鼻 English

There is no one in Ike-no-O who does not know the nose of Zenchi Naiku.

It measured five or six sun in length, hanging down from above the upper lip to below the chin.

It was equally thick from base to tip.

In a word, something like an elongated sausage dangled limply from the center of his face.

Naiku, now past fifty, had inwardly fretted over this nose without cease, from his days as a novice all the way to the present, when he had risen to the post of Naidojo Gubu.

Of course, outwardly he still kept a composed air, as if the nose were of no particular concern to him.

This was not solely because he felt it unseemly for a monk, one who should be devoting himself wholeheartedly to longing for the Pure Land to come, to be worrying about his nose.

Rather, it was because he did not want others to know that he was bothered by his nose.

In everyday conversation, Naiku dreaded above all else the appearance of the word "nose."

There were two reasons Naiku found his nose so troublesome.——

The first was a practical one: the length of his nose was an inconvenience.

For one thing, he could not eat alone.

If he ate alone, the tip of his nose would reach down into the rice in his bowl.

So Naiku had one of his disciples sit across the table from him and, throughout the meal, hold up his nose with a board about one sun wide and two shaku long.

However, eating in this manner was by no means an easy matter, either for the disciple doing the holding or for Naiku being held.

The story of how a chudoji who once served in the disciple's place sneezed, his hand trembled, and the nose fell into the gruel had been told all the way to Kyoto at the time.——

Yet this was not the chief reason Naiku suffered over his nose.

It was truly because of the wound to his self-esteem inflicted by this nose that Naiku suffered.

The people of the town of Ike-no-O said that Zenchi Naiku, with such a nose as he had, was fortunate not to be a layman.

This was because they thought there would be no woman willing to become his wife with that nose.

There were even those who commented that it was on account of that nose that he had entered the priesthood.

Yet Naiku did not believe that being a monk had spared him even a measure of the suffering caused by this nose.

Naiku's self-esteem was too delicate a thing to be swayed by such concrete facts as whether or not one had a wife.

And so Naiku attempted, both actively and passively, to restore the self-esteem that had been damaged.

The first thing Naiku thought of was a way to make his long nose appear shorter than it actually was.

He tried this when no one was around, facing a mirror, turning his face at various angles, studying it with earnest ingenuity.

There were times when merely changing the position of his face was not enough to satisfy him, and he would prop his cheek on his hand, or press a finger to the tip of his chin, and peer patiently into the mirror.

Yet not once until now had the nose appeared short enough to satisfy even himself.

At times it even seemed to him that the harder he tried, the longer it looked.

On such occasions, Naiku would put the mirror away in its box, and with a sigh as fresh as if it were the first time, would reluctantly return to his sutra desk to read the Kannon Sutra.

Furthermore, Naiku was constantly preoccupied with the noses of others.

The temple at Ike-no-O was one where monks' gatherings and lectures were frequently held.

Within the temple grounds, monks' quarters stood packed close together, and monks of the temple boiled water in the bathhouse every day.

Accordingly, the numbers of monks and laypeople coming and going were very great.

Naiku patiently scanned the faces of all these people.

He wished to find even one person with a nose like his own, so that he might gain some peace of mind.

Thus, to Naiku's eyes, dark blue suikan robes and white katabira robes made no impression.

Still less did the tangerine-colored hats and shiinibi-dyed vestments register, for being so familiar, they were as nothing to him.

Naiku looked not at the people, but only at their noses.——

Yet though he found hooked noses, he found not a single nose like Naiku's own.

As these failures accumulated, Naiku's heart grew gradually more discontented.

It was entirely under the sway of this discontent that, while talking with someone, Naiku would unconsciously take hold of the tip of his dangling nose, and flush with a redness unseemly for his age.

Finally, Naiku had even thought of searching the Buddhist and non-Buddhist scriptures for a figure with a nose like his own, so as to find at least some small consolation.

Yet there was no sutra text that stated the noses of Moggallana or Shariputra had been long.

Of course Nagarjuna and Ashvaghosha, too, were bodhisattvas endowed with ordinary noses.

When Naiku heard, in the course of a tale about China, that Liu Xuande of Shu Han had had long ears, he thought to himself how much less forlorn he would feel if only it had been his nose.

It goes without saying that while Naiku was engaged in these passive efforts, he was at the same time trying active means to shorten his nose.

In this direction as well, Naiku tried nearly everything he could.

He tried brewing and drinking a decoction of karasuuri.

He tried rubbing mouse urine onto his nose.

Yet no matter what he tried, his nose continued to hang limply over his lip, five or six sun long as ever.

Then one autumn, a disciple monk who had gone up to Kyoto on Naiku's errands returned having been taught a method for shortening a long nose by an acquaintance who was a physician.

This physician was a man who had originally come over from China, and was at that time serving as a supply monk at Choraku-ji.

Naiku, in his usual manner of pretending not to care at all about his nose, deliberately did not say that he wished to try the method at once.

And on the other hand, in a casual tone, he said something to the effect that he felt sorry for the trouble he caused his disciple at every meal, having his nose held up.

In his heart, of course, he was waiting for the disciple monk to persuade him and coax him into trying the method.

The disciple monk could not have failed to see through Naiku's stratagem.

Yet the feeling behind Naiku's taking such a stratagem moved this disciple monk's sympathy more strongly than any resentment toward it.

The disciple monk, just as Naiku had anticipated, began urging him with great earnestness to try the method.

And Naiku himself, likewise as anticipated, ultimately agreed to follow this wholehearted recommendation.

The method was quite simple: one merely had to boil the nose in hot water, and then have someone tread upon it.

Hot water was boiled every day in the temple bathhouse.

So the disciple monk at once fetched hot water so scalding that one could not put a finger in it, carrying it from the bathhouse in a handled pot.

However, if the nose were to be plunged directly into this pot, there was a danger that the steam would burn one's face.

So they made a hole in a flat tray, used it as a lid for the pot, and put the nose into the hot water through the hole.

The nose alone could be immersed in this scalding water without any sensation of heat whatsoever.

After a while, the disciple monk said:

"It should be boiled through by now."

Naiku gave a wry smile.

It was because he thought that anyone hearing just these words would never guess they were talking about a nose.

The nose, steamed in the hot water, itched maddeningly, as though bitten by fleas.

When Naiku withdrew his nose from the hole in the tray, the disciple monk, bracing himself with both feet, began to tread upon it while it was still giving off steam.

Naiku lay on his side, his nose stretched out on the floorboards, watching before his eyes as the disciple monk's feet moved up and down.

The disciple monk, glancing down now and then at Naiku's bald head with a look of sympathy, said:

"Does it not hurt?"

"The physician said to tread hard."

"But does it not hurt?"

Naiku shook his head to indicate it did not hurt.

But since his nose was being trodden upon, his head would not move as he wished.

So, looking up with upturned eyes at the cracked heels of the disciple monk's feet, he said in a voice tinged with irritation:

"It does not hurt."

And so he answered.

In truth, since the itching spots on his nose were being trodden upon, it felt rather pleasant than painful.

After treading for some time, tiny things like millet grains began to appear on the nose.

They looked, one might say, exactly like a small plucked bird roasted whole.

When the disciple monk saw this, he stopped his feet and said, as if to himself:

"They said to pull these out with tweezers."

Naiku puffed out his cheeks with a dissatisfied look, and left everything to the disciple monk without a word.

It was not that he failed to understand the disciple monk's kindness.

He understood, yet he found it disagreeable to have his nose handled as though it were a mere object.

With a face like a patient submitting to surgery by a doctor he did not trust, Naiku reluctantly watched as the disciple monk extracted oil from the pores of his nose with tweezers.

The oil came out in the shape of the quill of a bird's feather, about four bu in length.

When this was at last finished, the disciple monk, with a look of relief, said:

"One more boiling should do it."

He said.

Naiku remained still with his brow furrowed in an expression of dissatisfaction, and did as the disciple monk directed.

When the nose was taken out after being boiled a second time, it had indeed grown shorter than usual.

It was now not much different from an ordinary hooked nose.

Naiku stroked his shortened nose, and with a bashful, hesitant air, peeked into the mirror the disciple monk held out to him.

The nose—that nose which had hung down to below his chin—had shrunk almost beyond belief, and now clung feebly just above the upper lip, barely maintaining a miserable existence.

The reddish patches here and there were likely marks left by the treading.

Surely no one would laugh at him now.——

The face of Naiku in the mirror blinked its eyes in apparent satisfaction at the face of Naiku outside the mirror.

Yet throughout that day, there remained an anxiety that the nose might grow long again.

So Naiku, whether he was reciting sutras or eating, reached out whenever he had a moment and gently touched the tip of his nose.

But the nose simply rested properly above his lip, showing no sign of hanging down any further.

Then, after a night's sleep, when Naiku awoke early the next morning, the very first thing he did was feel his nose.

The nose was still short.

Naiku then felt a sense of ease and freedom, the likes of which he had not known for many years—the same feeling as when he had accumulated merit through copying the Lotus Sutra.

However, within two or three days, Naiku discovered an unexpected fact.

It was this: a samurai who happened to visit the temple at Ike-no-O on some business wore a look even more amused than before, and barely spoke, staring at Naiku's nose again and again.

Moreover, the chudoji who had once let Naiku's nose fall into the gruel—when he passed Naiku outside the lecture hall—at first looked down and struggled to suppress his amusement, but apparently could suppress it no longer, and suddenly burst out laughing.

It happened more than once or twice that the shimo-boshi who had been given errands would behave circumspectly while face-to-face with Naiku, but would break into snickers the moment he turned his back.

Naiku at first interpreted this as a consequence of the change in his appearance.

Yet this interpretation alone seemed insufficient to fully explain the matter.——

Of course, in that lay the cause of the chudoji and shimo-boshi's laughter, without doubt.

Yet even granting that they laughed, the manner of their laughter was somehow different from the old days when his nose was long.

One could say that an unfamiliar short nose looked more comical than the familiar long nose—and that would be the end of it.

Yet there seemed to be something more.

"They did not laugh so openly as this before."

Naiku would sometimes pause in his recitation and, tilting his bald head, murmur something like this.

The lovable Naiku, at such moments, would invariably sit in a daze, gazing at the painting of Samantabhadra hung nearby, thinking back on those days four or five days ago when his nose had been long, "like one who, fallen to mean estate, fondly recalls the days of glory,"

and sink into gloom.——

Unfortunately, Naiku lacked the insight to give himself an answer to this question.

——In the human heart there are two contradictory emotions.

Of course, there is no one who does not sympathize with another's misfortune.

Yet when that person manages to extricate himself from his misfortune somehow, one finds oneself oddly unsatisfied.

To exaggerate somewhat, one even feels like plunging that person back into the same misfortune once more.

And before one knows it, one comes to harbor a certain hostile feeling toward that person—passive, but real.——

The reason Naiku felt somehow ill at ease, though he did not know why, was precisely because he had dimly sensed, in the attitude of the monks and laypeople of Ike-no-O, this self-interest of the bystander.

And so Naiku grew more ill-tempered with each passing day.

At the slightest provocation he would snap at anyone spitefully.

In the end, even the disciple monk who had treated his nose began to say behind his back, "Naiku will be visited by the sin of hokekendon—"

—and so he said behind his back.

What angered Naiku most of all was that mischievous chudoji.

One day, hearing a dog barking loudly, Naiku stepped outside without thinking, and found the chudoji chasing about a thin, long-haired mongrel dog, brandishing a piece of wood about two shaku long.

And not merely chasing it.

"Mind you don't get your nose hit. There now, mind your nose!"

He was chasing it around with these taunts.

Naiku snatched the piece of wood from the chudoji's hand and struck him hard across the face.

The piece of wood was the very board that had formerly been used to prop up his nose.

Naiku found himself resenting, for no reason, the very fact that his nose had been shortened.

Then one night it happened.

It seemed a wind had risen suddenly after dark, for the sound of the wind bells on the pagoda rang so persistently that it carried through to his pillow.

On top of that, the cold had sharply increased, and aged Naiku, try as he might, could not fall asleep.

As he lay there wide awake, he happened to notice that his nose itched in an unusual way.

When he touched it, it felt slightly swollen, as if some fluid had gathered in it.

It even seemed to have a feverishness in that spot alone.

"Perhaps forcing it short has brought on an illness."

Naiku murmured this to himself, holding his nose with the reverent care of one offering flowers before the Buddha.

The next morning, when Naiku awoke early as usual, he found that the ginkgo and horse chestnut trees within the temple grounds had shed their leaves overnight, and the garden was bright as if spread with gold.

It must have been because frost had fallen on the roof of the pagoda.

In the still faint morning sunlight, the nine-ringed finial was dazzlingly bright.

Zenchi Naiku stood on the veranda with the slatted shutters raised, and breathed in deeply.

It was at this moment that a certain sensation he had nearly forgotten returned to him.

Naiku hurriedly raised his hand to his nose.

What his hand touched was not the short nose of the night before.

It was his old long nose, hanging more than five or six sun from above his upper lip to below his chin.

Naiku realized that his nose had, in the course of a single night, grown long again as it had been before.

And at the same time, he felt a light-hearted feeling, the same as when his nose had grown short, returning from somewhere.

"Now, surely, there is no one who will laugh."

Naiku whispered this to himself in his heart.

As he let his long nose sway in the autumn breeze of early dawn.

(January, Taisho 5)