Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories (25 page)

Shinsuke hated this poverty. Indeed, the unquenchable hatred he felt then continues to reverberate deep in his heart even now. He could never buy books. He could never go to summer school. He could never wear a new overcoat. His friends got all those things. He envied them—sometimes to the point of jealousy. But he would never admit to himself that he harbored such envy and jealousy because he was contemptuous of their abilities. His contempt, however, did nothing to change his hatred for his own family's poverty. He hated their old tatami mats, their dim oil lamps, their paper-covered sliding doors
with peeling pictures of ivy—everything that made their house so shabby. Still worse, merely because of this shabbiness, he hated the very parents who gave him birth. He especially hated his father, who was bald and shorter than Shinsuke himself. His father would often attend school-sponsor meetings,
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and Shinsuke felt shame at the sight of this father of his there in his friends' presence. At the same time, he was ashamed of his despicable nature for being ashamed of his own flesh-and-blood. He kept a “Diary without Self-Deceit” in imitation of the writer Kunikida Doppo;
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on its lined pages he recorded passages like this:

What he hated even more than the shabbiness, though, was the petty deceits to which the poverty gave rise. His mother once gave some relatives a piece of sponge cake packed in a box from the elegant F
Å«
getsu bakery. The cake itself, however, she had actually bought at the local confectioner's. And his father—how earnestly had his father taught him “Hard work, frugality, and martial prowess” as the central tenets of the Way of the Warrior.
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According to his father, buying a Chinese character dictionary in addition to the old classic references was enough to make one guilty of “luxurious over-indulgence in high culture”! When it came to deceit, though, Shinsuke was not much better than his parents. He supplemented his fifty-sen-per-month allowance any way he could in order to buy the books and magazines he hungered for above all things. He used every possible excuse to steal his parents' money—by “losing” change on the way home from an errand, by saying that he had to buy a notebook or to pay dues to the students' association. When these failed to bring in enough, he would try charming his parents out of his next month's allowance, or cozying up to
his old mother, who was particularly lenient with him. He disliked his own lies as much as his parents', but still he continued to lie—boldly and cunningly. He did this primarily out of need, but also for the pathological pleasure it gave him—something like the pleasure of killing a god. In this one point he came close to being a juvenile delinquent. The last page of his “Diary without Self-Deceit” contained these few lines:

These were Shinsuke's innermost feelings. He had indeed come to hate his own hatred for poverty. The double ring of hatred continued to pain this young man not yet twenty years old. Not that happiness was entirely lacking. He always made the third or fourth highest grade in examinations. And a beautiful young boy in one of the lower grades, all unbidden, expressed love for him. But for Shinsuke these were chance rays of sunlight shining through an overcast sky. Hatred oppressed him more than any other emotion, and before he knew it this hatred had left permanent scars on his heart. Even after he escaped from poverty, he could not stop hating it. And at the same time, he could not stop hating extravagance just as much. This hatred for extravagance was a brand burned into the skin by lower-middle-class poverty—and perhaps by that alone. To this day, Shinsuke feels this hatred inside himself, this petty-bourgeois moralistic fear of having to struggle against poverty.

The autumn he graduated from the university, Shinsuke visited the home of a friend still attending the Faculty of Law. They sat conversing on the tatami floor of the friend's good-sized room, the paper doors and walls of which were showing their age. From behind his friend, an old man of perhaps sixty poked his head in. Intuitively, Shinsuke sensed in the old man's alcoholic face a retired official.

“My father.” The friend introduced the old man to him with this simple phrase.

Shinsuke offered a proper formal greeting, which the old man
almost arrogantly ignored. Before he left the room, however, he told Shinsuke, “Make yourself comfortable. We have chairs out there…” Now Shinsuke noticed the two armchairs set on the darkened wood of the glassed-in corridor that ran past the room—long-legged chairs with fading red seat cushions from a half-century earlier. In these two pieces of furniture, Shinsuke sensed the entire lower middle class. He sensed, too, that his friend was just as ashamed of his father as Shinsuke was of his own. This is yet another minor incident that remains in Shinsuke's memory with painful clarity. Ideas might well come to cast new and varied shadows on his mind in the future, but he was, first and foremost, the son of a retired official, bred not of lower-class poverty but of lower-middle-class poverty and its need to trade in falsehood.

Yes, there was more: it was in middle school that he hated teachers most of all. As individuals, his teachers were surely not bad people. But their “educational responsibility”—and in particular their right to punish students—turned them into tyrants. They did not hesitate to use any means at their disposal to infect students' minds with their own prejudices. And in fact one of them, the English teacher they nicknamed “Dharma,”
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often beat Shinsuke for being what he called a “smart aleck.” What made Shinsuke a “smart aleck” was nothing worse than that he was reading such writers as Doppo and Katai.
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Another of the teachers, the one with an artificial left eye who taught Japanese and classical Chinese, was not pleased with Shinsuke's lack of interest in martial arts and athletics. “What are you, a girl?” he would often taunt Shinsuke. Infuriated by this, Shinsuke once shot back at him, “And you, Sir? Are you a man?” for which he was of course severely punished. The number of humiliations he endured was endless, as he could see by rereading his already-yellowing “Diary without Self-Deceit.” He always had to counter such humiliations to protect himself, determined as he was to preserve his great self-esteem. Had he not done so, he would have ended up despising himself as did all juvenile delinquents. He naturally turned to his “Diary without Self-Deceit” to equip himself for his mental fitness program:

Not all of his teachers tormented him, however. One invited him to family teas. Another lent him English novels. Shinsuke still remembers the joy with which he read the English translation of Turgenev's
A Hunter's Diary
,
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when he discovered it among those borrowed books at the end of his fourth year of middle school. The teachers' “educational responsibility,” however, always prevented him from interacting warmly with them as fellow human beings. For in his efforts to win their good graces, there always lurked his base need to play up to the teachers' authority—or their homosexuality. He could never behave with complete freedom in their presence. Sometimes he would make a show of grabbing a cigarette, or hold forth on a play he had seen on a standing-room ticket. They of course chalked up such behavior to his insolence, which was reasonable enough: he was never a very likeable student. The old photos he keeps stashed away show a sickly boy with a head too big for his body and huge, shining eyes. This pale-faced boy took his greatest pleasure in tormenting kindly teachers by constantly hurling venomous questions at them.

Shinsuke always received high grades in examinations, but his grade for deportment never rose above a 6. In the Arabic numeral “6” itself, he seemed to feel the sneers of the entire teachers' room. And the teachers actually were mocking him for his deportment grade. That 6 kept his class standing from going above third place. He hated this kind of revenge, and he hated the teachers for taking their revenge. Even now—no, no longer: Shinsuke has let go of his hatred. Middle school was a nightmare for him, but it was not necessarily a misfortune. At least it enabled him to develop a personality that could endure loneliness. Otherwise, the course of his life would have been far more painful than it is today. In fulfillment of his long-standing dream, he became the author of several books. But what he got in return was a desolate loneliness. And now that he has made peace with that loneliness—or, rather, now that he has learned that he has no choice but to make peace with that loneliness—
he can look back twenty years and see the schoolhouse where he was so tormented standing before him in a rose-colored twilight. Of course, the poplars still harbor the lonely sound of the wind in their thick gloomy branches…