Sanshiro Read online

  If he was going to be so rushed today, how could he have wasted the whole day yesterday? That house-hunting had been indistinguishable from a casual stroll. This was almost more than Sanshirō could fathom. Yojirō insisted it was because the Professor had come along.

  “It was a mistake for him to get involved in looking for houses. He’s never done it before. There must have been something wrong with him yesterday. It was his fault we got yelled at like that in the Satake villa. That was embarrassing as hell. —Are you sure you don’t know of some place?”

  He was suddenly talking about houses again. This actually did appear to be his sole reason for coming. Sanshirō pressed for a few details on why they had to move. Their damned extortionist of a landlord made him furious the way he kept raising the rent, Yojirō said, and he had announced their intention to leave. So it was Yojirō’s responsibility.

  “I went all the way to Ōkubo today but couldn’t find anything there, either. As long as I was in Ōkubo I stopped in to see Yoshiko. She’s still looking washed out, sorry to say—one of those anemic beauties. Her mother sends her regards to you. The neighborhood has been quiet ever since you were there—no suicides or anything.”

  Yojirō flew from one thing to another. Never very good at sticking to the point, he was especially agitated today over the house-hunting problem. When each new topic was exhausted he would ask, as a refrain, whether Sanshirō knew of a place. Finally, Sanshirō burst out laughing.

  *

  Soon Yojirō’s buttocks were settling ever more comfortably on the matted floor, and he began amusing himself with Chinese literary references.28 “How does that poem go…? ‘Autumn is here, let us read by the lamplight.’ ” For no very good reason, the conversation turned to Professor Hirota.

  Sanshirō asked, “What is the Professor’s given name?”

  “ ‘Chō.’ It’s written with an unusual character.” He drew the strokes in the air. “I wonder if it’s even in the dictionary. It’s supposed to mean some kind of bitter-tasting fruit the Chinese call a ‘sheep-peach.’ They pinned a weird one on him.”

  “You say he’s a professor at the College?”

  “That he is. From once upon a time to this very moment. Isn’t that something? They say ten years can shoot by like a day, but he’s been at it a good twelve or thirteen years.”

  “Does he have any kids?”

  “Kids? He’s a bachelor.”

  This came as a surprise to Sanshirō. Was it possible to remain single so long? “Why isn’t he married?”

  “That’s what makes the Professor the Professor. You wouldn’t know it, but he’s a great theorist. He doesn’t have to get married to know that a wife would be no good for him. He says his theory proves it beforehand. It’s ridiculous. That’s why he’s so full of contradictions. He’s always saying what an eyesore Tokyo is, but when he sees a nice stone gate it scares him to death. ‘No stone gates,’ he says, or, ‘It’s too good for us.’ ”

  “Well then, maybe he ought to get married as an experiment.”

  “He might actually like it, who knows?”

  “He talks about how dirty Tokyo is and how ugly the Japanese are, but has he ever been abroad?”

  “Are you kidding? Professor Hirota? He’s like that because his mind is more highly developed than anything in the actual world. One thing he does do is study the West in photographs. He’s got tons of them—the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, the Houses of Parliament in London—and he measures Japan against them! Of course Japan looks bad in comparison. Meanwhile, he can live in a shack and not give a damn. It’s weird.”

  “I met him in the third-class carriage.”

  “He must have been complaining how filthy it was.”

  “No, he didn’t say much about that.”

  “Anyhow, Professor Hirota is a philosopher, you know.”

  “Is that what he teaches?”

  “No, in school he only teaches English, but what’s interesting about him is that the man himself is made of philosophy.”

  “Has he written any books?”

  “Not one. He writes an essay now and then, but there’s never any response to them. It can’t go on like this. What’s the good if nobody knows about him? He called me a paper lantern, but the Professor himself is a great darkness.”

  “He ought to try to get out in the world and make a name for himself.”

  “Make a name for himself? He can’t do anything for himself. He couldn’t eat three meals a day if he didn’t have me around.”

  Sanshirō laughed out loud as if to say that Yojirō was talking nonsense.

  “It’s true. It’s pitiful how little he does. I’m the one who orders the maid to do things the way he likes them. But never mind all that. I’m planning to really get moving and find him a position at the University.”

  Yojirō meant it. Sanshirō was shocked. But that made no difference to Yojirō, who went on, leaving Sanshirō’s shock intact. He concluded with a request. “Be sure to come and help us move.” He sounded as if the new house had been decided on long before.

  *

  It was nearly ten o’clock by the time Yojirō went home. Seated on the floor alone now, Sanshirō felt a vague chill. He noticed that the window by his desk was still not shuttered for the night. Sliding back the shoji, he found the moon in the night sky. A hinoki cypress fire-tree stood outside his window. This tree bothered him whenever he caught sight of it, and especially so tonight when the bluish light of the moon gave the edges of its black silhouette a smoky look. He closed the shutters, thinking how odd it was to have the autumn moon on the seasonless evergreen.

  He crawled into bed without further delay. More a rambler in the groves of academe than a serious student, Sanshirō read comparatively little. One pastime he enjoyed, however, was to savor repeatedly the memorable scenes he encountered. This gave life greater depth, he felt. Now would ordinarily be the time of day for him to enjoy recalling such moments as when the lights snapped on during the mystical lecture. First, though, he had his mother’s letter to deal with.

  Shinzō had given her some honey, she wrote, and she was drinking a little each night, mixed with spirits. Shinzō was a tenant farmer of theirs who brought twenty bales of rice each winter as his annual rent. He was an exceptionally honest fellow but very hot-tempered, and he would beat his wife with a piece of kindling every now and then. Sanshirō recalled how Shinzō first came to keep bees five years earlier. He discovered a swarm of two or three hundred clinging to an oak tree behind his house and took every one of them alive in a big rice funnel sprayed with sake. He put them in a box, cut a hole for the bees to go in and out, and set it on a rock in a sunny place. The bees gradually multiplied, and one hive was no longer enough. He made another, and soon two were no longer enough. He made yet another and went on increasing them this way until he had more than half a dozen hives. He would take one down from its rock each year and cut out the honeycombs “for the bees’ sake,” as he put it. Every summer when Sanshirō was home from school, Shinzō invariably promised to give them some honey but never brought any. Apparently his memory had improved this year, and he had fulfilled his long-standing promise.

  Heitarō had asked her to come and see the stone he had put up on his father’s grave, the letter continued. It was made of granite, and it stood in the very center of Heitarō’s yard, where not a tree or a blade of grass grew on the red earth. Heitarō was quite proud of the granite slab. Just to cut it out of the mountain had taken him several days, and the engraver had charged him ten yen. A farmer wouldn’t realize the value of the stone, Heitarō said, but young master Sanshirō was in the University, and he would be sure to appreciate it. Heitarō wanted her to ask him about it in her next letter and have him say a few kind words about this stone that he had made for his father at a cost of ten yen. Sanshirō chuckled over this one. It was generating a lot more heat than the stone gate in Sendagi.

  His mother went on to ask him for a photograph of himself in his stud
ent uniform. He would be sure to have one taken for her some time, he thought, and moved on to the next item. As he had feared, it was about Miwata Omitsu. Omitsu’s mother had come to see his mother recently and suggested that Sanshirō marry her daughter when he graduated from the University. His mother noted that Omitsu was a pretty girl with a nice disposition, their family owned a good deal of rice land, and considering the two families’ long-standing relationship, it should work out well for both sides. She added two postscripts: “It would certainly make Omitsu happy, too.” “I don’t want you to marry a Tokyo girl. I don’t understand those people.”

  Sanshirō rolled up the letter and returned it to its envelope. He placed it by his pillow and closed his eyes. Some rats began to scurry around in the ceiling, but they quieted down eventually.

  *

  Three worlds took shape for Sanshirō. One of them was far away and had the fragrance of the past, of what Yojirō called the years before Meiji 15. Everything there was tranquil, yes, but everything was sleepy, too. It would not be difficult for him to go back, of course. He need only go. But he would not want to do that except as a last resort. It was, after all, a place of retreat, and in it he had sealed up the discarded past. He felt a twinge of remorse to think that he had buried his dear mother there as well. Only when her letters came did he linger a while in this world, warm with nostalgia.

  In his second world stood a mossy brick building. It had a reading room so vast that, standing in one corner, he could not make out the features of people in the other. There were books shelved so high they could not be reached without a ladder, books blackened with the rubbing of hands, the oil of fingers, books whose titles shone with gold. There was sheepskin, cowhide, paper of two hundred years ago, and piled on all of these, dust. It was precious dust, dust that took twenty, even thirty years to accumulate, silent dust enough to conquer the silent passage of time.

  He saw the human shadows flitting through his second world. Most of them had unkempt beards. Some walked along looking at the sky, others looking at the ground. All wore shabby clothing. All lived in poverty. And all were serene. Closed in on every side by streetcars, they freely breathed the air of peace. The men in this world were unfortunate, for they knew nothing of the real world. But they were fortunate as well, for they had fled the Burning House of worldly suffering.29 Professor Hirota was in this second world. So, too, was Nonomiya. Sanshirō stood where he could understand the air of this world more or less. He could leave it whenever he wished. But to do so, to relinquish a taste he had finally begun to savor, was something he was loath to do.

  Sanshirō’s third world was as radiant and fluid as spring, a world of electric lights, of silver spoons, of cheers and laughter, of glasses bubbling over with champagne. And crowning everything were beautiful women. Sanshirō had spoken to one of them, he had seen another twice. This world was for him the most profound. This world was just in front of him, but it was unapproachable, like a shaft of lightning in the farthest heavens. Sanshirō gazed at it from afar and found it baffling. He seemed to possess the qualifications to be a master of some part of this world; without him, a void would open up in it. This world should have wanted to fill that void and develop to perfection, but for some reason it closed itself to him and blocked the route by which he might gain free access.

  Lying in bed, Sanshirō set his three worlds in a row and compared them, each to the others. Then he mixed the three together and from the mixture obtained a conclusion. The best thing would be to bring his mother from the country, marry a beautiful woman, and devote himself to learning. It was a mediocre conclusion. But a lot of thinking had gone into it, and from the point of view of the thinker himself, who could adjust his evaluation of the conclusion according to the effort he had expended in arriving at it, it was not so mediocre.

  The only drawback to this scheme was that it made a mere wife the sole representative of the entire vast world number three. There were plenty of beautiful women. They could be translated in any number of ways. (Sanshirō tried out the word “translate” as he had learned it from Professor Hirota.) And in so far as they could be translated into words relating to character, Sanshirō would have to come into contact with as many beautiful women as possible in order to enlarge the scope of the influence derived from those translations and to perfect his own individuality. To content himself with knowing only a wife would be like going out of his way to ensure the incomplete development of his ego.

  Sanshirō carried the argument this far, when it occurred to him that his thinking had been “corrupted a little” by Professor Hirota. For in fact he was not so dissatisfied as all that with his one-woman scheme.

  *

  The next day’s lectures were as boring as ever, but with the atmosphere of the classroom still distant from the mundane, he succeeded by three in the afternoon in becoming a fully fledged citizen of world number two, and when he ran into Yojirō near the Oiwake police box, Sanshirō bore himself with an air of greatness.

  “Ha ha ha ha ha! Oh, ho ho ho ho ho!”

  Thanks to Yojirō, the bearing of greatness crumbled to bits. Even the officer at the police box was looking at him with a faint smile.

  “What’s that for?”

  “What do you mean, ‘What’s that for?’ Walk a little more like an ordinary human being. That’s romantische Ironie if I’ve ever seen it!”

  Sanshirō did not understand this foreign term. Instead of pursuing it he asked, “Did you find a house?”

  “I was just at your place to tell you about that. We move tomorrow. Come and help.”

  “Where is it?”

  “Nishikatamachi ten, block F, number three. Get there by nine o’clock, will you, and clean the place up. We’ll be there later. All right? Make it nine o’clock. Block F, number three. See you there.”

  Yojirō hurried away and Sanshirō hurried on home. He went back to the library that evening to look up romantische Ironie. It was a term first used by the German philosopher Schlegel, he found, and apparently it was some kind of theory to the effect that a genius ought to spend the whole day hanging around, without purpose or effort. Relieved, Sanshirō returned to his room and went to sleep.

  The next day was 3 November, the Emperor’s Birthday. Despite the holiday, Sanshirō rose at the usual hour and set off as if going to campus. He had promised to help Yojirō. He went to Nishikatamachi ten and found block F, number three, halfway down an oddly narrow street. It was an old house. Instead of the usual stone-floored foyer, a single Western room jutted out from the front of the house. This room formed an L with the matted Japanese parlor, behind which was a smaller sitting room, also matted. Beyond the sitting room was the kitchen, and beyond that the maid’s room. The house also had a second story of uncertain size.

  He had been asked to clean up, but he saw nothing in special need of cleaning. The place was not clean, of course, but nothing struck him as having to be thrown out. If you were determined to get rid of something, the mats and paper doors could possibly stand replacement, but that was all. He slid back the storm doors and sat on the veranda, looking at the garden.

  There was a large crepe myrtle. It was rooted, however, in the neighbor’s yard and merely leaned most of its trunk over the cedar fence, taking up space on this side. There was a large cherry tree. It, to be sure, was growing on this side of the fence, but half its branches had fled the garden for the street and would soon obstruct the telephone lines. There was a single large chrysanthemum. Perhaps it was a winter variety, though, for it had no blossoms. There was nothing else. It was a pitiful sort of garden. The soil, however, level and of a very fine consistency, was quite beautiful. Sanshirō looked at it for some time. This was, in fact, a garden made for looking at the soil.

  Soon a bell sounded, opening the holiday ceremonies at the College. It must be nine o’clock, Sanshirō thought. At last it occurred to him that he should not be sitting there doing nothing. Perhaps he could sweep up the leaves that had fallen from the cherr
y tree. But there was no broom. He sat down again on the veranda. Perhaps two minutes had gone by when, without a sound, the garden gate opened and, to Sanshirō’s amazement, the young woman from the pond stepped in.

  *

  Two sides of the garden were enclosed by a hedge. The square bit of land did not quite come to twenty feet on one side. When he saw the young woman from the pond standing within this narrow enclosure, Sanshirō had a momentary insight: one should always view a flower cut, in a vase.

  Sanshirō moved away from his seat on the veranda. The young woman moved away from the gate.

  “Pardon me,” she began, bowing. As before, she floated forward from the waist. But her face did not move down. Even while she was bowing, she stared straight at Sanshirō. Her throat seemed to extend toward him, and at the same time her eyes flashed into his.

  A few days before, Sanshirō’s aesthetics instructor had shown the class some portraits by Greuze. Using an English term, he had explained that all women painted by this artist wore richly voluptuous expressions. Voluptuous! There was no other way to describe her eyes at that moment. They were trying to tell him something, something voluptuous, something that appealed directly to the senses. But their plea pierced the bone of the senses and reached the marrow. It went beyond bearable sweetness and became a violent stimulus. Far from sweet, it was excruciating. This was not, to be sure, cheap coquetry. There was a cruelty in her glance that made the one it fell on wish to play the coquette. Nor did she bear the slightest resemblance to a portrait by Greuze. Her eyes were small, half the size of those in his paintings.

  “Would this be Professor Hirota’s new house by any chance?”

  “Uh-huh. This is it.” Sanshirō’s tone of voice and manner were very brusque in comparison to hers. He was aware of this, but he knew no other way to answer her.

  “Has he not moved in yet?” She expressed herself clearly, without letting her voice trail off the way so many women did.