Sanshiro Read online

  “Who did the copy?” Mineko asked.

  “Mitsui. He’s really better than this. I don’t think much of it,” Haraguchi said, stepping back a pace or two. “It was bound to fail. The original was done by a man at the height of his powers.”

  Haraguchi cocked his head to one side. Sanshirō looked at the bend in his neck. “Have you seen everything?” the painter asked Mineko. He spoke only to Mineko.

  “Not yet.”

  “Why not forget it and come with us to the Seiyōken? I’ll buy you a cup of tea. I have to go there anyhow to see the manager about our gathering. He’s a friend of mine. Now is just the right time for tea. Soon it will be too late for tea, too early for dinner, no good for anything. What do you say? Come with us.” Haraguchi liked to drop an occasional English expression into his speech.

  Mineko looked at Sanshirō. His face said he could go either way. Nonomiya stood outside of the conversation.

  “As long as we’re here, we might as well see everything, don’t you think?” she asked Sanshirō. He said he did.

  “Here’s an idea, then,” Haraguchi went on. “There’s a special gallery in back. Fukami’s posthumous works are there.46 Just look at those and come over to the Seiyōken. We’ll be waiting for you.”

  “Thank you very much.”

  “Now, with Fukami’s watercolors, don’t look at them the way you’d look at ordinary watercolors. They are his and his alone. You’ll find they have some very interesting qualities, but you mustn’t think of them as pictures of things. Just look at Fukami’s fine personal touch.” Leaving these parting instructions, Haraguchi went out with Nonomiya. Mineko thanked him and watched the two men go. Neither of them looked back.

  *

  Mineko turned and walked into the special gallery with Sanshirō a step behind her. Little light penetrated this far into the museum. Just as Haraguchi had said, nearly all of Fukami’s paintings were watercolors. They were arranged on one wall of the long, narrow gallery. What most struck him was their subdued tone. There was little color variety, and those colors the artist had used were pale and low in contrast. They would probably not show up well unless they were in sunlight. More interesting was the brushwork, which revealed no sign of hesitation. Each piece gave the impression of having been done in a single breath. The style was free and easy: that much was clear from the way the pencil lines stood out sharply beneath the colors. The human figures were spare and elongated. They looked to Sanshirō like grain flails. In this collection, too, there was a scene of Venice.

  “Here is another Venice,” Mineko said, approaching him.

  “Yes,” he answered, and the name jogged his memory. “What were you saying before?”

  “Before?”

  “When I was looking at the other Venice.”

  Again Mineko revealed her white teeth, but she did not speak.

  “If it was nothing special, I don’t have to know.”

  “It was nothing special.”

  Sanshirō continued to look at her oddly. By now it was after four o’clock on this overcast autumn day. The galleries were dark. There were very few people left, and in the special gallery, Sanshirō and Mineko were alone, two shadows in the gloom. She moved away from the painting and stood directly in front of him. “It was Sōhachi. You know…”

  “Nonomiya?”

  “You know.”

  Mineko’s meaning flooded into him like the shattering of a huge wave. “You were toying with Nonomiya?”

  “Why should I do such a thing?” Her voice rang with absolute innocence. Sanshirō suddenly lost the courage to say more. He moved off a few steps without a word. She followed, all but clinging to him. “You’re not the one I was toying with.”

  Again Sanshirō came to a halt. He was a tall young man. He looked down at Mineko. “Never mind.”

  “Why was it so wrong of me?”

  “Never mind. It’s all right.”

  Mineko turned her face away. They walked from the gallery together, and as they passed through the door, their shoulders touched. In that instant, Sanshirō thought of the woman on the train. The touch of Mineko’s flesh was like a throb of pain in a dream.

  “Is it really all right?” Mineko asked in a tiny voice. Two or three other spectators were walking their way.

  “Anyhow, let’s get out of here,” Sanshirō said.

  They retrieved their shoes at the door. Stepping outside, they found that it was raining.

  “Do you want to go to the Seiyōken?”

  Mineko did not answer. They stood in the broad field that stretched away from the museum, their clothes growing damp in the rain. Fortunately the storm had just begun, and it was not violent. Mineko looked across the field and pointed toward the Ueno forest.

  “Let’s go and stand under the trees.”

  The rain would probably stop if they waited a little. They crossed the field and stood in the shade of a large cedar. It was not a good tree for warding off the rain, but neither of them moved. They stood there getting wet and cold.

  “Sanshirō?”

  He was looking at the sky with knitted brows, and he turned this face to Mineko.

  “Was it wrong of me, before?”

  “It’s all right.”

  “But,” she drew closer, “I just wanted to do it, I don’t know why. I didn’t mean any disrespect to Sōhachi.”

  Mineko fixed her gaze on Sanshirō. He saw in her eyes an appeal more profound than her words had expressed. “Don’t you see?” they were saying, “I did it for you.”

  “Never mind, it’s all right,” he said again.

  The rain fell more and more heavily. Only the smallest patch was left where the raindrops did not strike. The two of them drew closer together. They stood cowering beneath the tree, shoulders touching.

  “Please keep the money,” Mineko said through the sound of the rain.

  “I’ll take it on loan. But only what I need.”

  “Please, take it all.”

  9

  Sanshirō went to the Seiyōken dinner after much prodding from Yojirō. He wore traditional formal attire that included a black coat of fine raw silk. A letter from his mother explained the making of the coat in great detail. Miwata Omitsu’s mother wove the material, and after they had dyed it with the Ogawa family crest, Omitsu did the sewing. He tried it on when the package arrived but, reluctant to wear the Miwata ladies’ handiwork, he had left it in the drawer ever since. This was a great waste, according to Yojirō, who badgered Sanshirō to wear it to the dinner, as though he might wear the coat himself if Sanshirō did not. Once Sanshirō relented and tried it on, the coat did not seem so bad.

  Sanshirō stood in the doorway of the Seiyōken with Yojirō, dressed in this outfit. It was the proper attire for receiving guests, Yojirō said. Sanshirō had not been expecting to receive guests, however. He had assumed that he himself was a guest. Now he felt like an overdressed doorman. He was sorry he had not worn his student uniform.

  The guests began to arrive. Yojirō buttonholed each of them in turn, treating them all like old friends. After each new arrival handed his hat and coat to the valet and passed by the broad flight of stairs to turn into the dark corridor, Yojirō would identify him for Sanshirō. In this way, Sanshirō came to know the faces of many eminent men.

  Before long, all the guests had arrived. They numbered close to thirty. Professor Hirota was there. So was Nonomiya—a scientist, to be sure, but fond of art and literature and therefore, according to Yojirō, forced to attend by Haraguchi. Haraguchi himself was there. He had arrived first of all and proceeded to circulate officiously among the guests, exuding charm and fondling his beard.

  Soon it was time to be seated. Each man sat where he liked, no one yielding, no one contesting his place. Out of keeping with his usual slowness, Professor Hirota was the first one to the table. Only Yojirō and Sanshirō intentionally sat together, taking seats near the doorway. All of the others found their neighbors by chance.

  A criti
c in a striped formal coat sat between Nonomiya and Professor Hirota. Across the table was one Dr. Shōji, Yojirō’s “influential professor in the Department of Literature.” He wore a frock coat and was a man of some dignity. His hair, which he wore at more than twice the normal length, seemed to swirl in black eddies beneath the electric lamps, a remarkable contrast to Professor Hirota’s close-cropped monk’s cut. Haraguchi sat at the far corner, which placed him across from Sanshirō down the length of the table. He wore a suit and had a broad tie of black satin knotted at the collar, with the ends splayed out across his chest. Yojirō informed Sanshirō that all French artists wore that kind of necktie. It looked just like the knot in a man’s sash, Sanshirō thought to himself as he sipped spoonfuls of soup.

  Soon the conversation started. Yojirō, uncharacteristically quiet, concentrated on his beer. This was an occasion when even he had to practice some restraint, apparently.

  “How about a little de te fabula?” Sanshirō suggested under his breath.

  “Not today,” Yojirō answered, turning away to start up a conversation with the man next to him. He complimented the man on a certain essay and said how much he had benefitted from it. This struck Sanshirō as strange, because in his presence Yojirō had torn the thing apart. Yojirō turned back to Sanshirō. “That’s a handsome coat. It really becomes you,” he said, looking at the white family crests in particular. Just then Haraguchi began to address Nonomiya from his far corner. His loud voice served him well in the distant exchange. Professor Hirota and Dr. Shōji, fearing lest their cross-table conversation interfere with the other dialogue, cut their own discussion short. Everyone else fell silent, too. The gathering had a focal point now for the first time.

  *

  “Nonomiya, have you completed your experiment on the pressure of light?”

  “No, far from it.”

  “It’s real drudgery, isn’t it? We artists have to work hard, but yours seems even more strenuous.”

  “All an artist needs to paint a picture is inspiration,” Nonomiya said, using the English term. “It’s not so easy when you experiment in physics.”

  “Inspiration? Now there’s a word that makes me cringe! This summer I heard two old women engaged in a dialogue. They were sharing their ‘research’ into whether or not the rainy season had ended. The first one was complaining that in the old days a good clap of thunder was sure to end the rainy season but that thunder didn’t work anymore. This made the other one mad. She said, ‘What are you talking about? A little thunder’s not going to do it!’ Well, that’s how it is in painting nowadays. A little inspiration’s not going to do it. What do you say, Tamura? It must be the same for a writer.”

  A novelist called Tamura was sitting next to Haraguchi. “My only inspiration comes from the editors when they hound me for manuscript,” he answered, which drew a big laugh. Then Tamura became serious and started asking Nonomiya about his work. Does light have pressure? If so, how does one experiment on it? Nonomiya’s answers were interesting.

  You make a thin disk about an inch in diameter from mica or some such material, hang it from a quartz thread in a vacuum, and shine the beam of an arc lamp at the surface of the disk at a right angle. Pushed by the beam, the disk moves.

  Everyone at the table was listening intently. Sanshirō recalled the time when he had first arrived in Tokyo and had been so startled at the view through the telescope, the view of that tin can which must have contained the device he was hearing about now.

  “Yojirō,” he whispered, “is there such a thing as a quartz thread?”

  Yojirō shook his head. Then Sanshirō asked Nonomiya, “Is there such a thing as a quartz thread?”

  “Yes. First you melt powdered quartz in the flame of an oxyhydrogen blowpipe, then stretch it to the right and left with both hands until a fine thread forms.”

  Sanshirō said only “Oh?” and retreated. The critic in the striped coat sitting beside Nonomiya was the next to speak up.

  “We’re entirely ignorant when it comes to these things, but what I’d like to know is how you became aware of the problem in the first place.”

  “It has been a matter of theoretical conjecture since Maxwell, but Lebedev was the first to prove it through experimentation. Now it’s reached the stage where someone is using the idea to explain the behavior of comets. The tails ought to be drawn toward the sun, but they’re always bent the other way. Perhaps it’s because light-pressure blows them back.”

  The critic seemed greatly impressed. “The idea itself is interesting, I suppose, but what I like about it is that it’s big.”

  “It’s not only big,” said Professor Hirota. “It’s fun because it’s harmless.”

  “And if the idea is wrong, it’s even more harmless,” Haraguchi said with a laugh.

  “No, I’m afraid it’s right. The pressure of light is proportionate to the square of the radius, but gravity is proportionate to the cube of the radius, so the smaller a thing is, the less its gravitational pull and the stronger the effect of light pressure on it. If we assume the tail of a comet to be composed of tiny particles, it will obviously have to be blown back away from the sun.”

  Nonomiya had turned serious, but Haraguchi went on as before. “Now we’re paying for the harmlessness with all this calculating. You can’t win.” This remark restored the beery mood for everyone.

  Professor Hirota said, “It looks to me as though a writer of the naturalist school could never be a physicist.”

  The pairing of physicists with the dominant literary movement excited everyone’s interest to no small degree.

  *

  “What do you mean by that?” asked Nonomiya, the man most directly concerned. Now Hirota had to explain himself.

  “Well, look. It won’t do you any good just to open your eyes and observe nature if you want to test the pressure of light. I don’t see where this fact, ‘the pressure of light,’ is printed anywhere on nature’s menu, do you? You have to go about it artificially, with quartz threads and vacuums and mica, all these devices so that the pressure becomes visible to the eye of the physicist. In other words, physicists are not naturalists.”

  “But they’re not romantics, either,” Haraguchi butted in.

  “Oh yes they are,” Hirota defended himself grandly. “To place the light and the thing that receives the light in a spatial relationship that cannot be found in the normal natural world is something only a romantic would do.”

  “But once you have put them into that spatial relationship,” Nonomiya said, “all you do is observe the light’s characteristic pressure, and that much belongs to the naturalist school.”

  “Then physicists are romantic naturalists,” said Dr. Shōji, sitting diagonally opposite Nonomiya, and he offered a comparison: “In literature, that would be someone like Ibsen, I suppose.”

  “True,” said the critic in the striped coat. “Ibsen has as many devices as Nonomiya, but I doubt if his characters follow natural laws the way light does.”

  “That’s a good point,” Professor Hirota said. “But there is one thing we ought to keep in mind in the study of man. Namely, that a human being placed in particular circumstances has the ability and the right to do just the opposite of what the circumstances dictate. The trouble is, we have this odd habit of thinking that men and light both act according to mechanical laws, which leads to some stunning errors. We set things up to make a man angry, and he laughs. We try to make him laugh, and again he does the opposite, he gets angry. Either way, though, he’s still a human being.”

  Hirota had enlarged the scope of the problem again.

  “Well, then, what you’re saying is, no matter what a human being does in a particular set of circumstances, he is being natural,” said the novelist at the far end of the table.

  “That’s it,” Hirota shot back. “It seems to me that you might create any sort of character in a novel and there would be at least one person in the world just like him. We humans are simply incapable of imaginin
g non-human actions or behavior. It’s the writer’s fault if we don’t believe in his characters as human beings.”

  The novelist had nothing to say to this. Now it was Dr. Shōji’s turn to speak.

  “Look at the physicists. Galileo realized that one swing of the lamp in the cathedral took the same time no matter how big the swing; Newton discovered that the apple fell because of gravity. Men like that are dyed-in-the-wool members of the naturalist school.”

  “If that’s what the naturalist school is, I suppose it’s all right for literature to have one,” Nonomiya said. “Haraguchi, is there a naturalist school of painters?”

  “Of course. There was this frightening fellow Courbet. Vérité vraie. He accepted only fact. Not that his ideas ran rampant over everything. They were simply recognized as one particular school, which is how it ought to be. It’s probably the same with fiction. Isn’t that so, Tamura? There must be some writers who prefer symbolism and idealism—men like Moreau or Chavannes.”

  “There must be,” said the novelist beside him.

  No one rose to make an after-dinner speech. Only Haraguchi had anything to say. He was intent on criticizing the bronze figure at the top of Kudan.47 What a terrible thing to inflict on the citizens of Tokyo! How much smarter it would be to put up a bronze image of a beautiful geisha! Yojirō told Sanshirō that Haraguchi did not get along well with the sculptor of the Kudan piece.

  The party ended. Outside, the moon was beautiful. Yojirō asked Sanshirō if he thought Professor Hirota had made a good impression on Dr. Shōji. Sanshirō answered that he probably had. Stopping next to a public water tap, Yojirō mentioned that he had come here for a walk this summer. Feeling the heat, he was washing himself off when a policeman spotted him and he ran up Suribachi Hill. Now the two of them climbed Suribachi Hill to look at the moon.

  *

  On the way home Yojirō began to make excuses about the money he owed Sanshirō, but on this fairly cold night with a clear moon in the sky, money was the farthest thing from Sanshirō’s mind. He could not listen seriously. In any case, he thought, Yojirō was not going to give it back. Giving it back was the one thing that Yojirō failed to mention. He concentrated instead on all the reasons why he was unable to do so. More than what he had to say, however, it was his style that interested Sanshirō. —Yojirō knew a man who, disappointed in love, had grown tired of living and had finally resolved to kill himself. He found drowning unpalatable, throwing himself into a volcano even worse, and hanging worst of all. So he bought a gun. Before he had a chance to use it, though, a friend came to him for a loan. Having no money himself, he turned the friend down, but the man pleaded for help. All he could do was lend him the gun. The friend pawned it and kept himself going. When he had money again, he redeemed the gun and brought it back. By this time, however, the owner of the gun no longer felt like dying. In other words, his life had been saved because someone had come to him for a loan.