牛肉と馬鈴薯 English

There was a Western-style building in the Meiji Club, situated by the moat in Shiba Ward, Sakurada Hongomachi — not particularly grand, but respectable enough; the building still stands today, though it has changed hands, and the Meiji Club itself is no more.

This was in the days when the club was still flourishing: on a winter's evening one year, the second-floor dining room was unusually alight, and now and then the sound of laughter rang out into the night.

As a rule, the club saw few visitors in the evenings, and the stove's smoke ordinarily rose only during the daytime.

Yet even after eight o'clock had struck, the party showed no sign of breaking up.

Six rickshaws were lined up beside the entrance, and the pullers had all retreated to the kitchen, apparently deep in their usual dice game.

Then a man appeared abruptly out of the darkness — his overcoat collar turned up, his felt hat pulled low over his brow — and with no ceremony he pressed the doorbell roughly.

When the door opened from within,

"Is Mr. Takeuchi in?" he asked in a low, composed voice.

He inquired in a low, steady tone.

"Yes, he is. And you are?"

The receptionist — a narrow-faced man with one eye, dressed in Japanese clothes — replied politely.

"This," he said,

and presented a calling card bearing in small type the single name Okamoto Seifu, with no title or affiliation of any kind.

The receptionist took the card, hurried upstairs, and returned shortly after,

"This way, please,"

and led him up; as he ascended to the second floor, the stove was burning so vigorously that the warmth hit him like a wall.

Three men were gathered before the stove; the other three sat in chairs a little apart.

A bottle of whisky stood on the table nearby, some glasses empty, some still filled; the company had drunk enough to feel pleasantly warm.

The moment he caught sight of Okamoto, Takeuchi rose to his feet and said cheerfully,

"Come, sit here."

and offered him a chair.

Okamoto did not sit down immediately.

Looking around, he recognized five of the men as slight acquaintances, but one — a fair-complexioned, medium-built gentleman of refined appearance — was unknown to him.

Takeuchi noticed this and said,

"Ah, you haven't met this gentleman yet — let me introduce you. This is Mr. Kamimura, a staff member of the Hokkaido Coal Mining Company. Mr. Kamimura, this is my oldest friend, Mr. Okamoto..."

before he could finish, the gentleman called Kamimura broke in with a bright air,

"Ah, it is a pleasure — I have long been reading your work... I hope we shall be friends from now on..."

Okamoto merely replied, "Please think nothing of it,"

and then fell silent.

He settled into a chair.

"Now then, where were we..."

said a short gentleman named Watanuki, with a thick black beard on his cheeks.

"That's right! Mr. Kamimura — and then?"

urged a thin, balding gentleman named Iyama, whose eyes had a bleary, blinking look.

"Now that Mr. Okamoto has arrived, I find it hard to go on. Ha ha ha ha."

And the gentleman from the mining company smiled with a touch of embarrassment.

"What is it about?"

Okamoto asked Takeuchi.

"It's highly entertaining — in the course of some conversation or other it turned into each man expounding his philosophy of life. Do listen — the brilliant arguments have been flowing without end."

"No, we've already exhausted our supply. You, unlike us common souls, are the genuine article — so, with your kind permission, let us hear yours. Don't you agree, gentlemen?"

And Kamimura tried to slip away.

"No, no — finish what you were saying first!"

"I for one am most eager to hear it," said Okamoto,

and drank off a glass of whisky without setting it down.

"My view is, I suspect, the precise opposite of Mr. Okamoto's. In short — the ideal and the real cannot be reconciled; they simply cannot be reconciled..."

"Hear, hear!"

Iyama chimed in approvingly.

"If they truly cannot be reconciled, then my ideal is to submit to reality rather than follow the ideal."

"Is that all?"

said Okamoto with a low, rumbling tone, holding his second glass.

"Well, you cannot eat ideals, can you!"

As Kamimura said this, his face was like a rabbit's.

"Ha ha ha ha — it isn't a beef steak, after all!"

Takeuchi opened his mouth wide and laughed.

"No — it is beef steak. Reality is beef steak. It is stew."

"An omelette, perhaps?"

said Matsuki, the youngest-looking gentleman there, with a flushed red face, who had until now been dozing half-asleep — and he said it in complete earnest.

"Ha ha ha ha ha!"

The whole company burst out laughing.

"No, it's no laughing matter,"

said Kamimura, becoming a little agitated,

"Speaking in those terms, that is precisely it — if you follow ideals you have to eat nothing but potatoes. You might not even be able to eat potatoes. Which do you prefer, gentlemen — beef or potatoes?"

"Beef, I should think!"

said Matsuki again, in his drowsy voice, with the same gravity.

"But potatoes always come alongside a beefsteak."

said the bearded gentleman, with an air of self-satisfaction.

"Precisely! The ideal is an accompaniment to the real! You can't do entirely without potatoes, yet nothing but potatoes is quite unbearable!"

And with that, Kamimura looked at Okamoto's face with an air of some satisfaction.

"But isn't Hokkaido famous for its potatoes?" Okamoto asked composedly.

He inquired with perfect calm.

"Those potatoes! I had a truly dreadful time with those potatoes. You know, Takeuchi, though I may not look it, I am an old graduate of Doshisha University, and in those days I was an ardent churchgoing young man — in other words, a card-carrying member of the Potato Party!"

"You?"

said Iyama, his blinking eyes widening with undisguised surprise.

"Nothing strange about it. I was young then, you see. I don't know how old Mr. Okamoto is, but I graduated from Doshisha at twenty-two. That was thirteen years ago. I was, if you'll believe it, a passionate devotee of the Potato Party — and ever since my school days, the very mention of Hokkaido made me shiver with longing. I fancied myself a Puritan, so it was irresistible!"

"What a Puritan!"

Matsuki interjected, but Kamimura silenced him with a flick of his chin, and sipping his whisky continued,

"I had resolved to leave this corrupt mainland and throw myself into the free wilderness of Hokkaido."

At these words Okamoto fixed his gaze steadily on Kamimura's face.

"So I went about eagerly gathering stories of Hokkaido. Whenever a missionary turned up who'd been to Hokkaido, I rushed to hear him out. And the missionaries had plenty of fine things to tell: the wonders of nature, the broad flowing Ishikari River, forest upon forest as far as the eye could see — I couldn't bear it! I was completely swept away. I began to piece together everything I'd heard and formed a vision in my mind that went something like this: First, I myself would clear the forests, fell the trees with my own sweat-drenched brow, and sow azuki beans in the opened earth..."

"I'd have liked to see that farmer — ha ha ha ha ha ha!"

And Takeuchi broke into laughter.

"No, I actually went and did it, I assure you — wait, I'm getting there. Little by little the farmland takes shape, planted mainly with potatoes; as long as you have potatoes, you won't go hungry..."

"There are the potatoes!"

Matsuki interjected again.

"There in the middle of the fields stands a house — crude in construction, but at a glance it has an American look, exactly like a New England settler's home, with the roof steeply pitched and a sturdy chimney rising on one side. I spent considerable time agonizing over how many windows to put in..."

"And did that house actually get built?"

Iyama's blinking eyes widened again.

"No, this was all in my imagination while I was still in Kyoto — the agonizing over windows was... yes, yes, I remember now — it was on my way back from a walk to Nyakuoji!"

"And then what?"

Okamoto urged him on, quite seriously.

"Then, to the north, a windbreak of trees — I planned to keep as much forest as possible. From the right side of the windbreak a clear little stream would wind its way out and flow before the house. Naturally ducks and geese would be floating their purple and white feathers on it. A single plank three inches thick would serve as a bridge over the stream. I deliberated at length whether to add a railing — in the end I decided not to, since that seemed more natural...Well, that was the structure of it, but my imagination wasn't satisfied there. Then when winter came..."

"Pardon my interrupting, but were you not enchanted by the very sound of the word 'winter'?"

Okamoto asked.

Kamimura looked startled and said,

"How did you know that? This is remarkable! You truly are one of the Potato Party! Yes, the word 'winter' quite undid me — somehow it felt as though winter and freedom were one and the same thing. And then, being an ardent churchman, I was a great celebrant of Christmas — and for Christmas, snow simply had to fall in abundance, with icicles hanging like rods from the eaves, or it didn't seem real. So for me it wasn't so much Hokkaido's winter as 'winter equals Hokkaido.' Even just hearing someone's tale of Hokkaido, the moment they said 'when winter comes...', my whole body would shiver. And so in my vision, too: when winter came, snow would bury the house entirely, and at night the red glow of firelight would flicker through the window glass; now and then the wind would roar through, sending snow cascading from the treetops; and in the cowshed a Holstein cow would low!"

"You are a poet!"

Someone shouted this and stamped his foot on the floor.

This was a man called Kondo — tall, with a face that suggested he was not one to be trifled with — who had not uttered a single word since Okamoto entered the room, absorbed entirely in his wrestling match with the whisky.

"Isn't that so, Mr. Okamoto!"

he added.

Okamoto merely nodded in silence.

"A poet? Yes, I was a poet in those days. I was fond of reading translations of Gray — 'The hills are veiled in mist, the evening bell tolls...' — and I tried writing some myself. Compared to today's new-style poets, I am quite the senior!"

"I've written new-style verse myself, actually," said Matsuki, now with somewhat more enthusiasm.

Matsuki said this, warming to the topic.

"Oh, I've dashed off two or three of them myself,"

said Iyama, not to be outdone, in complete seriousness.

"What about you, Watanuki?" Takeuchi asked.

Takeuchi asked.

"I'm embarrassed to say — as you know, I am as deficient in romance as I am in women, and I have never had the least poetic feeling. 'Rights and obligations' has been my creed from first to last. I must be exceptionally well-developed in the philistine bone!"

Watanuki rubbed his head.

"Now I am quite ashamed to admit it, but even I wrote some in my day — and had two or three of them published in a magazine! Ha ha ha ha ha!"

"Ha ha ha ha ha!"

The whole company burst out laughing.

"So it seems you are all veterans of poetry — ha ha ha ha ha! What a tale!"

Watanuki exclaimed.

"Ah, so you all wrote it too? Remarkable — so in their day, everyone here was a member of the Potato Party."

Kamimura said this with an air of having been greatly vindicated.

"I should like to hear the rest of your story," Okamoto pressed Kamimura.

Okamoto urged Kamimura on.

"Yes, go on, do!"

Kondo said, in a tone that was almost a command.

"Very well! After graduation I floundered about in Tokyo for a year or so, then made the decisive move to Hokkaido — the feeling at that moment was beyond description. I had a sort of 'damn you all!' feeling, and at Ueno Station, as the train whistle sounded and the car began to move, I thrust my head out the window and spat toward Tokyo. Then an unspeakable joy welled up in me and I secretly wiped tears from my eyes with my handkerchief — truly!"

"Pardon me for a moment — I cannot quite understand what you mean by 'a sort of damn-you-all feeling.' What exactly was that?"

Watanuki of 'rights and obligations' asked, in earnest.

"It was aimed at the people of Tokyo — scrambling after fame and fortune, what a wretched sight! Damn you all! Look at me! That was the feeling."

Kamimura added this explanation, with equal gravity.

"Passing over the journey itself, I arrived safely in Sapporo, Hokkaido — the very heartland of the potato. Without difficulty I obtained ten thousand tsubo of land. Now was the time — this was where the so-called sweat of the brow would begin — and I set to work at once. Actually, I had a friend who shared my ideals from the very beginning, and who is now at the same company as I am; the two of us took up the task of clearing the land together. You know him, Takeuchi — Kajiwara Shintaro..."

"Kajiwara? He was a Potato man too? He's fat as a pig now, isn't he?"

Takeuchi appeared genuinely surprised.

"Indeed he is. Nowadays he has the face of an ogre and wolfs down a bloody beefsteak in two bites. But compared to me, he was sensible from the start — he held out for about two months, then one day proposed the motion that this foolishness should be stopped once and for all. His argument was: why go out of your way to live like a hermit? Rather than do battle with nature, why not grapple with the world instead? Potatoes have less nutritional value than beef. I strongly objected at the time — if you want to quit, quit; I'll carry on alone, I insisted. He said: suit yourself; you'll come to your senses soon enough; in short, the ideal is mere fantasy, the dreamer's delusion — and with that parting shot he left on the spot. Left alone, I put a brave face on it, but inwardly I was faltering. Even so, I held out for another three months or so with one or two tenant farmers for company. Wasn't that admirable!"

"It was foolish!"

Kondo said, as if scolding him.

"Foolish? That's harsh! Looking back now, yes — utter foolishness. But at the time it felt truly admirable."

"Still foolish. That sort of life was simply not in your character from the start. You were not the type to live in Hokkaido eating nothing but potatoes. Not knowing that and persevering for three months — that can only be called foolishness!"

"Foolish or not, what you call 'not in my character' is something I gradually came to understand. Fortunately, it turned out I lacked the constitution for potatoes. And so summer passed, and the 'winter' I had looked forward to began slowly to draw near, heralded by autumn — and from the very start, autumn fell short of my expectations. A cold drizzle pattering down over the silent treetops, the sunlight somehow pale and feeble, no one to talk to, almost nothing to eat but a little rice that cost dear and those very potatoes, a bed in a rough shanty walled with bark."

"But surely you had prepared yourself for all that!"

Okamoto interjected.

"That is exactly my point — that real comfort is better than the ideal. I had prepared myself, and yet I could not truly embrace it. For one thing, you grow thin on it."

Kamimura said this, wetted his lips with a sip from his glass, and continued,

"I had not meant to grow thin!"

"Ha ha ha ha ha ha!"

Everyone laughed.

"And so I reflected deeply: Kajiwara was right after all; this is utter madness; I'll stop — and I did stop. But if I had stayed through that winter, I believe I would have died."

"So what is your view now?" Okamoto asked.

Okamoto said this with an air that was half mocking, half earnest.

"That is why I am thoroughly done with potatoes. My philosophy now is pure practicalism: make money, eat well, warm yourself with your friends by a stove like this one, drink sake, talk as you please, and when hungry eat beef..."

"Hear hear — I hold the same view. Loyalty to the emperor, love of country — none of it is incompatible with beef; and if anyone says it is, then it's his own failure to make them compatible. That person is the fool."

Watanuki said this with great vehemence.

"I disagree!"

Kondo cried, and turning his back to the stove, straddled his chair.

With eyes that held a fierce gleam, he looked around the room and said,

"I am neither Potato Party nor Beef Party! Mr. Kamimura began as Potato and later defected to Beef — in a word, he is weak-willed and irresolute. In sum, all of you are poets — poets who have degenerated. That is why you go about twitching your noses and sniffing the smell of scorching beef — a sorry spectacle!"

"Come now — before disparaging others, first state your own position. What sort of degeneration are you?"

Kamimura cut in.

"Degeneration? Degeneration means falling from a high place to a low one. I am fortunate to have never been in a high place, so I have committed no such embarrassment! You, sir, ate potatoes on principle — not out of inclination; that is why you hungered for beef. I eat beef because I like it, not as a matter of principle — so from the beginning I never hungered for it, and even now I am not ravenous for it..."

"That makes no sense at all!"

Kamimura cried.

Kondo was about to say something more and braced himself when one of the club attendants came briskly to his side and whispered something in his ear.

At that,

"Tell him that this Kondo is not such a generous master as all that!" he roared.

He barked.

"What is it?"

one of the company asked in surprise.

"Nothing — my rickshaw man lost at dice again and wants to borrow a little money. 'Makes no sense'? It makes perfect sense! You are all Beef Party men — Beef-principle men. In my case, I have liked beef from the beginning; it is not a matter of principle or anything else!"

"I quite agree with that,"

said someone in a quiet, composed voice.

"Naturally you do!"

Kondo gave a sly smile and looked at Okamoto's face.

"I agree most heartily — that it is not a matter of principle, I agree entirely. There is nothing more foolish in this world than that thing people call 'principle,'"

said Okamoto, letting his clear, keen gaze sweep across the room.

"I should like to hear that view — do please expound it!"

Kondo thrust out his square jaw.

"Now which are you — beef or potato? Come, it must be potato, surely?"

Kamimura tried to coax Okamoto's position out of him, as though he already knew the answer.

"I am also neither Beef Party nor Potato Party, as it happens. Yet unlike Mr. Kondo, I cannot say that beef is simply to my taste. I detest, of course, that homemade dish called 'principle,' but for all that I cannot follow mere preference for meat or potato either."

"Then what are you?"

Iyama blinked his blinking eyes and stared.

"I am nothing in particular. To speak plainly without metaphor: I cannot dedicate myself to any great ideal, and yet I cannot blend with the common world and satisfy my appetites and call that a sufficient life — I cannot do it; I do not say I will not, but I truly cannot. To be honest, I sometimes think it would be a relief to decide one way or the other; but by some strange fate I have, until now, one single, mysterious desire, and because of it I cannot decide either way."

"And what is this mysterious desire?"

Kondo asked in his usual overbearing manner.

"It cannot be said in a few words."

"Surely it isn't a fancy for a drink with a whole roasted wolf?"

"Something of that sort, yes... The truth is, I once fell in love with a young woman."

Okamoto began to speak in earnest.

"Splendid, splendid — now the story grows truly interesting. And then?"

The young Matsuki drew his chair closer to the stove.

"The story may seem a little abrupt, but in order to explain my mysterious desire, I must begin from this point. The young woman was a remarkable beauty."

"Hear, hear!"

Matsuki could scarcely contain his delight.

"She was, if anything, round-faced, with a clear, vivid white complexion; her shoulders had the plump, smooth contour of a Western woman's; and her eyes had a slightly drowsy quality — not sparkling, but with a dreamy, meditative air — and when those eyes, full of charm, fixed themselves upon you with a steady gaze, most iron-hearted men would have softened. I myself was easily undone. At first sight of the woman I thought nothing in particular; but from the second visit to the third, I felt a strange pull toward her, and she began to occupy my thoughts in a curious way. Even so, I did not yet think of it as love.

"One day I called at her house to find the parents away and only the maidservant, the young woman, and her twelve-year-old sister at home — just the three of them. The young woman said she was feeling slightly unwell and sat listlessly alone in the inner room, and I remained on the veranda listening to her singing quietly to herself.

'O-Ei, listening to that voice of yours makes me feel strangely sad and I cannot bear it,'

the words escaped my lips before I knew it, and

she said,

'I do not understand why I am living in this world,' the young woman said in a voice full of helplessness — to my ears this rang truer than any great philosopher's pessimism, but what followed needs no telling.

"The two of us became, all at once, slaves of love. It was then that I first learned both the joy and the sorrow of love. About two months passed as if in a dream, and of the things that happened in between, let me tell you one or two of the more remarkable scenes — there was this, for instance:

"One afternoon around five o'clock I attended a farewell party for a couple departing abroad, and my beloved was also there, accompanied by her mother. It was a grand gathering, with young ladies from counts' families among the guests; when it finally broke up around ten in the evening, I proposed that since the moon was beautiful we should walk from the hotel to the young woman's home in Shiba Sannai, and so the three of us strolled along together. Along the way, the mother praised the departing couple without stint and said how much she envied them, and woven into her words was a meaning that plainly deplored her own daughter's rather unworldly tendencies — and a phrase nearly amounting to: such tendencies were the product of the company she kept — at which the young woman walking beside me and pressing her shoulder against mine gripped my hand tightly. I squeezed back. It was a frail act of defiance toward the mother.

"Then as we entered the forest of the temple precinct, the moonlight filtered down through the branches in a pale blue-gray light, lending a special beauty; the mother walked some five paces ahead of us. The night had grown late and the passersby were rare, so all around was very still, with only the sound of my shoes and the two pairs of wooden clogs ringing and echoing loudly; still stung by the mother's words a moment before, neither the young woman nor I spoke, and the mother too had grown suddenly grave and walked on in silence.

"We came to a place where the shadow of the trees was deep and the moonlight shut out, when the young woman suddenly pressed close against me as if to cling to me, and

'Please don't take my mother's words to heart and abandon me,'

she whispered, and no sooner had she placed her hand on my shoulder than something warm and soft pressed against my left cheek, and a fragrance surpassing any flower brushed past my nostrils.

Suddenly we stepped into the open, and the young woman's eyes were brimming with tears, her face an eerie, ashen white — though that was partly the moonlight; in any case, the moment I saw it, a strange chill ran through me, and a feeling I could call neither fear nor sorrow lodged in my chest, as if a lump of lead were pressing down upon it.

"That night I walked her to the gate, declined the mother's invitation to come in for tea, and set out for home; but a feeling came over me as though some difficult riddle had been put to me and to solve it would be to understand all the tragedy of my fate — it was no mere figure of speech, I truly felt it — and I could not leave it alone. So instead of going straight home I wandered through the desolate parts of the temple grounds, and before I knew it found myself on top of Maruyama Hill, where I sat on a bench and gazed for some time in silence at the sky over Shinagawa Bay.

'What if that woman is going to die before long?'

This thought flashed like lightning through the deepest, darkest part of my mind, and I leaped up involuntarily.

And I paced back and forth there in a daze, staring at the ground, saying to myself, 'It is certainly not so,'

'Absolutely not,'

as if rebuking a demon — but the demon would not leave; I stopped now and then and stared at the ground, and the pale face of the young woman appeared vividly before my eyes; no matter what I did, that face told me it did not belong to this world.

"At last I resolved to still my mind and told myself that getting a good night's sleep was the best thing — it was all self-delusion — and I started down from Maruyama Hill; but then I encountered an event that threw me into even greater confusion. Specifically, on my way up I had not noticed it at all, but from the branch of a tree by the roadside, a person was hanging. I was horrified; it was as if cold water had been poured over my head, and I stood rooted to the spot.

"Still, I steeled myself and went closer, and it was a woman. Her face was invisible, of course, but from the wooden sandals discarded in the road one could tell she was young. In a complete daze I ran down from Maruyama toward Sannai, straight to the police box at the end of the road, and reported what I had found..."

"So that woman was the very young woman you were in love with?"

Kondo said coldly.

"That would make it a perfect novel — but fortunately it did not become a novel.

"Looking at the newspaper two days later, I read that she was nineteen years old; she had become intimate with a soldier who had since returned home to the provinces, and finding herself with no way out she had apparently taken her own life. At any rate, I barely slept that night.

"But wonderfully, the next day when I saw the young woman's face it was the same as always — and when those languid eyes received me with a smile, the anguish that had gripped me from the night before vanished like mist. Then another month or so passed with nothing but joy and happiness..."

"Well, this is no small matter,"

Watanuki stamped his foot on the floor.

"Come now, listen quietly. And then,"

Matsuki became very serious.

"Shall I tell you what comes next? It went like this, didn't it: in the end the young woman gave one great yawn, and that was the end of the sacred love affair. Am I right?"

Kondo too said this, for some reason in earnest.

"Ha ha ha ha ha ha!"

Two or three of the company burst out laughing.

"At least, that was how it went with my love."

Kondo added.

"So even you know something called love?"

This was an uncharacteristic remark from Iyama.

"In the middle of Mr. Okamoto's story, shall I tell you about my love? I can say it in a minute. A certain young woman and I got on very well together; we spent some delightful time in a happy daze; three months in, the woman gave one yawn; we parted. That's all. In short, with anyone's love that is the final act — a woman, after three months, every single one of them grows tired; if they're married they have no choice but to stay together. But that is merely a woman swallowing her yawns and getting through the days. Don't you think so?"

"Perhaps so. But fortunately mine had not yet reached the yawn. Do hear me out.

"In those days I too was, like Mr. Kamimura's story, burning with Hokkaido fever — and in fact I still think life in Hokkaido would be good. So I too was elaborating various visions, and talking about them with my beloved was my greatest pleasure. I also made a sketch of that American-style house on a large sheet of drawing paper with a pencil, just as Mr. Kamimura described. But there was a slight difference: I wanted not merely firelight flickering from a winter window, but now and then the sound of cheerful laughter and a woman's clear singing voice echoing through the house..."

"But I had no partner, you see,"

Kamimura said plaintively, and the whole company burst into laughter.

"That is probably part of why you defected from the Potato Party," said Watanuki.

Watanuki said.

"No, that's not true. I think that if Mr. Kamimura had had a partner, he would have defected even before he set foot on Hokkaido soil. Women are simply incapable of putting potato-ism into practice. They are Beefsteak Party members by nature — just like me. Women saying they prefer potatoes is a lie!"

Kondo said this in something close to a shout.

That final remark brought another burst of laughter from the group.

"And so the two of us," Okamoto began calmly,

and they gradually quieted down.

"The two of us had decided that Hokkaido would be our home in the future, and our plans had at last ripened, so I returned to my hometown for the time being to sell off the forests and farmland that had been entrusted to relatives, and with that money to open new land in Hokkaido — intending to be gone about ten days, but owing to objections from relatives and disagreements over the price, it unexpectedly took twenty days. Then one day a telegram arrived from the young woman's mother; I rushed back in a panic, and when I arrived, the young woman was already dead."

"Dead?"

Matsuki cried out.

"Yes. And with that, all my hopes vanished utterly into thin air."

Before Okamoto had finished speaking, Kondo said the following — in the manner of a formal address:

"Well, we are most grateful to have been treated to such a charming love story; nevertheless, I celebrate the death of Mr. Okamoto's beloved on his behalf; if 'celebrate' sounds improper, then I rejoice — quietly rejoice, rather rejoice, indeed rejoice. For if that young woman had not died, the result, I firmly believe, would have been a tragedy surpassing even the tragedy of death."

He had been quite serious up to that point, but then seemed to find himself a little amusing, and abruptly changed his tone, lowering his voice and letting a smile creep in,

"The reason being — women yawn. There are several varieties of yawn; among them, two are especially to be mourned and despised. The first is the yawn of one weary of life; the second is the yawn of one weary of love. The yawn of one weary of life is the peculiar mark of man; the yawn of one weary of love is the innate character of woman. The former is most grievous; the latter most detestable."

Then reverting to a somewhat more serious tone, he continued,

"That is to say, women almost never grow weary of life itself. A young woman may sometimes appear to do so, but that is merely an aberrant condition arising from a thirst for love. Fortunately she finds that love, and for some years thereafter she seems entirely happy — truly happy; one might say that the full meaning of the word 'happiness' is exhausted in the condition of such a woman. Yet suddenly she is weary — weary of love; there is nothing more troublesome than a woman who has grown weary of love. I called this detestable, but it is in truth rather more pitiable. As for man, it is different: there are times when he grows weary of life itself; when love meets him at such a moment, he finds for the first time an opening through which to live. And so he throws his whole heart into the fire of love. In such circumstances, love is identical with the man's very life."

And turning to look at Okamoto,

"Isn't that so? Don't you think my view is penetrating?"

"It makes no sense at all!"

Matsuki cried.

"Ha ha ha ha — no sense? In truth I myself am not making very much sense; I just wanted to say something like that. But tell me, Mr. Okamoto — I think the reason you are neither Potato Party nor Beef Party, and hold only this one mysterious desire, is that you wish to see the dead young woman again."

"No!"

With a single cry, Okamoto rose from his chair.

He was by now considerably drunk.

"First let me say no. If any of you wish to hear what my mysterious desire is, I will tell you."

"The rest may know it or not — I intend to hear it,"

Kondo swung his arm.

Everyone sat quietly looking at Okamoto's face — Matsuki and Takeuchi with gravity; Watanuki, Iyama, and Kamimura with a hint of a smile.

"Very well — let me cry 'No' once more.

"It is true that, as Mr. Kondo surmised, I am a man who found one path to life through love. Therefore the young woman's death was a devastating blow to me; it destroyed almost all my hopes, as I said a moment ago. If such a thing as the legendary incense that summons back the dead truly existed, I would buy two or three hundred catties of it. I want more than anything to have the young woman returned to me. When my thoughts turn to this, I am overcome with desperation. I confess without embarrassment that I have wept for her many times. Many times I have called her name and lifted my eyes to the open sky. Truly, the longing for that young woman to come back to life once more in this world is my wish.

"But this is not my mysterious desire. It is not my true wish. I have a still greater desire, a deeper desire, a more ardent desire. If this desire were fulfilled, it would be fine if the young woman did not return to life. It would be fine even if she came back to life and betrayed me to my face. It would be fine if the young woman stuck out her red tongue at me and laughed coldly.

"'Hear the Way in the morning; die content in the evening' — my desire differs greatly in meaning from that saying, and yet the feeling is the same. If this desire of mine cannot be fulfilled, living another hundred years from now would be of no use whatsoever, not the slightest joy — rather, it would be a torment.

"Though every last person in the world is without this desire, I alone will pursue it. Even if pursuing it leads me to commit robbery, I shall not repent — murder, arson, anything; I do not care. If a demon were to promise me: give me your wife and I will violate her, give me your child and I will devour him — and then I shall grant you your desire — I would leap for joy and hand over wife if I had one, child if I had one, to the demon."

"This is getting interesting — I want to hear this desire of his at once!"

Watanuki cried, tugging fiercely at his own beard.

"I shall say it now. You must all be thoroughly tired of a government as unstable as the present one, and no doubt you wish you could blend Bismarck and Cavour and Gladstone and Toyotomi Hideyoshi into one and form a government of steel and carry out bold, decisive politics — I too hold exactly such a wish, but this is not my mysterious desire.

"I want to become a saint, a man of virtue, a bodhisattva of compassion — a man like Christ, the Buddha, Confucius. I truly want to become so. But if my mysterious desire could not be fulfilled even so, then I have not the least wish to become a saint or the son of God.

"'Life in the mountain forest!' — those words alone make my blood surge. That is also what drew me to Hokkaido. I often take walks in the countryside; lately in the clear winter sky, seeing far in the distance the snowy crowns of the mountain ranges ringing the horizon, my blood immediately begins to race. I cannot bear it! And yet — the moment my mind touches that desire of mine, all such things become nothing. If only my desire were fulfilled, I would be content even as a rickshaw man in a dusty city of a million souls.

"The universe is mysterious, life is mysterious, what is the ultimate origin of creation — so goes the clamorous debate. Science, philosophy, and religion strive to research and elucidate these questions and to find in them a place of peace and certainty. I want to be a great philosopher; I want to be a great scientist who makes Darwin look like an amateur. Or a great religious thinker. But my desire is not this either. If my desire could not be fulfilled and yet I became a great philosopher, I would mock myself and brand the character 'falsehood' on my own face."

"What is it? Hurry up and say it — this desire of yours!"

Matsuki said impatiently.

"I will say it. But do not be too startled."

"Go on, quickly!"

Okamoto calmly said,

"My desire is to be startled."

"What! Absurd!"

"What nonsense!"

"Is this a joke?"

The others dismissed it, but Kondo alone sat silent, apparently waiting for Okamoto to explain.

"There is this verse:

Awake, poor troubled sleeper: shake off

thy torpid night-mare dream.

That is to say, my desire is to shake off the nightmare!"

"I don't understand what that means!"

Watanuki muttered.

"It is not a desire to know the mystery of the universe — it is a desire to be astonished at the mysterious universe!"

"This grows ever more like a riddle!"

Now Iyama stroked his face.

"It is not a desire to know the secret of death — it is a desire to be astonished at the fact called death!"

"You can be as startled as you please, can't you? It's nothing at all!"

Watanuki said mockingly.

"Not necessarily faith itself, but to be so tormented by the mystery and the secret meaning of this universe and this life that I cannot rest for a single moment without it — that is my desire."

"This grows more and more incomprehensible,"

Matsuki muttered, staring at Okamoto's face as if he could bore a hole through it.

"Rather — my desire is to gouge out these worn, grape-like eyes of mine!"

And Okamoto involuntarily struck the table.

"Splendid, splendid!"

Kondo could not help raising his voice.

"I have no desire to eat the courage of Luther, who did not bow before the power of the princes at the Diet of Worms. But when at the age of nineteen, before his very eyes, his friend Alexius was struck dead by lightning, and Luther was seized by astonishment at the very mystery of death itself — that state of mind is what I desire.

"'Be startled at your own pleasure,' said Mr. Watanuki. Be startled at your own pleasure — what a delightful phrase; but one cannot be startled at one's own pleasure.

"My beloved died. She vanished from this world. I was entirely the slave of love, so when the young woman died my heart was thrown into extraordinary turmoil. But my grief was the grief of having lost the object of my love. I could not look squarely at the cold, hard fact of death itself. That is to say, there is nothing that controls the human heart as love does; and from this we can know that there is something that exerts many times more force upon the human heart than even love.

"That is — the force of custom.

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting.

As that line says.

We come into this world: from the time we are infants without understanding, we encounter every manner of thing; we see the sun every day; we look up at the stars every night; and in this way even this unfathomable heaven and earth ceases to be unfathomable at all.

Life and death, all the phenomena of the universe, become commonplace, a trivial farce.

We speak of 'philosophy, if you please' and 'science, with your permission,' taking an attitude as if standing outside the cosmos, and treat this universe accordingly.

Full soon thy soul shall have her earthly freight,

And custom lie upon thee with a weight,

Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life!

Just so, just so!

"My desire, therefore, is somehow to knock this frost loose. Somehow to escape the oppressive weight of this worn-out custom, and to stand in this universe with a sense of wonder. Whether the outcome of that may be beef-ism or potato-ism, or whether I become a pessimist and curse my own existence — I do not care in the least!

"I do not care about the outcome; I do not wish to place my foundation in falsehood. I do not wish to build my premise on the playful research of one who stands upon custom.

"All that babbling about how the moonlight is beautiful, how an evening of blossoms is this or that, how a starlit night is such and such — in short, the torrents of verse from poets: that is mere self-indulgence. They do not see the real thing; they see an illusion — nothing more than an illusion produced by eyes conditioned by habit. It is a game of the emotions. Philosophy and religion too — whatever their ultimate sources may be — in all but their most distant tributaries, it is all the same.

"I have an acquaintance who said this: there are those who torture themselves by asking such absurd questions as 'What am I?' — but things that can never be known simply cannot be known no matter what one does, and he laughed dismissively. By the world's standards he is perfectly right. Yet this question was not asked in order to find its answer. It is the cry of the spirit, arising spontaneously from a vivid, painful sense of how utterly mysterious is this self of ours, here in this heaven and earth. The question itself is the genuine voice of the spirit. To mock it is to confess the paralysis of one's own spirit. My desire is rather this: to truly send this question forth from my heart. But this question, for all that it passes easily from one's lips, will not come from one's heart.

"'From where do I come, and where do I go?' — a frequently uttered phrase; but it is from those who cannot help but ask this question, who try not to ask it yet cannot refrain, that the wellspring of religion flows; poetry is the same; and therefore everything beyond that is play, is falsehood.

"Let me stop now! It is useless, useless, no matter how much I say it is useless... Ah, I am tired! But one last word: I wish to divide humanity into two kinds — those who are astonished, and those who are unperturbed..."

"Which kind do I belong to?"

Matsuki asked, laughing.

"Obviously to the unperturbed. All seven of us here belong to the tribe of the thoroughly unperturbed. Indeed, among the ten-odd billion people in the world, how many can truly be said to be other than unperturbed? Poets, philosophers, scientists, men of religion, scholars, politicians — almost all of them, in their way, go on making arguments calmly, pretending to wisdom, shedding tears, while unperturbed. Last night I had a dream.

"I dreamed I was dead. Dead, I trudged alone down a dark road, and cried out involuntarily, 'I never expected to die!' Truly — I truly cried it.

"And so I think: all one hundred of a hundred people, even those who attend funerals today, who lose a parent or a child — in the end, at the gate of hell after their own death, they will all be of the company who cry, 'I never expected to die myself,' while the demons laugh. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!"

"They say a fright will cure hiccups, but wanting to be startled for its own sake when one can perfectly well eat beef in peace and quiet — that is an odd fancy. Ha ha ha ha."

Watanuki clutched his ample belly.

"Well, I say I want to be startled, but in the end it is just words. Ha ha ha ha."

"Only words? Ha ha ha ha ha."

"Just words, is it? Heh heh heh heh."

"Indeed! It comes to no more than humbly putting in a request, doesn't it. Ha ha ha ha!"

"Still just a hobby, after all. Ha ha ha ha ha!"

Okamoto laughed along with the rest; but Kondo caught in Okamoto's face an expression of inexpressible anguish.