that with this kind of drivel they were actually portraying war.
Some said they could not write because of military censorship, but the fact was that, war or no war, they had not the slightest idea how to write honestly on any subject. Truth or real feeling in writing has nothing to do with censorship. In whatever period these gentry had happened to live, their personalities would surely have displayed the same emptiness. They changed in accordance with the prevailing fashion, and took for their models expressions culled from popular novels of the day.
To be sure, the period itself was both crude and senseless. What relationship could there be between human honesty and the cataclysm of war and defeat in which Japan’s two-thousand-year-old history was being submerged? The entire fate of the nation was being decided by the will of those men who had the feeblest power of introspection, and by the blind action of the ignorant mob that followed them. If you spoke about personality and originality in front of the city editor or the president, he would turn away as if to say that you were a fool. After all, a newspaper reporter was merely a machine whose function it was to spout forth “all our thanks to you, brave soldiers!”; “ah, how inspiring the sight of the Rising Sun flag!”; “despite oneself the hot tears well up.” And so, indeed, was the entire period—it was all a mere machine. If you asked whether it was really necessary to give a full report of the speech by the divisional commander to his men, or whether you had to record every word of the weird Shinto prayer that the factory workers were obliged to recite each morning, the city editor would look away and click his tongue with annoyance; then he would suddenly turn round, crush his precious cigaret
te in the ash tray, and, glaring at you, shout: “Look here, what does beauty mean at a time like this? Art is powerless! Only news is real.”
The directors, the members of the planning department, and the other groups had banded together to constitute their own private cabals, rather like the professional gambling societies of the Tokugawa period. Everything was based on group comradeship, and the individual talents of the members were used on a rotational basis with special emphasis on the traditional precepts of “duty” and “human feeling.” The entire organization became more bureaucratic than the bureaucracy itself. Thus they managed to protect their respective mediocrities and to form a sort of mutualaid relief organization founded on a hopeless dearth of talent. Any attempt to work one’s way up by means of artistic individuality was regarded as a wicked violation of union rules. Internally the groups were relief organizations for the dearth of talent, but in their relations to the outside world they were alcohol-acquiring gangs whose members occupied the “people’s bars” and argued drunkenly about art as they swilled their bottles of beer. Their berets, their long hair, their ties, and their blouses were those of artists; but in their souls they were more bureaucratic than the bureaucrats. Since Izawa believed in artistic creativeness and in individuality, he found it hard to breathe in the atmosphere of these cabals; their mediocrity, their vulgar and sordid spirit, were sheer anathema. He became an outcast: no one returned his greetings and some people in the office even glared at him when he made his appearance.
One day he strode resolutely into the president’s office and asked whether there was any inevitable, logical link between the war and the current poverty of artistic output. Or was this poverty, he asked, the deliberate aim of the military, who insisted that all one needed to portray reality was a camera and a couple of fingers? Surely, said Izawa, the special duty of us artists is to decide on the particular angle from which we should portray reality so as to produce a work of art. While Izawa was still talking, the president turned aside and puffed at his cigarette with a look of disgust. Then he smiled sardonically as if to say “Why don’t you leave our company if you don’t like it here? Is it because you’re afraid of being drafted for hard labor?” Gradually his expression changed to one of annoyance. “Why can’t you fit in with our way of working?” he seemed to say. “Just do your daily stint like the other men and you’ll collect your salary all the same! And stop thinking about what doesn’t concern you. Damned impertinence!” Without a single word in reply to Izawa’s questions, the president motioned for him to leave the room.
How could this job of his be anything but the meanest of the mean? Sometimes he felt that it would be best to be done with it all and to be called into the army. If only he could escape from the anguish of thinking, even bullets and starvation might seem a blessing.
While Izawa’s company was working on films like “Don’t Let Rabaul Fall to the Enemy!” and “More Planes for Rabaul!” the American forces had already passed Rabaul and landed on Saipan. Saipan fell before they had finished “The All-Out Fight for Saipan”; and soon American planes based on Saipan were flying overhead in Japan. Strange was the enthusiasm with which Izawa’s colleagues planned their films. “How to Extinguish Incendiary Bombs”; “Bodies that Crash in Midair”; “How to Grow Potatoes”; “Let Not a Single Enemy Plane Survive!”; “Power Saving and Airplanes”—one after another they turned out their infinitely boring lengths of celluloid.
Soon they began to run out of film stock, and usable cameras also grew scarce. The artists’ enthusiasm reached new heights, as though they were possessed by some lyrical frenzy. Their films now bore such titles as “The Kamikaze Suicide Pilots”; “The Decisive Battle for the Mainland”; “The Cherry Blossoms Have Fallen.” Infinitely boring films, films like pieces of pale paper. And Tokyo was about to turn into ruins.
Izawa’s enthusiasm was dead. When he woke up in the morning and realized that he had to go to work again, he immediately became sleepy. Just as he was dozing off, the air-raid warning sounded. He got up and put on his leggings. Then he took out a cigarette and lit it. It occurred to him that if he missed work he would run out of cigarettes.
One night Izawa was late and barely managed to catch the last tram. The private electric line had already closed down and to get home he had to walk a considerable distance through the dark streets. When he turned on the light he was surprised to find that his bedding, which he always left spread out on the floor, had disappeared. This was strange since no one ever came into his room when he was out. He opened the closet. There, next to the heaps of his bedding, crouched the idiot woman from next door.
She glanced uneasily at Izawa and buried her face in the bedding. But when she discovered that he was not going to be angry, her relief gave rise to a great deluge of friendliness. She became remarkably composed. Yet she was still unable to talk coherently. All she could produce was a series of mumblings, and even when Izawa could make out what she was saying, it had no connection with what he was asking her. In a vague, fragmentary manner she voiced the confused scraps of thought in her head. Izawa surmised that she had been thoroughly scolded at home and that when it had become too much for her she had taken refuge in his hut. Since questions only seemed to frighten her, he limited himself to asking when and how she had arrived. After a spate of unintelligible mumblings, the woman rolled up her sleeve and rubbed a bruise on her arm.
“It hurts,” she said. “It still hurts … it’s been hurting for some time now.” From her stumbling efforts to point out the time sequence—the distinction between past pain and present pain—Izawa finally gathered that she had climbed into his room through the window after it had become dark. She also mumbled something to the effect that she had been walking about barefoot outside and that she was sorry for having muddied the floor. But since Izawa had to extricate her meaning from among a confusion of mutterings that meandered up one blind alley after another, he was quite unable to tell the direction in which this particular apology was aimed.
It seemed difficult to rouse his neighbor in the dead of night to return this thoroughly frightened woman to her house. At the same time, if he brought her back in the morning, there was no telling what misunderstanding might arise from his having let her stay the night, especially since her husband was a madman.
“I don’t care,” he thought, suddenly imbued with a peculiar form of courage. “I’ll let her stay.”
The substance of his courage was simply this: the loss of emotion in his life had provoked in him a certain curiosity; he felt it did not matter what happened and that it was essential for his own way of life that he should regard the present reality as a sort of test. He told himself that there was no need to think about anything other than his duty to protect this feeble-minded woman for a night. He told himself that there was nothing to be ashamed of in the fact that he was so strangely moved by this unexpected turn of events.
Izawa made up two sets of bedding on the floor and told the woman to he down. Then he switched off the light. A couple of minutes later he heard her crawling out of bed. She went to the corner of the room and crouched down. If it had not been the middle of winter, Izawa would probably have gone to sleep without troubling about her. But it was a bitterly cold night—so cold that he could not stop shivering. Since he had sacrificed one half of his bedding to his guest, the icy air seemed to impinge directly on his skin. He got up and turned on the light. The woman was crouching by the door, holding the front of her dress tightly about her body. Her eyes were those of a creature who has lost its hiding place and is driven to bay.
“What’s the matter?” he said. “Go to bed.”
The woman nodded—almost too readily—and crawled back into the bed. Izawa turned out the light. A moment later he heard her getting up as before. When he took the woman back to her bed this time, he tried to reassure her. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m not going to touch you.” With a startled expression the woman muttered something that sounded vaguely like
an excuse. The third time that he turned out the light, she got up without a moment’s delay, opened the closet door, stepped inside, and shut herself in.
The woman’s persistence had begun to annoy Izawa. He opened the closet roughly. “I don’t know what you think you’re doing,” he said crossly, “but you seem to have got the wrong idea about me. Why on earth do you have to hide in the closet like that when I’ve told you I don’t have the slightest intention of touching you? It’s damned insulting. If you can’t trust me, why come here in the first place? You’ve humiliated me, made a fool of me. What right have you to act as if you were being victimized in this place? I’ve had quite enough of your nonsense for one night.”
Then it occurred to him that the woman could not possibly understand a word he was saying. What could be more futile than to remonstrate with a half-wit? Probably the best thing would be to give her a good slap on the cheek and then go to sleep without bothering any more about her. He noticed that the woman was muttering away with an inscrutable look on her face. Apparently she was stuttering out something to the effect that she wanted to go home and that it would have been better if she had never come.
