Sanshiro Read online

  *

  As if by prearrangement, they both bought meals from the platform vendors in Hamamatsu. The train showed no sign of moving even after they had finished eating. Sanshirō noticed four or five Westerners strolling back and forth past the train window. One pair was probably a married couple; they were holding hands in spite of the hot weather. Dressed entirely in white, the woman was very beautiful. Sanshirō had never seen more than half a dozen foreigners in the course of his lifetime. Two of them were his teachers in college, and unfortunately one of those was a hunchback. He knew one woman, a missionary. She had a pointed face like a smelt or a barracuda. Foreigners as colorful and attractive as these were not only something quite new for Sanshirō, they seemed to be of a higher class. He stared at them, entranced. Arrogance from people like this was understandable. He went so far as to imagine himself traveling to the West and feeling insignificant among them. When the couple passed his window he tried hard to listen to their conversation, but he could make out none of it. Their pronunciation was nothing like that of his Kumamoto teachers.

  Just then the man with the mustache leaned over Sanshirō’s shoulder. “Aren’t we ever going to get out of here?” He glanced at the foreign couple, who had just walked by. “Beautiful,” he murmured, releasing a languorous little yawn. Sanshirō realized what a country boy he must appear; he drew his head in and returned to his seat. The man sat down after him. “Westerners are very beautiful, aren’t they?” he said.

  Sanshirō could think of nothing to say in reply. He nodded and smiled.

  “We Japanese are sad-looking things next to them. We can beat the Russians, we can become a ‘first-class power,’ but it doesn’t make any difference. We still have the same faces, the same feeble little bodies. Just look at the houses we live in, the gardens we build around them. They’re just what you’d expect from faces like this. —Oh yes, this is your first trip to Tokyo, isn’t it? You’ve never seen Mount Fuji. We go by it a little farther on. Have a look. It’s the finest thing Japan has to offer, the only thing we have to boast about. The trouble is, of course, it’s just a natural object. It’s been sitting there for all time. We didn’t make it.” He grinned broadly once again.

  Sanshirō had never expected to meet anyone like this after Japan’s victory in the Russo-Japanese War. The man was almost not Japanese, he felt.

  “But still,” Sanshirō argued, “Japan will start developing from now on at least.”

  “Japan is going to perish,” the man replied coolly.

  Anyone who dared say such a thing in Kumamoto would have been beaten on the spot, perhaps even arrested for treason. Sanshirō had grown up in an atmosphere that gave his mind no room at all for inserting an idea like this. Could the man be toying with him, taking advantage of his youth? The man was still grinning, but he spoke with complete detachment. Sanshirō did not know what to make of him. He decided to say nothing.

  But then the man said, “Tokyo is bigger than Kumamoto. And Japan is bigger than Tokyo. And even bigger than Japan…” He paused and looked at Sanshirō, who was listening intently now. “Even bigger than Japan is the inside of your head. Don’t ever surrender yourself—not to Japan, not to anything. You may think that what you’re doing is for the sake of the nation, but let something take possession of you like that, and all you do is bring it down.”

  When he heard this, Sanshirō felt he was truly no longer in Kumamoto. And he realized, too, what a coward he had been there.

  Sanshirō arrived in Tokyo that same evening. The man with the mustache never did tell Sanshirō his name. Nor did Sanshirō venture to ask it; there were bound to be men like this everywhere in Tokyo.

  2

  Tokyo was full of things that startled Sanshirō. First, the ringing of the streetcar bells startled him, and then the huge numbers of people that got on and off between rings. Next to startle him was Marunouchi, the busy commercial center of the city. What startled him most of all was Tokyo itself, for no matter how far he went, it never ended. Everywhere he walked there were piles of lumber, heaps of rock, new homes set back from the street, depressing old storehouses half demolished in front of them. Everything looked as if it were being destroyed, and at the same time everything looked as if it were under construction. The sheer movement of it all was terrible.

  And Sanshirō was utterly startled. The shock he felt was identical in quality and degree to that of the most ordinary country boy who stands in the midst of the capital for the first time. His education could no more prevent this shock than might some store-bought remedy. He felt a large portion of his self-confidence simply disappear, and it made him miserable.

  If this violent activity was what they called the real world, then his life up to now had been nowhere in touch with it. He had been straddling the fence—and had fallen asleep there!9 All right, then, could he end his napping today and contribute his share of activity? Not likely. He stood in the center of activity now, but his life as a student was the same as before. He had merely been set down in a new position from which to observe the activity all around him. The world was in an uproar; he watched it, but he could not join it. His own world and the real world were aligned on a single plane, but nowhere did they touch. The real world would move on in its uproar and leave him behind. The thought filled him with a great unease.

  Sanshirō stood and watched the activity of the streetcars and the trains, of people in white and people in black, and this was how he felt. Behind the student life, however, lay the world of ideas with its own activity, and of this Sanshirō was still unaware. Meiji10 thought had been reliving three hundred years of Western history in the space of forty.

  Sanshirō was feeling very much alone and hemmed in by the restless city when a letter came from his mother. The first since his arrival in Tokyo, it was full of news. The rice crop was excellent this year, she began. He must take good care of himself and watch out for Tokyo people, none of whom could be trusted. He need not worry about money; his school expenses would arrive at the end of every month. The cousin of Katsuta Masa was a University graduate now working in some place called the Faculty of Science; Sanshirō ought to go visit him and ask for his kindness in the future. His mother had apparently left out the man’s name at first. In the margin it said, “Mr. Nonomiya Sōhachi.” There were a few other items in the margin. Saku’s gray horse had died all of a sudden, and Saku was feeling very bad. Miwata Omitsu had given them some sweetfish. His mother would have liked to send him a few, but they would have spoiled on the way to Tokyo, so she had eaten them. And so on.

  Sanshirō felt as though his mother’s letter had arrived from the musty past. He concluded, with a twinge of conscience, that he had no time to waste reading such stuff. He read it through again, nevertheless. After all, if he was in touch with the real world now, the only point of contact was his mother, an old-fashioned lady in an old-fashioned country town. Aside from her, there was the woman he had met on the train. He had hardly been “in touch” with her, however. It had been too brief and intense, a bolt of lightning from the real world.

  Sanshirō concluded that he would do as his mother said and visit Nonomiya Sōhachi.

  *

  The next day was hotter than usual. The University was closed for the summer, which meant that he was not likely to find Nonomiya there. But his mother had not included Nonomiya’s home address. He thought he might go over to the campus by way of finding out where Nonomiya lived. At four o’clock that afternoon he walked past the First National College and entered the University’s Yayoi-chō gate. The unpaved road leading up to the gate lay under a thick blanket of dust. It bore the imprint of shoes and sandals and wooden clogs and countless tracks left by rickshaws and bicycles. It was a narrow, stifling street, after which the University grounds, with its many trees, came as a relief.

  The first door he tried was locked. He walked around to the rear of the building, but still had no success. He took one last push on a side door and found it open. A janitor was napp
ing inside where two corridors intersected. Sanshirō stated his business, but the man just sat there, staring off at the Ueno woods to revive himself. Then, snapping out of it, he announced, “He might be here,” and disappeared into the depths of the hushed building. He came back some moments later and said to Sanshirō, as if to an old friend, “He’s here. C’mon.” Sanshirō followed him around a corner and down a concrete incline. The world darkened suddenly. He was momentarily blinded, as in the glare of the hot sun, but his eyes began to adjust soon enough. He was in a cellar. The air was cooler down here. A door stood open on the left, and from the door a face emerged. Its broad forehead and large eyes suggested an affinity with Buddhism. The face’s owner wore a suit coat over a cotton crepe undershirt. The coat was stained in several places. The man was tall, his thin frame just right for the hot weather. He bowed, keeping his head and back in a perfectly straight line.

  “Over here,” he said and turned away, taking his face into the room. Sanshirō approached the door and looked inside. Nonomiya was already seated. “Over here,” he said again.

  “Here” was a small platform, a plank atop four square legs. Sanshirō sat on it and introduced himself, adding that he hoped he could turn to Nonomiya for advice or help, should the occasion arise. Nonomiya listened, responding now and then with a “Yes, yes” that reminded Sanshirō somewhat of the man with the peaches on the train. Once he had dispensed with the preliminaries, Sanshirō ran out of things to say. Nonomiya also stopped his “Yes, yes.”

  Sanshirō began to look around. A long, heavy oak table stood in the center of the room. Some kind of complicated machine covered with thick wires sat on top of it, and next to the machine was a large glass bowl full of water. There was also a file, a knife and a discarded necktie. Last of all he noticed a three-foot granite block in the far corner. It had an intricate-looking machine on top about the size of a tin can. He noticed two holes in the can’s side. They shone like the eyes of a boa constrictor.

  “See how they shine?” Nonomiya said, smiling. “I set everything up like this during the day and I come back when traffic and other activity dies down at night. Then it’s dark and quiet down here and I look at those things like eyes through the telescope. It’s an experiment on the pressure exerted by a beam of light.11 I’ve been working on it since the New Year, but the instruments are hard to handle and I still don’t have the results I want. It’s not so bad in summer, but those winter nights are unbearable. I can hardly stand the cold, even with an overcoat and scarf.”

  This all came as a shock to Sanshirō, and he struggled to grasp what kind of pressure a beam of light could have and what function such pressure could possibly serve.

  *

  “Take a look,” Nonomiya suggested. Just for fun, Sanshirō walked over to the telescope, which stood several yards from the granite block. He applied his right eye to the eyepiece, but he could see nothing.

  “How’s that? Can you see?” Nonomiya asked.

  “Not a thing.”

  “Ah, the lens cap is on.”

  Nonomiya left his chair and took something off the end of the telescope. There was nothing to see but the scale of a ruler inside a bright area with hazy outlines. The figure “2” appeared at the bottom. Again Nonomiya asked, “How’s that?”

  “I can see a ‘2.’ ”

  “Watch how it moves,” he said and walked around behind the machine, where he started to fiddle with something.

  Soon the scale began to move inside the bright area. The “2” disappeared and a “3” took its place. Then a “4” appeared, and a “5.” It went all the way to “10,” after which it started to move backward. The “10” disappeared, the “9” disappeared, then “8” changed to “7,” “7” to “6,” and so on until it stopped at “1.”

  “How’s that?” Nonomiya asked. Shocked again, Sanshirō took his eye from the telescope. He could see no point in asking what the scale meant.

  He thanked Nonomiya and left the cellar. Up again where people came and went, he found the world still blazing. Hot as it was, he took a deep breath. The sun, now sinking in the west, illuminated the broad slope at an angle. The windows of the Engineering buildings flanking the top of the slope were sparkling as if on fire. Pale red flames of burning sun swept back from the horizon into the sky’s deep clarity, and their fever seemed to rush down upon him. Sanshirō turned left and entered the woods, whose back, like his, lay half in darkness, half in the streaming rays of the setting sun. He walked beneath a canopy of black-green leaves, the openings between them dyed red. On the trunk of a large zelkova tree a cicada was singing. Sanshirō came to the edge of the University pond and squatted down.

  It was extraordinarily quiet. Not even the noise of the streetcars penetrated this far. One streetcar line was to have run past the Red Gate, but the University had protested and it had gone through Koishikawa instead. Squatting by the pond, Sanshirō recalled that he had read about this incident in the Kyushu papers. If it refused to let streetcars pass by it, the University must be far removed from society.

  He had entered its precincts and found Nonomiya there, a man who spent the better half of a year underground, experimenting with the pressure of light. Nonomiya’s clothing was plain, so plain that on the street Sanshirō would have taken him for an electrician. Yet he had to admire him: Nonomiya pursued his research cheerfully, tirelessly, his life centered on a hole in the ground. One thing was clear, however: the scale in the telescope could move all it liked, and it would still have nothing to do with the real world. Perhaps Nonomiya hoped to avoid contact with the real world as long as he lived. A person could come to feel that way quite naturally, no doubt, breathing this quiet atmosphere. And he, too, Sanshirō wondered, perhaps he too ought to lead a life like this, undistracted, unconnected with the living world.

  He stared at the surface of the pond. The reflection of many trees seemed to reach to the bottom, and down deeper than the trees, the blue sky. No longer was he thinking of streetcars, or Tokyo, or Japan. A sense of something far-off and remote had come to take their place. The feeling lasted but a moment, when loneliness began to spread across its surface like a veil of clouds. The solitude was complete, as if he were sitting alone in Nonomiya’s cellar. At school in Kumamoto, he had climbed to the top of nearby Tatsuta Mountain, a place still more silent than this; he had lain by himself in the playing field when it was carpeted in evening primrose; he had often felt the pleasure of forgetting all about the world of men. But never before had he known this sense of isolation.

  Could it be because he had seen Tokyo’s violent activity? Or perhaps—and at the thought of the woman on the train, Sanshirō turned red. Yes, the real world was something he needed. But it was dangerous and unapproachable. He decided to hurry back to his room and write a letter to his mother.

  *

  Sanshirō looked up. There were two women standing on a low hill to the left overlooking the pond. The bank opposite theirs lay beneath a high cliff surmounted by a grove of trees. Behind the trees stood a Gothic-style building of bright red brick. By now the sun had dropped low enough to cast its light from behind all this, directly at the women. From his low, shadowy place by the water’s edge, the top of the hill looked very bright. One of the women, uncomfortable in the glare, held up a stiff, round fan to shade her eyes. He could not see her face, but the youthful colors of her kimono and obi shone brilliantly. She wore sandals, their thongs too narrow to show color at this distance, but revealing white split-toed socks at the hem of the kimono. The older woman was dressed entirely in white. She did not try to shade her eyes, but instead knit her brow as she looked into the grove atop the cliff. There the old trees hunched over the pond, stretching their branches far down to the water. The one with the fan stood just ahead of the woman in white, who held back a step from the edge. Together their figures made a line oblique to Sanshirō’s line of vision.

  The sight gave him an impression of pretty colors, nothing more. A country boy, he could not
have explained what was pretty about them. His only thought at the moment was that the woman in white must be a nurse, and when the thought had passed, he continued watching them, entranced.

  The one in white began to move, but in a manner that suggested no will or purpose, as though her legs had begun to walk without her knowing it. The young woman with the fan was moving now too, he saw. They were coming down the slope, both, as if by agreement, walking in that manner devoid of purpose. He continued watching them.

  At the bottom of the path was a stone footbridge. If they did not cross it, they would go straight ahead to the Science building. If they did, they would continue along the bank toward Sanshirō. They crossed the bridge.

  The young one no longer held her fan up. Her left hand pressed a small, white flower to her face. She came toward him with her eyes down, inhaling the fragrance of the flower. Six feet from Sanshirō she stopped short. “What kind of tree is this?” she asked, looking up. A large oak thrust out its dense, round burden of leaves above her, casting an unbroken shadow to the water’s edge.

  “This is an oak tree,” the nurse said, as if to a child.

  “Oh? Doesn’t it have any acorns?” Her eyes came down from the tree to the flower, glancing at Sanshirō as they moved. Sanshirō was fully conscious of the instant her deep, black eyes were upon him. The impression of color vanished, to be replaced by something inexplicable, something very like his feeling when the woman on the train called him a coward. He was frightened.

  They walked past Sanshirō, and the young woman dropped her white flower in front of him. He watched them walk away, the nurse ahead, the young one behind. He could see her obi now, dyed in bright colors except for a frond of autumn grass in the white of the cloth. In her hair she wore a pure white rose. It shone brilliantly against the black hair, in the shadow of the tree.