Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories (26 page)

Shinsuke thus quite naturally learned everything he knew from books—or at least there was nothing he knew that didn't owe something to books. He did not observe people on the street to learn about life but rather sought to learn about life in books in order to observe people on the streets. This might have been a roundabout way of doing it, but to him passersby on the street were nothing but passersby. In order to learn about them—their loves, their hatreds, their vanities—he had no choice but to read books, and in particular the novels and dramas of
fin-de-sieècle
Europe. Only in their cold light did he discover the human comedy unfolding before him. Indeed, it was there as well that he discovered his own soul, which made no distinction between good and evil. Human life was not all he learned about from books. He discovered the beauty of nature in the neighborhoods of Honjo, but the eyes with which he observed nature owed some of their keenness to certain of his favorite books—most notably, books of haiku from the Genroku Period. Thanks to them, he discovered other natural beauties that Honjo could not teach him—“Shape of the mountain/Near the capital,” “In turmeric fields/The wind of autumn,” “Offshore in chilly rain/Sails running, sails reefed,” “Into the darkness goes/A night heron's scream.”
¹⁹
From books to reality
was a constant truth for Shinsuke. He loved several women in the course of his life, but it was not they who taught him the beauties of woman—or at least none beyond those he had learned of from books. Sunlight shining through an ear, or the shadow of eyelashes falling on a cheek: these he learned from Gautier and Balzac and Tolstoy. Thanks to these writers, women could still communicate beauty to Shinsuke. Without them, he might have discovered only “the female,” not “woman.”

Because he was poor, though, Shinsuke could not afford to buy all the books he read. He managed to overcome this difficulty first of all through institutional libraries, secondly through
commercial lending libraries, and thirdly by means of his own frugality, which went so far as to invite charges of stinginess. He still clearly remembers the lending library by the Big Ditch, the nice old lady who ran it, and the ornamental hairpins she made on the side. She called him “sonny boy” and believed in the perfect guilelessness of this new elementary-school student, but he very quickly figured out how to read her books on the sly while pretending to search for something. He still clearly remembers the clutter of used bookstores that lined Jinb
ō
ch
ō
Avenue
²⁰
twenty years ago and, above the shop roofs, Kudanzaka hill shining in the sun. In those days, there were neither electric nor horse-drawn streetcars running down the avenue. As a twelve-year-old pupil clasping his lunch box or notebooks under his arms, he went up and down this avenue any number of times on his way to and from the
ō
hashi Library—three-and a-half miles roundtrip from the
ō
hashi to the Imperial Library.
²¹
He still remembers his first impression of the Imperial Library: his fear of the high ceilings, his fear of the large windows, his fear of the numberless people who filled all the numberless chairs. Fortunately, his fears vanished after two or three visits to the place. He was soon familiar with the reading room, the iron stairway, the catalogue cases, the basement lunchroom. He moved on from there to the University Library and the Higher School Library, borrowing hundreds of volumes from them all, loving dozens of those volumes. And yet—

And yet, the books he loved most of all, the books he loved most as books irrespective of their contents, were the books he bought. In order to buy books, Shinsuke stayed away from cafés. Still, he never had enough money. And so he taught mathematics (!) to a middle-schooler relative of his three days a week. When even that failed to bring in the money he needed, he would, as a last resort, sell his own books. Never once did that earn him more than half what the book had cost him to buy, even when the book he sold was still new. Even worse, whenever he handed a used-book dealer a volume he had owned for some years, it felt like a tragedy to him.

One night there was a light dusting of snow on the ground as he made his way along Jinb
ō
ch
ō
Avenue from one used
bookstore to the next. Before long, he came across a copy of
Zarathustra
—and not just any copy. It was the very copy he had sold them two months earlier, still smudged with the oil from his hands. He stood out front re-reading passages from this old
Zarathustra
, and the more he read, the more he missed the book. After ten minutes of this, he finally asked the woman who owned the shop, “How much is this?”

“One yen sixty sen, but for you I'll make it one yen fifty sen.”

Shinsuke recalled that he had sold it to her for a mere seventy sen, but he decided to buy it anyway after he had bargained her down to one yen forty sen—exactly twice what he had sold it for. The snowy nighttime streets were subtly quieter than normal—the houses, the streetcars. All along the way, as he trudged back to the university in Hong
ō
, he felt the steel-colored cover of
Zarathustra
against his chest. He also felt his mouth working every now and then with derisive laughter, directed at himself.

Shinsuke could not befriend anyone without evaluating the person's intelligence. Even a non-gentleman was a mere roadside bystander to him if the young man was not intellectually voracious. It was not kindness Shinsuke looked for in his friends. Nor did he mind if his friends were young men who lacked youthful hearts. If anything, he feared so-called “best friends.” Friends of his had to have brains—strong, well-built brains. He loved the owner of such a brain far more than he did the handsomest boy. He also hated the owner of such a brain more than he did any gentleman. For him, the passion of friendship contained hatred in its love. Even today Shinsuke believes that there is no such thing as friendship apart from this passion—or at least that apart from this passion there is no friendship that does not stink of
Herr und Knecht
.
²³
His friends in those days, especially, were in one sense irreconcilable mortal enemies to him: he engaged in endless combat with them, his brain his weapon. Everything was a battlefield: Whitman, free verse, creative evolution. He struck his friends down on these battlefields and there he was struck down by them. Surely it was the joy of carnage that propelled this mental combat, but just as surely the struggle revealed new ideas and new forms of beauty. Oh, how brightly a candle flame lighted their 3:00 a.m. war of words! How powerfully the works of Mushanok
ō
ji Saneatsu
²⁴
ruled over that war of words! Shinsuke has vivid memories of the huge moths that crowded around the candle flame one September night. The moths were born from the deep darkness in a sudden brilliant flash, but no sooner did they touch the flame than they fluttered to their deaths as if they had never existed. Such a minor event may not be worth such latter-day wonderment, but whenever Shinsuke recalls it—this strangely beautiful death of moths in a flame—a bewildering loneliness fills his heart.

Shinsuke could not befriend anyone without evaluating the
person's intelligence. That was the only standard he applied. But there was an exception to this standard: the class distinctions between him and his friends. Shinsuke felt no strain with middle-class young men who had an upbringing like his. But toward the few upper-class (or upper-middle-class) young men he knew, he felt a strangely impersonal hatred. Some of them were lazy, others were cowardly, still others were slaves to sensuality—but it was not necessarily for these qualities that he hated them. No, it was for something vaguer—something which a few of them hated in themselves, even if unconsciously, and which caused them to yearn almost pathologically for their diametrical opposites in society, the lower classes. Shinsuke sympathized with them, but his sympathy finally led nowhere. Before he managed to shake hands with them, this “something” always stabbed his hand like a needle.

One windy, cold April afternoon, he was standing with one of them—a higher-school student like himself, but the eldest son of a baron—at the edge of a cliff on the island of Enoshima. The rocky shore was just below them. They threw out a few copper coins for boys on the shore to dive for. Whenever a coin fell, the boys would plunge into the ocean. One girl diver, however, simply watched the boys as she crouched smiling by a fire at the base of the cliff.

“This time I'll make her dive in, too,” Shinsuke's friend said, wrapping a copper coin in the silver paper from his cigarette pack. Then he leaned back and heaved the coin with all his might. Sparkling like silver, the copper coin sailed far out beyond the waves being stirred up by a high wind. This time the girl diver was the first to jump into the sea. Shinsuke still vividly remembers the cruel smile on his friend's lips. This boy had a special talent for languages. He also had unusually sharp canine teeth…

Captain Fujita spoke to Yasukichi as they were leaving the mess hall.

Here at the Naval Engineering School, Horikawa Yasukichi taught the translation of English texts, but there were other jobs for him between classes. He had written some funeral orations, put together a textbook, touched up a lecture someone then gave in the presence of the Emperor, and translated articles from foreign newspapers. It was always Captain Fujita—a swarthy, high-strung, bony man perhaps forty years of age—who brought the new assignments.

Yasukichi was a step behind Captain Fujita in the gloomy hallway. “What! Lieutenant Honda is dead?” he exclaimed in surprise. The Captain turned to look at him; his own surprise seemed as great as Yasukichi's. Yasukichi had invented an excuse to skip work the day before and missed the notice on Honda's sudden death.

“It happened yesterday, in the morning. A stroke. Anyway, have it done by Friday morning, will you? That gives you two days.”

“I suppose I can get it done all right…”

Fujita was quick to sense Yasukichi's hesitation. “You'll need some information for the eulogy. I'll send his file over.”

“But what sort of man was he? I'd recognize him if I saw him on the street, but that's all.”

“Well, let's see. He was a good brother… And he was always at the head of his class. Let your famous pen do the rest.”

By now they were standing at the yellow door to Fujita's office. The Captain was Assistant Headmaster.

Yasukichi abandoned any hope of maintaining his artistic integrity in writing the eulogy. “I guess it's time for the old saws—‘a man of innate brilliance,' ‘affectionate to his brothers and sisters,' ‘a swift and glorious end, like the shattering of a precious stone'—I'll make something up.”

“Thanks, I'm sure you'll do fine.”

Instead of stopping off at the lounge, Yasukichi went straight to the instructors' office, which was empty. November sunshine flooded his desk from the window on the right. He sat down and lit a cigarette.

So far he had written two eulogies. The first had been for young Lieutenant Shigeno, who died of appendicitis. Yasukichi had just started teaching then and barely knew the man by sight. But it was his debut in funeral oratory, and he had approached the task with some enthusiasm, turning elegant phrases in the lofty style of the Chinese masters. The second eulogy was for Lieutenant Kimura, who had accidentally drowned. Yasukichi had been commuting to the school with Lieutenant Kimura from the same seaside town, and so he was able to write an honest expression of grief. Lieutenant Honda, though, was just a face in the mess hall—and a vulture-like face at that. Yasukichi had lost all interest in the composition of eulogies, but now he had become Horikawa Yasukichi, Literary Mortician and Undertaker of the Spirit, with orders to bring the ceremonial lanterns and the artificial flowers at the right time on the right day of the right month. Cigarette dangling from his lips, Yasukichi began to sink into a state of melancholy.

“Excuse me, Sir. Mr. Horikawa?”

Yasukichi looked up, as if from a dream, to find Lieutenant Tanaka standing by his desk. The young lieutenant possessed an amiable face with a trim moustache and an opulent double chin.

“Lieutenant Honda's file, from Captain Fujita.” He laid a bound sheaf of lined paper on Yasukichi's desk.

“Oh, yes.” Yasukichi let his eyes drop to the lined paper. There, row after row of small square characters listed the dead
man's assignments and their dates. This was no mere curriculum vitae; it was a symbol of all the lives spent in bureaucracies, both civil and military.

“And also, Sir, could I ask you to explain a word to me?—No, not seafaring lingo. Something I found in a novel.” Tanaka held out a scrap of paper with a single foreign word scratched on it in blue pencil. “Masochism.” Yasukichi's eyes went from the paper to the Lieutenant's boyish, rosy-cheeked face.

“This? ‘Masochism'?”

“Yes. I can't seem to find it in a regular English–Japanese dictionary.”

Sullenly, Yasukichi gave him the definition.

“Is
that
what it means!”

Lieutenant Tanaka's beaming smile never faded. In Yasukichi's present mood, nothing could be more irritating than this kind of self-satisfied grin. He was tempted to hurl every word from Krafft-Ebing into the Lieutenant's happy face.

“Now, this writer whose name the word comes from—Masoch,
¹
you said?—are his novels any good?”

“No, they're all terrible.”

“He must have been an interesting person, at least.”

“Masoch? Masoch was an idiot. He tried to convince his government to take money out of defense and put it into keeping whores.”

Newly apprised of the idiocy of Masoch, Tanaka at last gave Yasukichi his freedom. The business about whore support was far from certain, of course; Masoch probably believed in national defense as well. But Yasukichi knew there was no other way he could impress the cheerful lieutenant with the stupidity of abnormal sexuality.

Alone now, Yasukichi lit another cigarette and began roaming the office. True, he taught English, but that was not his real profession. Not to his mind, at least. His life's work, he felt, was the creation of literature. Even after coming to this job, he had continued to publish at least one short story every two months. The current issue of a certain literary monthly contained the first half of the piece he was writing now, a recasting of the Saint Christopher legend in the style of the old Japanese
Jesuit translations of Aesop.
²
They wanted the second half from him for the next issue, and today was the seventh of the month, which meant the manuscript was due in— No, this was no time to be turning out eulogies. Yasukichi wrote with such painstaking care that he could work day and night and still not finish the story on time. He felt his resentment toward the eulogy beginning to mount.

Just then the wall clock chimed for twelve-thirty, with much the same effect as the apple falling at Newton's feet: Yasukichi realized that his class was still thirty minutes away; if he could finish the eulogy in that time, there would be no “A sad occasion brings us together today” to intrude on his more anguished creative labors. It would not be easy to lament the passing of Lieutenant Honda, “a man of innate brilliance,” “affectionate to his brothers and sisters,” in just thirty minutes; but to shrink from the task would mean that twelve centuries of pride in the riches of the native tongue, from Kakinomoto no Hitomaro to Mushanoko
ō
ji Saneatsu,
³
was sheer braggadocio. In an instant, Yasukichi was at his desk and writing.