Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories (22 page)

The object of O-Kimi's affections is a young fellow named Tanaka, an unknown—let's say—artist. I call him that because he writes poetry, plays the violin, paints in oils, acts on the stage, knows the Hundred Poets card game inside out, and has mastered the lute for the martial music of Satsuma.
¹⁰
With so many talents, it's impossible to say which is his profession and which are mere hobbies. As for the man himself, he has the smooth features of an actor, his hair glows like the surface of an oil painting, his voice is as gentle as a violin, the words he speaks are as well chosen as a poem's, he can woo a woman as nimbly as he can snatch the right card in the Hundred Poets game, and he can skip out on a loan with the same heroic energy he brings to singing with his Satsuma lute. He wears a broad-brimmed black hat, inexpensive tweeds, a deep purple ascot—you get the picture. Come to think of it, Tanaka is a well-established type, two or three of whom are always scowling at the masses in any bar or café in the university district, in any concert at the YMCA or the Music Academy (though only in the cheapest seats), and at any of the more stylish art galleries. So if you would like a clearer portrait of young Mr. Tanaka, go to one of those places and have a look for yourself. I refuse to write another line about him. Besides, while I've been sweating over this introduction to Tanaka, O-Kimi has gotten up from her desk, has opened the shoji, and is now looking out at the cold moonlit night.

The light of the moon over the tile roofs shines down upon the
artificial lily in its slender-necked glass vase, the little Raphael Madonna, and O-Kimi's upturned nose. It does not, however, register upon the girl's limpid gaze. Neither do the frosty tile roofs exist for her. Young Tanaka walked her home from the café tonight, and the two have agreed to spend tomorrow evening in each other's pleasant company. Tomorrow is the one day that O-Kimi has off this month. They are to meet at the Ogawamachi streetcar stop and go to see the Italian circus that is presently set up in Shibaura. O-Kimi has never gone out alone with a man before, so when she thinks about stepping out with Tanaka like a pair of sweethearts going to the circus at night, the sudden realization sets her heart aflutter. To O-Kimi, Tanaka is like Ali Baba after he has learned the magic spell that will open the treasure cave—what kind of unknown pleasure garden will appear before her when the spell is uttered? For some time now, O-Kimi has been gazing at the moon without seeing it, for what she has been picturing in her throbbing breast—throbbing like a wind-swept sea, or like the engine of an accelerating bus—is a vision of this mysterious world-tocome. There, on avenues buried in blooming roses, lie numberless cultured-pearl rings and imitation-jade obi clasps scattered in profusion. Like dripping honey, the gentle voice of the nightingale has begun to sound from above the Mitsukoshi Department Store banner. And in a marble-floored palace, amid the fragrance of olive blossoms, the dance of Douglas Fairbanks and the lovely Mori Ritsuko
¹¹
seems to be entering its most wonderful passage…

Let me add something here in defense of O-Kimi's honor. Across the vision that O-Kimi was picturing for herself just now, ominous dark clouds would pass from time to time as if to jeopardize her entire happiness. True, O-Kimi loves young Tanaka. But the Tanaka she loves is a Tanaka on whose head her artistic ecstasy has placed a halo—a Sir Lancelot who writes poetry, plays the violin, paints in oils, acts on the stage, and is skilled at both the Hundred Poets card game and the Satsuma lute. Nevertheless O-Kimi's fresh, virginal instincts are not entirely unaware that her Lancelot has something highly dubious at his core. Those dark clouds of anxiety cross O-Kimi's
vision whenever such doubts come to mind. Unfortunately, no sooner do the clouds form than they melt away. Mature though she may appear, O-Kimi is but a girl of sixteen or seventeen—a girl flushed with artistic ecstasy. No wonder she rarely takes note of clouds except when she is worried about having her kimono rained on, or is exclaiming in admiration for a picture postcard of a Rhine River sunset. How much less does she do so when on avenues buried in blooming roses, numberless cultured-pearl rings, and imitation-jade obi clasps… the rest of this is the same as in the passage above, so please just reread that.

Like Puvis de Chavannes' St. Geneviève,
¹²
O-Kimi stood there for a long time, gazing at the tile roofs in the moonlight until she sneezed once, banged the window's shoji closed, and went back to sitting sideways at her desk. What did she do until 6:00 p.m. the following day? Unfortunately, not even I know the answer to that. How can the author of the story not know, you ask? Well (tell them the truth now!), I don't know because I have to finish this thing tonight.

At 6: 00 p.m. the next day, an unusually nervous O-Kimi made her way toward the Ogawamachi streetcar stop, which was already enveloped in the gloom of evening. She wore a deep purple silk crepe coat of dubious quality and a cream-color shawl. Tanaka was there as promised, waiting beneath a red light and wearing his usual broad-brimmed black hat low over his eyes. Under his arm he carried a slim walking stick with a nickel-silver cap, and the collar of his wide-striped short overcoat was turned up. His pale face glowed more handsomely than ever. That and the light smell of his cologne told her that he had taken special pains with his grooming tonight.

“Have I kept you waiting long?” O-Kimi asked, a little breathless as she looked up at him.

“No, forget it,” he replied with a magnanimous flourish, fixing his gaze on her, his eyes hinting at a somewhat inscrutable smile. Then, with a quick shiver, he added, “Let's walk a little.”

But he did more than say the words: he was already walking down the crowded avenue beneath the arc lights toward Sudach
ō
. Strange—the circus was in Shibaura. Even if they were
going to walk there from here, they should be heading toward Kandabashi. Still standing in place, O-Kimi held down her cream-colored shawl, which was flapping in the dust-laden wind.

“That way?” she asked, looking puzzled.

“Uh-huh,” he called out over his shoulder, continuing on toward Sudach
ō
. O-Kimi had no choice but to hurry and catch up with him. They stepped gaily along beneath a row of leafless willows. At that point Tanaka got that inscrutable smile in his eyes and peered sidelong at O-Kimi saying, “I'm sorry to have to give you the bad news, but the circus in Shibaura ended last night. So let's go to this house I know and have dinner or something. What do you say?”

“That's fine with me,” O-Kimi said in a tiny voice that trembled with hope and fear as she felt the soft touch of Tanaka's hand taking hers. Tears of deep emotion came to her eyes just as they did when she read
The Cuckoo
. Viewed through such tears, of course, each neighborhood they passed—Ogawamachi, Awajich
ō
, Sudach
ō
—took on a special beauty of its own. The music of a band luring shoppers to a big year-end sale, the dazzling lights of an electric billboard for Jintan breath freshener, Christmas wreaths, a fanned-out display of national flags of the world, Santa Claus in a show window, postcards and calendars laid out on street stands—to O-Kimi's eyes, everything seemed to sing of the magnificent joys of love and to stretch off in splendor to the ends of the earth. Not even the gleam of the stars in heaven looked cold on this special night, and the dusty wind lapping now and then at the skirts of her coat would suddenly change into a warm spring breeze. Happiness, happiness, happiness…

Soon O-Kimi saw that they must have turned a corner and now were walking down a narrow back street. On the right-hand side there was a small grocery store open to the street, its wares displayed in piles beneath a bright gas lamp: daikon radishes, carrots, pickling vegetables, green onions, small turnips, water chestnuts, burdock roots, yams, mustard greens, udo, lotus root, taro, apples, mandarin oranges. As they passed the grocery, O-Kimi happened to glance at a thin wooden card
held aloft by a bamboo tube standing in the pile of green onions: “I bunch 4 sen,” it said in clumsy, dense black characters. With prices for everything surging upward these days, green onions at 4 sen a bunch were hard to find. In O-Kimi's happy heart, which until that moment had been intoxicated with love and art, the sight of this bargain instantaneously—literally, in that very instant—awoke latent real life from its torpid slumber. Her eyes were swept suddenly clean of images of roses and pearl rings and nightingales and the Mitsukoshi banner. Crowding in from all directions to take their place in O-Kimi's little breast, like moths to a flame, came rent payments, rice bills, electricity bills, charcoal bills, food bills, soy sauce bills, newspaper bills, make-up bills, streetcar fares—and all the other living expenses, along with painful past experience. O-Kimi's feet came to a halt in front of the grocery store. Leaving the flabbergasted Tanaka behind, she forged in among the green mounds beneath the brilliant gaslight. And then, extending a slender finger toward the pile of green onions among which stood that “1bunch 4sen” card, she said in a voice that might well have been singing “The Wanderer's Lament,”
¹³

“Two bunches, please.”

Meanwhile young Tanaka in his broad-brimmed hat, the collar of his wide-striped short overcoat turned up, slim walking stick with nickel-silver cap under his arm, stood alone on the dust-blown street like an abandoned shadow. In his imagination he had been seeing a lattice-doored house at the end of this street—a cheaply built two-story structure with a freshly washed stone platform for shoe removal in the entranceway and an electric sign on the eaves. Standing out in the street like this, however, he had a strange feeling that the image of that cozy little house was beginning to fade, to be replaced by a mound of green onions with a “1 bunch 4sen” price card. Then suddenly, all such images were shattered as, with the next puff of wind, the very real stink of green onions—as penetrating and eye-stinging as real life itself—punched Tanaka in the nose.

“Sorry to keep you waiting.”

Poor sad-eyed Tanaka stared at O-Kimi as if he were seeing a wholly different person. Hair neatly parted in the middle
and fastened with forget-me-not hairpins, nose tilted slightly upward, O-Kimi lightly pressed her chin down on her cream-colored shawl as she stood there holding her 2-bunches-for-8-sen green onions in one hand, a happy smile dancing in her limpid gaze.

Two years earlier, Hanzabur
ō
had married a respectable young lady. Her name was Tsuneko. Theirs was not—I am also sorry to say—a love match. It had been arranged for their families by an old couple related to Hanzabur
ō
. Tsuneko was no beauty. Neither, however, was she ugly. Her plump cheeks always wore a smile—always, that is, except when she was bitten by bedbugs in the sleeper coach from Mukden to Beijing. After that, however, she had no need to concern herself with bedbugs, for their company-owned house in XX Lane was always equipped with two cans of Bat Brand Insecticide.

I said before that Hanzabur
ō
's family life was ordinary to the extreme. Indeed, it was no different from that of all the other Japanese company employees stationed in Beijing. He and Tsuneko would eat their meals, listen to their gramophone, and go to the moving pictures. Their ordinary life, however, was no more immune to the workings of destiny than anyone else's. With a single blow one mid-afternoon, destiny shattered the monotony of their supremely ordinary life. Mitsubishi Conglomerate employee Oshino Hanzabur
ō
suffered a stroke and died on the spot.

He had been shuffling through papers at his desk as usual that afternoon in the company office at Dongdan Gate. The colleague at the facing desk had noted nothing unusual. Hanzabur
ō
apparently reached a point in his work when he could take a break. He put a cigarette in his mouth and was striking a match when he collapsed face-down on his desk and died. It was a truly disappointing way to die. Fortunately, however, society rarely offers critical comment regarding the way a person dies. The way a person lives is what evokes criticism. Thus it was that Hanzabur
ō
managed to avoid disparaging commentary. Far from it: without exception, his superiors and colleagues expressed their deepest sympathies to the widowed Tsuneko.

According to the diagnosis of Dr. Yamai, director of the Universalist Hospital, Hanzabur
ō
died of a cerebral hemorrhage. Hanzabur
ō
himself, however, did not believe that he had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. Neither did he believe that he was dead. It did come as a surprise to him, though, to find himself standing in a strange office.

A breeze gently stirred the curtains in the sunlit window. Beyond the window, he could see nothing. On either side of a large desk at the center of the office two Chinese men, dressed in white ceremonial robes of the recently overthrown Qing dynasty,
¹
were examining ledgers. One of the men seemed to be about twenty years old. The other had a long moustache that was beginning to yellow.

Without looking up, the younger man ran his pen across his ledger as he spoke to Hanzabur
ō
.

“You are Mr. Henry Barrett, are you not?”

This came as a shock to Hanzabur
ō
, but he answered as calmly as possible in his best Mandarin, “I am Oshino Hanzabur
ō
, an employee of the Mitsubishi Conglomerate of Japan.”

“What? You're Japanese?”

Finally raising his eyes, the young Chinese man seemed to be just as shocked as Hanzabur
ō
was. The older man, still writing in his ledger, looked at Hanzabur
ō
with an equal show of amazement.

“What are we going to do, Sir? We've got the wrong man!”

“Impossible! I don't believe it. Nothing like this has happened since the First Revolution.” The old man's pen hand trembled with visible anger as he spoke. “Anyhow, send him back right away.”

The young man turned to Hanzabur
ō
. “Please wait a minute, Mr…. uh… Oshino, was it?” He spread his thick ledger open again and began to read, muttering the words to himself. And when he closed the book, he spoke to the old Chinese man with still greater amazement. “We can't do it,” he said. “Oshino Hanzabur
ō
died three days ago.”

“Three days ago?!”

“And his legs are rotting. Right up to the thighs.”

Hanzabur
ō
was shocked again. First of all, according to what these two Chinese men were saying to each other, he was dead. Secondly, three days had gone by since his death. And thirdly, his legs were rotting. He knew this was ridiculous, though, because here his legs were perfectly—

He looked down and screamed. And no wonder: in his sharply-creased white trousers and white shoes, both his legs were swaying diagonally in the breeze from the window. He could hardly believe his eyes. But when he reached down and touched his legs, everything up to the thighs felt like air. Now, at last, he came down hard on his backside. At the same time, his legs—or, rather, his trousers—crumpled to the floor like a shriveling balloon.

“Don't worry. Don't worry. We're going to take care of you,” the old Chinese man said, but when he spoke to his young assistant, his anger had by no means cooled. “This is your responsibility, do you hear me? Your responsibility. You'll have to send up a report right away. But what I would like to know is this: where is Henry Barrett now?”

“According to my information, he seems to have made a sudden departure for Hankou.”

“All right, then, telegraph Hankou and get Henry Barrett's legs here immediately.”

“But it's too late for that. By the time the legs arrive from Hankou, Mr. Oshino will be rotten to the torso.”

“Impossible! I don't believe it.” The old Chinese man heaved
a sigh. Even his moustache seemed suddenly to be drooping more than before.

“This is your responsibility. Send up a report right away. I don't suppose any passengers are still here…?”

“No, they left an hour ago. There
is
a horse, though.”

“Oh? Where from?”

“Beijing. The horse market in Desheng Menwai. It died a little while ago.”

“All right. Put a couple of the horse's legs on him. They'll be better than nothing. Bring them now. Just the legs.”

The young Chinese man turned from the desk and glided away somewhere. Now Hanzabur
ō
was experiencing his third shock. They were going to put horse legs on him! Horse legs! Down on the floor, he pleaded with the old Chinese man.

“I'm begging you, please don't put horse legs on me! Anything but that! I hate horses. Oh, please, give me human legs. I'll even take Henry what's-his-name's legs. The shins might be a little hairy, but I can stand it as long as they're human.”

The old Chinese man looked down at Hanzabur
ō
with an expression of pity, and he nodded several times.

“I would be glad to give you human legs if we had any, but we don't. You'll have to resign yourself. Call it an unfortunate accident. And besides, horse legs are strong, you know. Change horseshoes once in a while and any mountain path's a breeze.”

The young subordinate glided in from somewhere carrying two horse legs, like a hotel valet delivering a pair of boots. Hanzabur
ō
tried to escape, but sadly, without legs, he could not lift himself. The subordinate approached him and started to take off his white shoes and socks.

“Stop! Stop! Anything but horse legs! You have no right to fix my legs without my permission!”

Hanzabur
ō
kept up his shouting as the subordinate slipped a horse leg into the opening of his right trouser leg. Its top end bit into his right thigh as if it had teeth. Next, the young man slipped the other horse leg into the left opening. This, too, bit into his flesh.

“There. That'll do fine.”

The young Chinese man rubbed his two long-nailed hands
together with a satisfied smile. Hanzabur
ō
stared down at his lower extremities. Now, protruding from the ends of his white trousers were two thick chestnut horse legs, their hooves in proper alignment.

This was all Hanzabur
ō
remembered—or at least, all he remembered with the same clarity as the events to that point. He seemed to recall arguing with the two Chinese men. Then he seemed to recall falling down a steep stairway. He could not be sure about either of those memories. In any case, when he regained consciousness after wandering through some kind of strange vision, he was lying in a coffin in his company-owned house in XX Lane. This occurred just at the moment that a young Honganji Buddhist missionary from Japan was reciting something like the last rites in front of the coffin.