Sanshiro Read online

  “Yes…”

  “You turn at that corner, go to the end of the hall, then left, and it’s the second room on the right.”

  “Turn at that corner?” She pointed with a slender finger.

  “Yes, that corner, just ahead.”

  “Thank you very much.”

  She walked on. Sanshirō stood watching her from behind. She reached the corner and, on the point of turning, looked back. Caught off-guard, he blushed. She smiled and asked with a look, was this the corner? He found himself nodding. Her shadow moved right and disappeared into the whiteness of the wall.

  Sanshirō wandered out of the front door. He took five or six steps, wondering if she had mistaken him for a medical student when she asked for Yoshiko’s room. Then it came to him. Damn it, he should have shown her the way!

  He did not have the courage to retrace his steps now. Resigned, he took a few more paces, and this time drew up short. An image of her hair ribbon flashed through his mind. In color and texture it was exactly like the one Nonomiya had bought at the Kaneyasu. His legs grew suddenly heavy. He was dragging himself past the library toward the main gate when Yojirō appeared from nowhere and called out to him, “Hey, Sanshirō, you should have come to class today. It was a lecture on how Italians eat macaroni.” He walked up and clapped him on the shoulder.

  They continued on together a short way. Nearing the main gate Sanshirō asked, “Do women wear thin ribbons in their hair even at this time of year? I thought they were just for very hot weather.”

  Yojirō laughed out loud. “You’d better ask Professor O. about that. He’s an expert on everything.” Yojirō refused to take him seriously.

  At the main gate Sanshirō said he was feeling ill, and wouldn’t be attending his lectures today. Yojirō hurried back to class as if to say that he had wasted his time coming this far with Sanshirō.

  4

  Sanshirō’s spirit was restless. Lecturers spoke to him from afar. On bad days he would fail to write down their most essential points, and at the worst of times he felt he was listening with ears rented from a stranger. It was all so stupid. He turned to Yojirō in despair. How dull the lectures were these days, he would say. Yojirō’s answer was always the same.

  “Of course the lectures are dull! You’re a country boy, so you’ve been sticking with it all this time, hoping for big things. What stupidity! Their lectures have been like this since the beginning of time. No sense feeling disappointed now.”

  “That’s not it, exactly…” Sanshirō would try to explain himself. His painful slowness of speech was comically mismatched with Yojirō’s patter. They repeated this dialogue two or three times, and before Sanshirō knew it half a month had gone by. His ears gradually came to seem his own again.

  Now it was Yojirō who turned to Sanshirō. “You have an odd look these days. That’s the face of a man who’s tired of life—a fin de siècle face.”

  In response to this critique, Sanshirō answered as before, “That’s not it, exactly…” Phrases like fin de siècle had no power to please him, so little had he breathed the air of artificiality. Nor could he use them yet as toys, so little did he know of certain circles. But “tired of life”—that was a phrase he rather liked. Come to think of it, perhaps he had been feeling tired lately. His diarrhea could not be the only cause. But neither was his view of life so modish that he could display a greatly wearied countenance. And so this conversation ended without further development.

  Soon autumn was at its height, the season when the appetite quickens and a young man of twenty-three can in no way be tired of life. Sanshirō went out often. He walked around the University pond a lot, but nothing ever came of it. He passed the University Hospital often, but encountered only ordinary human beings. He went to Nonomiya’s cellar to ask about his sister and found that she had left the hospital. He thought of mentioning the young woman he had seen in the doorway, but Nonomiya seemed busy and he restrained himself. There was no hurry; he could find out all about her when next he visited Ōkubo.

  Restless, he walked up one street and down another. Tabata, Dōkanyama, the graveyard in Somei, Sugamo Prison, the Gokokuji Temple—Sanshirō walked as far as the Yakushi in Arai. From there, he decided to walk by way of Ōkubo and visit Nonomiya at home, but he took the wrong street near the Ochiai crematorium and ended up at Takata. He took the train home from Mejiro. On the way, he ate most of the chestnuts he had bought as a gift for Nonomiya, and the next day Yojirō came and finished off what was left.

  Sanshirō was restless, but it was a light, airy restlessness, and the more he felt it, the happier it made him. He had concentrated too hard on the lectures until he could barely hear them well enough to take notes, but now he listened only moderately well and there was no problem. He thought about all sorts of things during the lectures. It no longer worried him if he missed a little. The other students did the same, he noticed, Yojirō included. This was probably good enough.

  Now and then, as his thoughts wandered, the ribbon came to mind. That bothered him, ruined his mood. He thought of rushing out to Ōkubo. But thanks to the associative links of the imagination and to the stimulus of the outside world, the feeling soon vanished. For the most part he was carefree. He was dreaming. The visit to Ōkubo never happened.

  *

  Rambling about the city as usual one afternoon, Sanshirō turned left at the top of Dangozaka and came out to the broad avenue in Sendagi Hayashi-chō. These days, ideal autumn weather made the skies of Tokyo look as deep as those back home in the country. Just to think that one was living beneath skies like this was enough to clear the mind. Walking out to open fields made everything perfect. The senses unwound and the spirit became as broad as the heavens. For all that, the body took on a new firmness. This was not the irresponsible balminess of spring. Gazing at the hedges on either side of him, Sanshirō inhaled Tokyo’s autumn fragrance for the first time in his life.

  The chrysanthemum doll show had opened at the bottom of Dangozaka23 two or three days earlier. Sanshirō had noticed a few banners as he turned left at the top of the slope. Now he could hear only the distant shouts, the beating of drums and clanging of bells. The rhythms floated slowly uphill and, when they had dispersed themselves completely into the clear autumn air, they turned at last into exceedingly tenuous waves. The waves stirred by those waves moved on as far as Sanshirō’s eardrums and came to rest. All that remained of the noise was a pleasant sensation.

  Just then two men appeared from a side street. One of them called out to Sanshirō. There was a note of restraint in Yojirō’s voice today. But then, he had someone with him. The sight of Yojirō’s companion confirmed for Sanshirō what he had long suspected: the man drinking tea at the Aokidō was indeed Hirota. Sanshirō had had some strange connection with this man ever since the peaches. The man had become fixed in his memory with particular tenacity when, drinking tea and smoking cigarettes, he caused Sanshirō to flee from the Aokidō to the library. As always, the man’s face looked to him like a Shinto priest’s with a Western nose attached. He wore the same summer suit he was wearing the last time, but he did not look cold.

  Sanshirō hoped to find some appropriate civility, but too much time had intervened; he did not know what to say. He simply removed his hat and bowed. This was too polite for Yojirō, but rather too curt for Hirota—a middle path that was appropriate to neither.

  Yojirō took care of the introductions simply. “This is a classmate of mine,” he said. “He’s just arrived in Tokyo from Kumamoto.” He had to go and blurt out Sanshirō’s rustic background. To Sanshirō he said, “This is Professor Hirota. Of the College.”

  “Never mind, we know each other,” Professor Hirota said.

  This brought an odd look from Yojirō, but instead of bothering to pursue the matter, he asked Sanshirō, “Do you know of any houses for rent in the neighborhood? We want a nice, big one with a room for a student houseboy.”

  “Houses? I don’t… yes, I do.”

 
; “Where? We don’t want anything run-down.”

  “Don’t worry, it’s very nice. It has a big stone gate out front.”

  “Good, where is it? A stone gate, Professor! Wonderful, let’s take it.”

  “No stone gates,” said the Professor.

  “No stone gates? Why not?”

  “I said no, that’s all.”

  “But they’re so impressive! Just think, we could look like a new baron!”24

  Yojirō was serious, Hirota grinning. Finally the serious side prevailed; they would at least look at the place. Sanshirō led the way.

  *

  They retraced their steps to a back street. Half a block north was a lane that appeared to end in a cul-de-sac. Sanshirō went in first. At the far end was a gardener’s front yard. They stopped several paces from the entrance. Two good-sized granite columns stood on the right, supporting an iron gate. This was it, said Sanshirō. And in fact a sign showed the house to be for rent.

  “Look at this monster, will you!” said Yojirō, pushing hard against the iron gate. It was locked. “Wait a minute,” he said, “I’ll go and ask.” He dashed into the gardener’s. Left alone, Hirota and Sanshirō started a conversation.

  “How do you like Tokyo?”

  “Well…”

  “Just a big, dirty place, isn’t it?”

  “Well…”

  “I’m sure you haven’t found anything here that compares with Mount Fuji.”

  Sanshirō had completely forgotten about Mount Fuji. Come to think of it, the mountain as he had first seen it from the train window, with Professor Hirota’s commentary, was something noble. There was no way to compare it with the chaotic jumble of the world inside his head now, and he was ashamed of himself for having let that first impression slip away. Just then Hirota flung an unexpected question at him. “Have you ever tried to translate Mount Fuji?”

  “Translate…?”

  “It’s fun. Whenever you translate nature it turns into something human. ‘Noble,’ say, or ‘great,’ or ‘heroic.’ ”

  Sanshirō saw what he meant by “translate.”

  “It always gives you a word having to do with character. Nature can’t influence the character of someone who can’t translate nature into character.”

  Sanshirō waited quietly for the rest, but Hirota was finished. He looked into the gardener’s and muttered as if to himself, “What is Sasaki doing in there? He’s taking so long.”

  “Shall I go see?” Sanshirō asked.

  “No, don’t bother. Sasaki wouldn’t come out just because somebody went looking for him. We might as well wait here.”

  He squatted down by the hedge and began sketching in the dirt with a pebble. Here was a man who took life easily! In this he went as far as Yojirō, but in the opposite direction.

  Just then Yojirō shouted from the other side of the gardener’s pine trees, “Professor Hirota!”

  The Professor went on sketching something. It appeared to be a lighthouse. When he did not answer, Yojirō was forced to come out.

  “Professor, come and look at this place. It’s really nice. The gardener here owns it. I could have him open the gate, but it would be quicker to go through the back.”

  They went around through the gardener’s and walked from room to room opening the storm doors. It was a good, middle-class house. The rent would be forty yen, with a three-month deposit. They came outside again.

  “Why bother looking at a house that good?” Hirota said.

  “Why not? What’s wrong with just looking?” Yojirō answered.

  “You know we’re not going to take the place.”

  “But I was going to take it. It’s just that he wouldn’t give it to us for twenty-five yen.”

  Hirota said only, “Of course he wouldn’t.”

  Yojirō then launched into the history of the stone gate. Until recently it had stood at the mansion of one of the gardener’s clients. They had given it to him when they rebuilt their house and he had brought it straight here. Yojirō, true to form, had been doing some odd research.

  *

  On the main thoroughfare again, they walked down the slope at Dōzaka toward Tabata. By the time they reached the bottom of the hill, the three were simply walking; they had forgotten about looking for houses. Yojirō, however, would make an occasional remark about the stone gate. To bring it from Kōjimachi to Sendagi had cost five yen, he said. The gardener must be pretty rich. Who was going to pay forty yen to rent a house in such a location? Yojirō did all the talking, concluding that the rent was sure to go down when no one took the house. They ought to bargain with the gardener again when that happened. Hirota seemed not to share his view of the situation.

  “Think of all the time you wasted talking nonsense with that fellow. You should have found out what you had to and come out.”

  “Was I in there such a long time? I saw you drawing some kind of picture, Professor. I’m not the only easy-going one.”

  “Maybe you’re a little better at it than I am.”

  “What was that picture, anyhow?”

  Hirota did not answer. Sanshirō spoke up, a serious expression on his face. “It was a lighthouse, wasn’t it?”

  The artist and Yojirō laughed aloud.

  “A lighthouse—how bizarre! You were drawing Nonomiya Sōhachi, then, right?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Nonomiya shines in far-off foreign countries, but down at the base of the lighthouse,25 in Japan, he’s pitch dark, no one knows who he is. He shuts himself up in that cellar and gets a miserable little salary. They don’t pay him what he’s worth. It breaks my heart just to look at him.”

  “The best you can do, Sasaki, is throw a little light around where you sit—maybe two or three feet in all directions. You’re like a paper lantern.”

  Having been compared to an outmoded domestic implement, Yojirō turned suddenly to Sanshirō and asked, “When were you born, Ogawa? What year of Meiji?”

  Sanshirō said simply, “I’m twenty-three.”

  “I thought so: Meiji 18.26 Professor, I hate things like that—paper lanterns, and those slim pipes27 they used to smoke when Tokyo was still Edo. Maybe it’s because I was born after Meiji 15 but, I don’t know, old-fashioned things like that bother me. How about you, Ogawa?”

  “I don’t mind them especially.”

  “No, of course not, you’ve just arrived from the wilds of Kyushu. Your mind is still back in Meiji Zero.”

  Neither Sanshirō nor Hirota had anything to say to this.

  A little farther on they came to an old temple, next to which a cedar grove had been cleared away and the earth leveled to make room for a blue-painted Western-style house. Professor Hirota stood looking back and forth between the temple and the painted building. “What an anachronism,” he said, using the English word. “Both the material and spiritual worlds of Japan are like this. You two know the lighthouse in Kudan, I’m sure.” Again the subject of lighthouses. “That’s an old, old thing. You can find it in the Illustrated Guide to Edo Attractions.”

  “Oh come on, Professor, the Kudan lighthouse may have been around a while, but it’s not in the Edo Guide. That would make it a hundred years old!”

  Professor Hirota laughed. He had been thinking of a print series on Tokyo attractions, he said. He then expounded on the construction of a modern brick building like the Military Club next to a survivor from another age like the lighthouse. The two of them together looked absurd, but no one noticed. It just didn’t bother anyone. This was representative of Japanese society.

  Both young men said “I see” and left it at that. A few hundred yards past the temple, they came to a large, black gate. Yojirō suggested they go through it and cut across to Dōkanyama. The others wondered if that was all right. Of course, he insisted, this was the suburban villa of the Satake Lords: everybody cut through here. They went in and walked through a grove of tall bamboo, coming out to the shore of an old pond. At that point a watchman appeared and cur
sed at them for trespassing. Yojirō offered his cringing apologies.

  They came to Yanaka and continued on through Nezu. Sanshirō reached his Hongō lodgings as the sun was going down. He could not recall the last time he had spent such a carefree afternoon.

  *

  Yojirō was not at school the next day. Sanshirō thought he might come to campus after lunch, but he did not. Neither could he find him in the library.

  Sanshirō went to the joint lecture for all literature students from five to six o’clock. It was too dark for taking notes, too early to turn on the lights. This was the hour when the depths of the great zelkova tree outside the high, narrow windows began to turn black. Inside the hall, the faces of the students and the lecturer were equally indistinct, which made everything somehow mystical, like eating a bean jam bun in the dark. He found it strangely pleasant that he could not understand the lecture. As he listened, cheek in hand, his senses became dulled, and he began to drift off. This was the very thing, he felt, that made lectures worthwhile. Just then the lights snapped on, and everything gained a measure of clarity. He suddenly wanted to go home and eat. The Professor, too, grasped the mood and improvised an ending for his talk. Sanshirō walked quickly back to Oiwake.

  He changed his clothes and sat down before the low table that had been brought to his room. Next to his cup of steamed custard was a letter. The seal told him that it came from his mother. Inexcusably, he hadn’t given a thought to his mother for the past two weeks or more. What with the anachronisms, the character of Mount Fuji, and the mystical lecture, not even the young woman had crossed his mind since yesterday. This gave him great satisfaction. He would read his mother’s letter afterward, at his leisure, but first he ate dinner and had a cigarette. The sight of the smoke reminded him of today’s lecture.

  At that point Yojirō dropped in. Sanshirō asked why he had not come to classes. He was far too busy with house-hunting, Yojirō said.

  “Are you in such a hurry to move?”

  “Such a hurry? We were supposed to have moved last month but they let us stay until the Emperor’s Birthday, the day after tomorrow. We’ve got to find a place tomorrow, no matter what. Don’t you know of anything?”