草枕 English

One

Going up the mountain path, I fell to thinking.

Push through with reason, and you rub people the wrong way.

Give yourself up to feeling, and you are swept along.

Insist on having your own way, and you are hemmed in.

However you take it, the world of men is a hard place to live.

When it grows hard enough, you want to move somewhere easier.

When you understand that it is hard to live wherever you move, poetry is born and painting comes into being.

What made the world of men was neither god nor demon.

It was ordinary people, after all, the ones who flit about among the three houses opposite and the two next door.

Hard as this world of ordinary people's making may be to live in, there is no country you can move away to.

If there is, it can only be a country without people in it.

And a country without people would be harder to live in than the world of men.

If the world you cannot move out of is hard to live in, then you must find some way to ease the hard places and make this brief life, for however brief a while, more livable.

Here the poet's calling comes into being; here the painter's mission is bestowed.

All who live by art are precious, because they make the world of men serene and enrich the human heart.

To draw out of a hard world the vexations that make it hard, and set a blessed world before our eyes — that is poetry, that is painting.

Or music, or sculpture.

Strictly speaking, you need not set it down at all.

You need only see it before you, and poetry lives there and song wells up.

Without putting the conception on paper, a clear ringing like the touch of jewels rises in the breast.

Without laying paint on the canvas, the brilliance of the five colors appears of itself to the mind's eye.

It is enough if one can see the world one lives in in this way, and take the muddied common world into the small camera of the heart clean and bright.

So the voiceless poet has not one line, and the colorless painter not a scrap of silk; yet in being able to see the world of men so, in being able to loose the bonds of the passions so, in being able to come and go in a pure world so, and further in being able to build up this one incomparable heaven and earth, in sweeping away the entanglements of self-interest — he is happier than the son of a great rich man, than the sovereign who rules the realm, than any darling of the common world.

Twenty years in the world taught me that it is a world worth living in.

At twenty-five I understood that light and dark are two sides of one thing, and that wherever the sun strikes a shadow surely falls.

Now, at thirty, this is what I think.—

When joy is deep, sorrow is deeper still; the greater the pleasure, the greater the pain.

Try to cut them apart, and life is not to be borne.

Try to be rid of them, and the world will not go on.

Money matters; and as what matters increases, one worries even in one's sleep.

Love is a joy; and as the joy of love piles up, one comes to long instead for the old days when one did not love.

A minister's shoulders bear up the feet of several million people.

On his back rides the heavy weight of the realm.

A good dish not eaten is a waste.

Eat a little and you are unsatisfied.

Eat your fill and you are uncomfortable afterward.…

Just as my thoughts had drifted this far, my right foot suddenly came down badly on the edge of an unsteady squared stone.

My left foot shot out to keep my balance, and just in time made up for the slip, and my seat came down neatly on a rock about three feet across.

Only the paint box slung at my shoulder leapt out from under my arm; luckily nothing came of it.

Getting up and looking ahead, I saw to the left of the road a peak rising like an upturned bucket.

Whether it was cedar or cypress I could not tell, but from foot to summit it was all blue-black, and through it the mountain cherry trailed in pale red patches, the haze so thick that one could not clearly see the joins.

A little nearer, a bare mountain stood out above everything around it and pressed close upon my brow.

Its naked flank might have been shorn off by a giant's axe; it drove its sharp flat face brutally down into the bottom of the valley.

The single tree visible at the top must be a red pine.

Even the sky between its branches showed clearly.

The way ahead broke off some two hundred yards on, but seeing a red blanket moving down from a high place, I judged that climbing would bring me out there.

The road is very hard going.

Merely leveling the earth would not take much trouble, but there are large stones in the earth.

You may level the earth, but the stones will not be leveled.

You may break up the stones, but there is no dealing with the rocks.

They tower serenely above the dug-away earth, with no sign of giving way for one's sake.

So long as they will not listen, one must climb over or go around.

Even where there are no rocks it is not easy walking.

It is high on both sides and hollow down the middle — as though a strip six feet wide had been cut out in a triangle with its apex running along the center.

Rather than walking a road, it would be truer to say one is crossing a riverbed.

Since I am in no hurry on this journey, I sauntered on into the seven bends.

All at once a skylark began singing under my feet.

I looked down into the valley, but of the bird there was no sign anywhere.

Only the voice came clearly.

Busily, industriously, it sang without a pause.

It was as though the air for miles around had been bitten all over by fleas and could not bear it.

There is not an instant's ease in that bird's singing.

It seems it will not be satisfied until it has sung out the whole serene spring day, sung the night through, and sung the day away again.

And on top of that it goes on climbing, forever climbing.

The skylark must surely die inside the clouds.

Perhaps at the end of its climb it drifts into the clouds, and while it floats there its shape melts away and only the voice is left in the sky.

Rounding a sharp corner of rock where a blind masseur would have gone headlong down, I cut narrowly to the right, and looking down sideways saw a whole field of rape flowers.

So that is where the skylark falls, I thought.

No — it comes flying up out of that golden field, I thought.

Then I thought of the falling skylark and the rising skylark crossing each other in the shape of a cross.

And last I thought that falling, rising, and crossing alike, it would go on singing with all its heart.

Spring makes one drowsy.

The cat forgets to catch the mouse; men forget that they are in debt.

Sometimes one forgets even where one's own soul is, and loses hold of oneself.

Only at the distant sight of the rape flowers does one wake.

Only at the skylark's voice does the whereabouts of the soul become clear.

The skylark does not sing with its mouth; the whole of its soul sings.

Of all the shows of the soul's activity in sound, there is nothing so full of life as that.

Ah, what delight.

To think so, and to be so delighted, is poetry.

Shelley's poem on the skylark came suddenly to mind, and I recited under my breath as much of it as I remembered; but what I remembered was only two or three lines.

Among those two or three lines is this:

We look before and after

And pine for what is not:

Our sincerest laughter

With some pain is fraught;

Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

"Looking before, looking behind, longing for what we have not, we go yearning; even in laughter from the heart there must be pain lying at the bottom; in the song of uttermost beauty, know that the uttermost sadness is gathered."

Truly, however happy a poet may be, he cannot sing his own joy as that skylark does — wholeheartedly, single-mindedly, forgetting what is before and behind him.

Not only in Western poetry but in Chinese poetry as well one often meets such phrases as "sorrow by the ten thousand bushel."

Perhaps it takes ten thousand bushels because he is a poet, and for the layman a single measure would do.

If so, the poet may be more given to worry than ordinary men, with nerves twice as keen as the common person's.

There may be joys beyond the vulgar, but there must be immeasurable sorrows too.

In that case one had better think twice about becoming a poet.

For a while the road was level, with a hill of scrub wood to the right and an unbroken view of rape flowers to the left.

Now and then I trod a dandelion underfoot.

Its saw-toothed leaves stretch out unabashed on every side, guarding the yellow bead in the middle.

With my attention on the rape flowers I trod on one, and turning to look, sorry for what I had done, I found the yellow bead enthroned as ever among its saw teeth.

An easygoing creature.

I went on with my thinking.

Sorrow may be inseparable from the poet, but in the frame of mind in which one listens to that skylark there is not a grain of suffering.

Looking at the rape flowers too, one is simply glad, with the heart leaping.

The dandelions likewise, and the cherry blossoms — but the cherry blossoms had gone out of sight before I knew it.

Come into the mountains like this and meet the sights of nature, and everything one sees and hears is interesting.

Merely interesting, with no particular suffering arising from it.

If any arises it will be that one's legs tire and one cannot get a good meal.

But why is there no suffering?

Simply because one sees this scene as a single painting and reads it as a single scroll of poems.

Being a painting and a poem, one has no thought of getting the land and cultivating it, no notion of laying a railway and making money.

Simply because this scene — a scene that will not fill one's belly nor add to one's salary — delights my heart purely as a scene, there is no toil or anxiety attached to it.

In this the power of nature is precious.

It is nature that in an instant polishes our temper and admits us to a pure and unmixed realm of poetry.

Love may be beautiful; filial piety may be beautiful; loyalty to the sovereign and love of country may be very fine.

But once you are a party to them yourself, you are caught in the whirlwind of gain and loss, and the beautiful and the fine alike are lost on your eyes.

So you cannot tell for yourself where the poetry in them lies.

To see it, you must stand in the position of a third party with leisure enough to see.

It is precisely because one stands as a third party that a play is interesting to watch.

A novel too is interesting to read.

He who enjoys a play and he who enjoys a novel have both set their own interests aside.

For as long as they watch or read, they are poets.

Even so, the ordinary play or novel does not escape human feeling.

There is suffering, anger, uproar, weeping.

And the spectator, without knowing it, is assimilated into it and suffers, rages, makes an uproar and weeps.

Their merit may lie in the absence of self-interest, but just because it is absent, the other emotions probably work harder than usual.

That I dislike.

Suffering, anger, uproar and weeping are part and parcel of the world of men.

I have gone through them for thirty years, and I have had my fill.

Having had my fill, to have the same stimulus repeated in plays and novels would be too much.

The poetry I want is not the kind that fans up such commonplace human feeling.

It is poetry that throws away worldly thoughts and lets one feel, if only for a while, apart from the dust of the world.

However fine a play may be, there is none that leaves human feeling behind, and few novels that get beyond arguments of good and evil.

That they can never get outside the world is their distinguishing mark.

With Western poetry in particular, since human affairs are its foundation, even what is called pure poetry does not know how to escape this realm.

Always it makes do with sympathy, or love, or justice, or freedom — only with what is set out on the world's market stalls.

However poetic it becomes, it runs about on the ground and never has leisure to forget the counting of money.

No wonder Shelley sighed when he heard the skylark.

Happily, in the poetry of the East there is work that has escaped all this.

Plucking chrysanthemums by the eastern hedge, I gaze at leisure on the southern hills.

In that alone there arises a scene in which the sweltering world is wholly forgotten.

There is no neighbor's daughter peeping over the hedge, no question of a close friend serving on the southern hills.

One can rise clear above the world and feel that the sweat of profit and loss has been washed away.

Alone I sit in the depths of the bamboo grove; I play the lute and again let my voice ring out long. Deep in the wood, no one knows of me; the bright moon comes and shines upon me.

In a mere twenty characters, a separate heaven and earth is set up at leisure.

The virtue of this heaven and earth is not the virtue of "The Cuckoo"

or "The Golden Demon."

It is not that at all.

It is the virtue of forgetting everything and falling into a sound sleep after being worn out by steamships, trains, rights, duties, morals and manners.

If sleep is needed in the twentieth century, then the savor of poetry that has left this common world is precious in the twentieth century.

Sadly, those who write poetry now and those who read it are all infected with the West, so it seems no one takes the trouble to float an idle little boat and go up the stream to this land of peach blossoms.

I have never made poetry my profession, so I have no intention of preaching the realm of Wang Wei or Yuanming to the present age.

Only, to me such moods seem better medicine than a variety show or a ball.

They seem more precious than Faust, than Hamlet.

It is entirely for this that I go plodding along a spring mountain path, all alone, with a paint box and a folding stool on my back.

A wish to absorb directly from nature the realm of Yuanming's and Wang Wei's poetry, and to stroll for even a little while in a heaven and earth free of human feeling.

It is a whim.

Of course, being one particle of humanity, I cannot keep up the freedom from human feeling for long, however fond of it I am.

Yuanming himself can hardly have gazed at the southern hills the whole year round, and Wang Wei was not a man who slept in a bamboo grove without a mosquito net for the pleasure of it.

I imagine he sold the chrysanthemums he had over to the florist and let the bamboo shoots that came up go to the greengrocer.

And I who say this am the same.

However much I like the skylark and the rape flowers, my freedom from human feeling has not grown so strong that I would sleep out in the mountains.

Even in a place like this one meets people.

Men with their skirts tucked high and towels round their heads, women in red underskirts, and sometimes even horses with faces longer than a man's.

Ringed round by a million cypresses, breathing in and out the air of a place hundreds of feet above the sea, one still cannot easily be rid of the smell of humanity.

Far from it: the inn where I shall settle tonight, once I am over the mountain, is the hot spring at Nakoi.

Only, a thing is whatever you make of it by the way you look at it.

Among Leonardo da Vinci's words to his pupils is this: listen to that bell; the bell is one, but the sound may be heard as you please.

One man, one woman, may likewise be construed however one looks at them.

Since this is a journey undertaken to be free of human feeling, if I look at people in that spirit it will surely be different from living cramped in some house or other in a back street of the floating world.

Even if I cannot get wholly clear of human feeling, I ought at least to be able to reach the light frame of mind in which one watches a Noh play.

There is human feeling in Noh too.

I cannot guarantee that I would not weep at Shichikiochi or at Sumidagawa.

But that is an art shown three parts feeling and seven parts craft.

The gratitude we get from Noh does not come from a skill in copying the human feeling of this lower world just as it is.

It comes of dressing that raw material in layer upon layer of the garment called art, and moving with a leisure impossible in the world.

Suppose that for a while I take the events that occur on this journey and the people I meet on it as the structure of a Noh play and the movements of Noh actors.

I shall hardly be able to cast off human feeling altogether, but since the journey is poetic in its making, I should like, while I am about this freedom from feeling, to pare things down and get as far as that.

People must be different in kind from the southern hills and the deep bamboo grove, and cannot be put on a level with the skylark and the rape flowers; but I should like to bring them as near as I can, and, so far as they can be brought near, to look at them from the same point of observation.

The man Basho saw even a horse making water by his pillow as something elegant, and made a verse of it.

I too shall assume that the people I now meet — farmers, townsmen, the clerk at the village office, old men and old women alike — are all figures drawn in as staffage in the great landscape of nature, and treat them so.

To be sure, unlike figures in a painting, they will each do as they please.

But to probe the root of that willfulness like an ordinary novelist, to enter into psychology or examine human conflicts, is to become vulgar.

They may move; it does not matter.

So long as one takes it that the people in a painting are moving, there is no harm in it.

However the figures in a picture move, they cannot get out of the plane.

It is only because one imagines them leaping out of the plane and moving as solid bodies that they collide with one, and dealings of profit and loss arise, and things become troublesome.

And the more troublesome they become, the less one can go on seeing them as beautiful.

With the people I now meet I shall keep the aloof air of one watching from a distant height, so that the electricity of human feeling does not spring up carelessly on either side.

Then however much the other party moves, he cannot easily leap into my bosom, and it comes to the same thing as standing before a picture and watching the figures in it bustle about the canvas.

With three feet between us one can watch calmly.

One can watch without danger.

In other words, since one's attention is not stolen by self-interest, one can bring all one's powers to observing their movements from the side of art.

With nothing else in mind, one can judge whether they are beautiful or not.

Just as I had made up my mind to this, the sky turned threatening.

The undecided clouds had been leaning on my head, and before I knew it they began to break, and out of what one might have taken for a sea of cloud on every side a spring rain came drizzling down.

The rape flowers were long since passed and I was going between hills now, but the threads of rain were so fine that they might almost be mistaken for mist, and I could not tell how far off anything was.

Now and then a wind came and swept the high clouds away, and a dark hill ridge could be seen on the right.

It seemed that beyond a single valley over there ran a range of mountains.

On the left, what I saw looked like the very foot of the hills.

Out of the depths of the thick-lying rain, things that looked like pines kept showing their faces.

No sooner shown than hidden again.

Whether it was the rain moving, or the trees, or a dream, it was somehow a strange feeling.

The road grew wider than I expected and was level besides, so that walking was no labor; but having no rain gear I hurried.

Just as the drops began to fall pattering from my hat, a bell sounded some thirty or forty feet ahead, and a packhorse driver loomed suddenly out of the dark.

"Is there anywhere hereabouts to rest?"

"Another fifteen cho and there is a teahouse. You have got pretty wet."

Fifteen cho still, I thought, and while I was turning to look, the driver's figure was wrapped in the rain like a shadow picture and faded away again.

The drops that had looked like bran grew thicker and longer little by little, and now one could see even the way each thread was twisted by the wind.

My haori was long since soaked through, and the water that had gone into my underclothes felt lukewarm with the warmth of my body.

It was unpleasant, so I tilted my hat and walked briskly on.

If I take the self that goes on getting wet — through a boundless world of pale ink-gray crossed slantwise by innumerable silver arrows — for someone other than myself, it will make a poem, it can be turned into a verse.

Only when I forget the actual self altogether and fix my eyes on the purely objective do I become, for the first time, a figure in a painting and keep a fine harmony with the sights of nature.

The moment the falling rain distresses me and I mind the weariness of my walking feet, I am no longer a man in a poem or a man in a picture.

I am the same callow young fellow from the town as ever.

The beauty of the flying clouds and drifting mist does not reach my eyes.

The pathos of falling blossoms and singing birds does not rise in my heart.

Still less do I understand how beautiful a thing it is, this self going alone and lonely through the spring hills.

At first I walked with my hat tilted.

Later I walked staring only at the tops of my feet.

At last I walked with my shoulders hunched, timidly.

The rain shook every treetop in sight and closed in on me, a lone traveler, from all sides.

My freedom from human feeling had been laid on a little too thick.

Two

"Hello there."

I called, but there was no answer.

Looking in under the eaves, I saw a sooty paper screen shut tight.

The other side was not to be seen.

Five or six pairs of straw sandals hung forlornly from the eaves and swung idly to and fro.

Below them stood three or so boxes of cheap sweets, and beside them lay a scattering of five-rin and Bunkyu coins.

"Hello there."

I called again.

A hen that had been sitting with her feathers puffed out on a mortar pushed into a corner of the earthen floor woke in alarm.

She set up a clucking, ku-ku-ku, ku-ku-ku.

Outside the threshold an earthen stove, its color half changed by the rain that had just fallen, had a pitch-black kettle on it, though whether the kettle was clay or silver one could not tell.

Luckily a fire was lit beneath it.

Since there was no answer, I went right in without leave and sat down on the bench.

The hen flapped and flew down from the mortar.

This time she got up onto the matting.

If the screen had not been shut she might have meant to run right through to the back.

The cock said kokekokko in a deep voice, and the hen said kekekokko in a thin one.

They seemed to take me for a fox or a dog.

On the bench a tobacco tray about the size of a one-sho measure waited quietly, and in it a coiled stick of incense smoldered at great leisure, indifferent to the passing of the day.

The rain gradually let up.

After a while there were footsteps from within, and the sooty screen slid open.

An old woman came out.

I had supposed somebody would come out sooner or later.

There was a fire burning in the stove.

There were coins scattered on the sweet boxes.

The incense was smoldering unhurriedly.

Somebody was bound to come.

But the way she thought nothing of leaving her own shop wide open is a little unlike the capital.

And for a man to sit down on the bench when nobody answers and wait indefinitely is also hard to take for the twentieth century.

It is just this that makes it interesting, and free of human feeling.

Besides, I liked the face of the old woman who came out.

Two or three years ago I saw Takasago at the Hosho stage.

At the time I thought, this is a beautiful tableau vivant.

The old man with the broom on his shoulder comes five or six steps along the bridgeway, turns quietly about, and faces the old woman.

That posture of the two facing each other is with me still.

From my seat the old woman's face was almost full on, so that the instant I thought how beautiful it was, the expression was printed clean onto the camera of my mind.

The face of the old woman at the teahouse resembled that photograph as nearly as if blood had been put into it.

"I have made free of your place for a moment, mother."

"Yes — I had no notion at all that you were there."

"It rained a good deal."

"Unfortunate weather; it must have been a trial to you. Dear me, you are very wet. I shall make up the fire at once and dry you."

"If you would build it up a little more I could sit by it and dry myself. Somehow I have grown cold now that I have rested."

"Yes, I shall make it up directly. Do have a cup of tea."

and rising, she drove the hens down with two hisses.

The pair went scuttling off, koh koh koh, from the dark-brown matting, trod through the middle of the sweet boxes and flew out into the road.

As the cock fled he dropped a mess on the sweets.

"Do take a cup."

said the old woman, and before I knew it she had set a tea bowl on a hollowed tray and brought it out.

On the bottom, where the color of the tea had burned itself black, three plum flowers in a single stroke were baked carelessly in.

"And some sweets."

This time she brought the sesame twists and the crumb sticks the hens had trodden on.

I looked to see whether any of the mess had got onto them, but it had been left behind in the box.

The old woman tied up her sleeves over her sleeveless jacket and crouched before the stove.

I took my sketchbook out of my breast and, drawing her face in profile, talked to her.

"It is pleasant and quiet here."

"Yes, a mountain village, as you see."

"Do the bush warblers sing?"

"Oh yes, they sing nearly every day. Hereabouts they sing in summer too."

"I should like to hear one. Not hearing one at all makes me want to all the more."

"Today, unluckily — the rain just now has driven them off somewhere."

At that very moment the inside of the stove crackled, and the red fire raised a gust of wind and shot out a foot or more.

"There, come and warm yourself. You must be very cold."

she said.

Looking at the eaves, I saw the blue smoke strike and break and trail its faint traces still about the boards.

"Ah, that is good; you have brought me back to life."

"And the rain has cleared nicely. Look, Tengu Rock has come into sight."

The mountain gale, impatient with the hesitating, easily clouded spring sky, had swept it away and passed clean through, and one corner of the nearer hills was left clear without a regret; the sharp height at which the old woman pointed, rising like a roughly hewn pillar, was Tengu Rock, she said.

I looked first at Tengu Rock, then at the old woman, and the third time compared the two of them half and half.

As a painter, the only old women's faces that exist in my head are the crone of Takasago and the mountain witch Rosetsu painted.

When I saw Rosetsu's picture I felt that the ideal old woman is a fearsome thing.

Something to be set among red leaves, or under a cold moon.

When I came to see the special Noh performance at the Hosho, I was astonished that an old woman could have so gentle an expression.

That mask must surely have been carved by a master.

I am sorry to say I failed to catch the maker's name, but the aged too, rendered so, look rich and calm and warm.

It is a property that may be set off against a gold screen, or a spring breeze, or even cherry blossom.

Rather than Tengu Rock, I thought the old woman in her sleeveless jacket — straightening her back, shading her eyes with her hand, pointing far into the distance — was exactly right as a sight of the spring mountain road.

The moment I took up my sketchbook, thinking, hold it a little longer, her posture broke.

Having nothing else to do, I held the sketchbook to the fire to dry it, and asked,

"You look strong and well, mother."

That was my question.

"Yes, thank heaven I am hale — I can hold a needle, I can spin hemp thread, I can grind the flour for dumplings."

I wanted to see this old woman turn a stone mill.

But I could hardly order such a thing, so I asked something else.

"It is less than a ri from here to Nakoi, is it not?"

That was my question.

"Yes, they call it twenty-eight cho. You will be going to take the waters, sir…"

"If it is not crowded I think I may stay a while — as the mood takes me."

"No, since the war began there has been hardly a soul coming. It is much the same as if the place were closed."

"That is odd. Then perhaps they will not put me up."

"No, if you ask they will put you up at any time."

"There is only the one inn, is there not?"

"Yes, ask for the Shiodas and anyone will know at once. They are the rich family of the village, and one cannot tell whether the place is a hot spring inn or a retirement house."

"Then it is all one to them whether they have guests or not."

"Is this your first visit, sir?"

"No, I went there once, a long while ago."

The talk broke off for a moment.

I opened the book and was quietly sketching the hens of a while ago when, into the depths of my settled ear, there came the jangling of a horse's bell.

The sound kept time of itself, and a kind of rhythm formed in my head.

It was like being drawn, half asleep, into a dream by the sound of the neighbor's mortar.

I gave up sketching the hens and, at the edge of the same page, wrote:

Spring wind — in Izen's ear, the bell of a horse

That was what I wrote.

Since I began climbing I had met five or six horses.

All five or six wore breast cloths and jangled their bells.

They did not seem to be horses of the present age.

Presently a leisurely packhorse driver's song broke the dream of the deserted mountain road late in spring.

At the bottom of its pathos lay an easy ring; whichever way one took it, it was a voice out of a painting.

A packhorse driver's song crossing Suzuka — the spring rain

I wrote this time slantwise across the page, and having written it I realized that the verse was not my own.

"Here comes somebody else."

said the old woman, half to herself.

Since there is only the single spring road, those going and those returning are all faces she knows.

The five or six jangling bells I had met must all have gone down the mountain and come up it again under this old woman's inward remark, here comes somebody else.

The road runs quietly on through spring after spring from of old until now, and in a village so small that if one grudged the blossom there would be nowhere to set one's foot, the old woman must have counted the jangling bells for years upon years and so come to the white head of today.

A packhorse song — her white hair undyed, the spring closing in

I wrote this on the next page, but it does not say all I feel; there ought to be a better working of it, I thought, staring at the point of my pencil.

While I was contriving to get in the words "white hair" and a phrase about the generations, and the title "packhorse song," and a season word for spring besides, all folded into seventeen syllables —

"Good day to you."

came the loud call of a real packhorse driver, halted before the shop.

"Why, is it you, Gen? Off to the castle town again?"

"If you have anything you want bought, I will see to it for you."

"Let me see — if you pass through Kajicho, get my daughter to give you a charm from the Reiganji."

"Right, I will get you one. Just the one? — Oaki has married into a good house; she is a lucky girl. Is she not, mother?"

"Thank heaven, she wants for nothing at present. Lucky, I suppose one may call it."

"Lucky indeed. Compare her with the young lady of Nakoi."

"A sad case, truly. And with such looks as hers. Is she any better lately?"

"No, just the same as ever."

"It is a hard thing."

said the old woman with a great sigh.

"Hard indeed."

said Gen, stroking the horse's nose.

The thick-branched mountain cherry had been holding, leaves and flowers alike, the gathered rain that had fallen out of the deep sky; but now the passing wind swept its feet from under it, and unable to hold on it came rustling down out of its lodging.

The horse started and tossed its long mane up and down.

"Here, now!"

Gen's scolding voice, with the jangling of the bell, broke into my musing.

The old woman said,

"Gen, I can see her still as she looked on her wedding day. Long sleeves with a pattern at the hem, her hair in the high shimada, up on a horse…"

"So it was; it was not a boat. It was a horse. She rested here too, did she not, mother?"

"Yes; when the young lady's horse stopped under that cherry tree, the blossoms came fluttering down and speckled her fine shimada."

I opened my sketchbook again.

This scene will make a picture; it will make a poem too.

Calling up the bride's figure in my mind and imagining how it had been, I wrote with a look of satisfaction:

In blossom time she crossed — the brave bride on a horse

That was what I set down.

Oddly enough, the dress and the hair and the horse and the cherry all came clearly before my eyes, but the bride's face alone I could not for the life of me arrive at.

While I turned over this face and that, the image of Millais's Ophelia suddenly appeared and dropped neatly into place beneath the high shimada.

This will not do, I thought, and pulled down at once the composition I had taken such trouble over.

The dress and the hair and the horse and the cherry all withdrew clean out of my mental properties in an instant, but Ophelia alone, floating on the water with her hands joined, stayed dimly at the bottom of my breast and would not be cleared away, like smoke that will not go for a palm broom.

It left me oddly uneasy, like a comet trailing its tail across the sky.

"Well then, I will be off."

said Gen by way of farewell.

"Stop in again on your way back. With this unlucky rain the seven bends will be hard going."

"Yes, it will be a bit of work."

and Gen set off.

Gen's horse set off too.

Jangle, jangle.

"Is he a Nakoi man?"

"Yes, that is Genbei of Nakoi."

"And it was he who took some bride over the pass on horseback?"

"When the young lady of the Shiodas went to be married in the castle town, he set her on a black horse and led her past here by the bridle. — Time goes quickly; it is five years ago this year."

One who laments the whiteness of his own head only when he faces a mirror belongs among the happy.

An old woman who has to count on her fingers before she learns how swiftly time turns in the flow of five years is, as human beings go, nearer to being a sage.

I answered as follows.

"She must have been beautiful. I should have come to see."

"Ha ha ha, you may see her even now. Go to the hot spring and she will surely come out and greet you."

"Indeed — she is back in the village now? If only she would wear the long sleeves with the patterned hem and put her hair up in the high shimada."

"Ask her and see. She will put them on for you."

Surely not, I thought; but the old woman's manner was unexpectedly serious.

On a journey free of human feeling, without such things it would be no fun.

The old woman said,

"The young lady and the Maiden of Nagara are much alike."

"In the face?"

"No. In the way their lives went."

"Indeed — and who was this Maiden of Nagara?"

"Long ago in this village there lived, they say, a beautiful daughter of a rich man, called the Maiden of Nagara."

"Indeed."

"And then, sir, two men fell in love with that girl at one and the same time."

"I see."

"Shall I incline to Sasada, or shall I incline to Sasabe? — so she fretted day and night, and being unable to incline to either, at last she composed the song

When autumn comes, like the dew that settles on the plume grass, so would I vanish away: such is my thought

and with that she threw herself into the deep pool of the river and died."

I had not expected to come to such a mountain village and hear from such an old woman, in such old-fashioned and well-bred language, such an old-fashioned tale.

"Go five cho down eastward from here and there is a five-ringed stone by the roadside. Look at the grave of the Maiden of Nagara while you are about it."

Inwardly I resolved that I would certainly see it on my way.

The old woman went on with the rest of her story.

"The young lady of Nakoi had two men after her as well. One was a gentleman she met while she was away studying in Kyoto, and the other is the richest man in the castle town here."

"And which did she incline to?"

"She herself wanted the Kyoto gentleman by all means, and no doubt there were reasons of every kind on that side, but her parents forced the match here…"

"So happily she was spared throwing herself into the river."

"But then — since he had taken her for her looks, perhaps he made a great deal of her; only, having been sent against her will in the first place, they got on badly, and even her relatives seemed much troubled about it. And now with this war the bank where the master worked has failed. So the young lady comes back to Nakoi again. People say all manner of things about her — that she is unfeeling, that she is heartless. She was once the shyest and gentlest of creatures, but of late she has grown very sharp, and Genbei says every time he comes that it is somehow a worry.…"

To hear more than this would ruin the effect I had taken such trouble over.

It felt as though, just as I was beginning to turn into a sage, somebody had come to press me to give back the feather robe.

Having braved the steepness of the seven bends and got this far with some difficulty, to be dragged down so easily into the common world would make it hardly worth having wandered out of the house.

Once gossip is entered into beyond a certain point, the smell of the floating world soaks in through the pores and the body grows heavy with grime.

"Mother, the road to Nakoi runs straight, does it?"

I said, and tossing a ten-sen silver coin onto the bench with a clink, I got up.

"If you go down to the right from the five-ringed stone at Nagara it is a short cut of some six cho. The road is bad, but for a young gentleman that will be the better way. — This is a great deal of money for the tea. Take care as you go."

Three

Last night I had a strange feeling.

Since I reached the inn about eight in the evening, I could make out neither the plan of the house nor the making of the garden, nor even which way was east and which west.

I was led round and round through something like a covered gallery, and at last put into a small room of about six mats.

It was quite different from what I remembered of my visit long ago.

When I had finished supper and taken a bath and come back to the room to drink tea, a young maid came and asked whether she should lay out the bedding.

What struck me as odd was that the receiving of me on arrival, the serving of supper, the guiding to the bath and the trouble of laying the bedding were all being done by this one young maid.

And she hardly ever spoke.

Yet she was not countrified either.

When she had tied her red sash without a trace of coquetry, lit an old-fashioned paper taper and taken me winding round and round through places that were neither corridor nor stair, and when with the same sash and the same taper she had led me down again and again through the same neither-corridor-nor-stair to the bath, I already felt that I was moving about inside a canvas.

At supper she said that as there had been no guests of late the other rooms were not swept, and would I put up with the room that was in ordinary use.

When she laid out the bedding she said, sleep well, in a human enough voice, and went out; but when her footsteps had gone gradually away downward along that twisting corridor and the silence came after, with no sense of any human presence, it made me uneasy.

In all my life I have had such an experience only once.

Long ago I once crossed Boshu from Tateyama to the far side and walked along the shore from Kazusa to Choshi.

One night on that journey I put up at a certain place.

A certain place is the only way I can put it.

By now I have wholly forgotten the name of the district and the name of the house.

In the first place it is a question whether I put up at an inn at all.

In a big house with a high ridge there were just two women.

When I asked whether they would put me up, the older one said yes, and the younger said this way, and led me on; and following her I passed through room after ruinous great room and was shown into a mezzanine chamber at the very back.

Climbing three steps and about to go from the passage into the room, I felt a clump of long bamboo that leaned in under the eaves catch the evening breeze and brush from my shoulder to my head, and that alone gave me a chill.

The boards of the veranda were already rotting.

When I said that next year the bamboo shoots would come up through the veranda and the room would be full of bamboo, the young woman said nothing, only grinned, and went out.

That night the bamboo rustled by my pillow and I could not sleep.

When I opened the paper screen, the garden was one field of grass; and as the summer moon was bright I let my eye run over it, and there was no fence and no wall — it ran straight on into a great hill of grass.

Beyond the grassy hill was the open sea, and the great waves came booming and booming to threaten the world of men.

In the end I did not sleep a wink until daybreak, but endured inside that dubious mosquito net, thinking that it was like something out of a cheap illustrated tale.

Since then I have made many journeys, but never once until tonight, here at Nakoi, have I felt like that again.

Lying on my back and happening to open my eyes, I saw a framed tablet with a vermilion-lacquered border hanging over the lintel.

Even lying down I could read the characters clearly: The bamboo's shadow sweeps the stone steps, yet no dust stirs.

The signature Daitetsu was plainly visible too.

I am a man with no judgment at all in calligraphy, but I have always been fond of the brushwork of the Obaku priest Kosen.

Ingen, Sokuhi and Mokuan each have their own interest, but Kosen's characters are the most weathered and strong, and elegant besides.

Looking at these seven characters now, from the way the brush meets the paper to the movement of the hand, I could take them for nobody's but Kosen's.

But since it plainly says Daitetsu, it must be someone else.

Possibly there was an Obaku priest named Daitetsu.

And yet the color of the paper is extremely fresh.

One can only take it for recent work.

I turned on my side.

My eye fell on Jakuchu's picture of a crane hanging in the alcove.

Being of the trade, I had recognized it as a fine piece the moment I entered the room.

Most of Jakuchu's paintings are minutely colored things, but this crane is a single-stroke drawing with no deference to the world at all; the way the egg-shaped body sits lightly on top of one leg planted straight down pleased me greatly, and the airy quality of it reaches to the very tip of the long beak.

Next to the alcove, the staggered shelves are dispensed with and it runs on into an ordinary cupboard.

What is inside the cupboard I do not know.

I fell peacefully asleep.

And dreamed.

The Maiden of Nagara, in long sleeves and mounted on a black horse, was crossing the pass, when out sprang Sasada and Sasabe and pulled at her from either side.

The woman suddenly became Ophelia, climbed onto a willow branch and, floating down the river, sang a song in a beautiful voice.

Meaning to save her, I took a long pole and went chasing her along Mukojima.

She showed no sign of distress and, laughing and singing, went down the stream to nobody knew where.

I shouldered the pole and shouted, hoy, hoy.

At that I woke.

There was sweat under my arms.

What an oddly mixed dream of the elegant and the common, I thought.

Long ago the Song master Daie said that after attaining enlightenment there was nothing he could not do as he pleased, but that in dreams alone worldly thoughts came out and troubled him, and that he was long distressed by this — and truly one can see why.

A man who makes literature and art his life cannot hold his own unless he dreams a little more beautifully than that.

Thinking that a dream like this would make neither picture nor poem for the most part, I turned over, and found that the moon had come onto the paper screen without my noticing and two or three branches were casting their shadows aslant.

It is a spring night clear enough to be cold.

Whether I imagined it or not, I felt that someone was singing a song in a low voice.

Wondering whether the song in my dream had slipped out into this world, or whether a voice of this world had strayed, still waking, into the far country of dreams, I listened closely.

Certainly somebody was singing.

It was a thin, low voice beyond a doubt, but it set one faint pulse beating in the spring night as it settled toward sleep.

The strange thing was that, whatever the tune, when I listened to the words — since she was not doing it beside my pillow, there was no way of making the words out —

what should have been inaudible was perfectly audible.

When autumn comes, like the dew that settles on the plume grass, so would I vanish away: such is my thought — it seemed she was repeating the Maiden of Nagara's song over and over.

At first the voice sounded close to the veranda, but little by little it grew thinner and went away.

What stops suddenly gives a sudden feeling, but there is little pathos in it.

In the heart of one who hears a voice cut clean off there arises, likewise, the feeling of something cut clean off.

But with a thing that thins away naturally with no break to it, and must vanish before one knows, I too shorten the seconds and divide the minutes, and the thinness of my forlornness grows thinner still.

Like an invalid about to die and about to die, like a lamp about to go out and about to go out, this song, which troubles the heart with will it stop now, will it stop now, has at the bottom of it a strain that gathers up all the regret of all the springs in the world.

Till then I had endured and listened from inside the bedding, but as the voice I listened to withdrew, my ears wanted to chase after it, knowing all the while that they were being lured out.

The thinner it grew, the more I felt I would fly after it, even if I were nothing but ears.

An instant before the point at which, however I strained, there could be no answer at my eardrum, I could bear it no longer, and slipping out of the bedding without knowing it I slid the paper screen open.

At once my legs from the knees down were bathed slantwise in moonlight.

The shadows of branches fell swaying on my nightclothes too.

When I opened the screen I noticed none of this.

Fixing the direction in which my ears were running — the voice was over there.

Against a trunk that might have been a flowering crab apple, standing aloof from the moonlight, was a dim shadow of a figure.

Before even the thought, is that it, had clearly formed in my mind, the black thing trod the shadow of the blossoms to pieces and cut away to the right.

The corner of the wing that continues from my room at once hid the tall woman's figure as it moved smoothly off.

In a borrowed cotton robe, holding onto the screen, I stood blankly a while; then, coming to myself, I understood that spring in a mountain village is a very cold thing.

At any rate, I got back into the hole in the bedding I had slipped out of and began to think.

Taking my watch out from under the round pillow, I saw that it was ten minutes past one.

I pushed it back under the pillow and began to think again.

Surely it was not a ghost.

If not a ghost, then a human being; and if a human being, a woman.

Possibly the young lady of the house.

But for a young lady come home from her marriage, to go out into a garden running up into the mountains in the middle of the night is not quite proper.

At any rate I could not get to sleep.

Even the watch under my pillow was ticking away at me.

I had never before minded the sound of a watch, but tonight of all nights it spoke as though urging me on — think now, think now — and advising me, do not sleep, do not sleep.

Outrageous.

Even a fearful thing, seen simply as the fearful thing itself, becomes a poem.

Even a ghastly thing, if one detaches oneself and thinks of it as ghastly in and of itself, becomes a picture.

That disappointed love should be a subject of art is exactly the same.

Because one forgets the pain of it and calls up before one's eyes, purely objectively, its tenderness, or the sympathy that lodges in it, or the sorrow it holds, or — to go a step further — the very overflowing of the pain itself, it becomes material for literature and art.

There are people in the world who invent a disappointed love that never existed, torment themselves of their own accord, and enjoy it.

Ordinary people call this foolish, or mad.

But to draw the outline of one's own misfortune and choose to live inside it is, in the artistic standpoint attained, exactly the same as drawing a landscape that does not exist and taking delight in a separate world inside a pot.

In this respect many of the world's artists (whatever they may be as ordinary men) are, as artists, more foolish and madder than ordinary people.

While we travel on foot we grumble from morning to night that it is hard, hard; but when we come to tell others of a journey long past, we show not the least sign of grumbling.

Not only the interesting and pleasant things, but even the old grievances we retail with an air of triumph and a look of satisfaction.

This is not from any notion of deceiving ourselves or cheating others.

While traveling one is in the frame of mind of an ordinary man, and in telling of an old journey one is already in the attitude of a poet; hence the contradiction.

That being so, one may call an artist a man who has worn away from the square world the corner that goes by the name of common sense, and lives inside the triangle.

So, whether in nature or in human affairs, in the very places where people of the world are sick of it and find it unapproachable, the artist sees countless beautiful jewels and knows treasure beyond price.

Commonly this is called beautification.

In truth it is nothing of the kind.

The light of brilliant color has plainly existed in the world of phenomena from of old.

Only, because there is a cloud on the eye, so that flowers that do not exist seem to fall in confusion; because the ties of the common world are too strong to be cut; because honor and disgrace, gain and loss press upon one urgently moment by moment — we fail to understand the beauty of a train until Turner paints one, and pass our lives not knowing the beauty of a ghost until Okyo paints one.

The shadowy figure I have just seen too, taken as no more than that phenomenon, is richly poetic to anyone who sees it or hears of it.—

A hot spring in a village far from anywhere — the shadow of blossoms on a spring evening — a low humming under the moon — a figure on a hazy night: every one of them is a fine subject for an artist.

And with this fine subject before my eyes, I go poking about with needless inquiry and throw in unnecessary probing.

A line of argument has been drawn across a rare and elegant scene, and an uncanny feeling has trampled down an elegance one could not have wished for.

If it comes to this, my freedom from human feeling is not worth hanging out as a signboard.

Unless I train myself further, I shall have no right to go about telling people that I am a poet or a painter.

I have heard that long ago the Italian painter Salvator Rosa, in his eagerness to study thieves, risked his own safety and got in among a band of brigands.

Having wandered out of the house with a sketchbook in my breast, it is shameful if I have not that much resolve.

As to how one returns to the poetic standpoint at such a time: one has only to set the feeling itself out before one, step back from it a pace, and make room enough to examine it calmly and as it is, as though it belonged to somebody else.

A poet is under an obligation to dissect his own corpse and publish its symptoms to the world.

There are various means, but the handiest of all is to take whatever comes and try to fold it into seventeen syllables.

Seventeen syllables is the lightest of poetic forms, so it can easily be done while washing one's face, or in the privy, or on the tram.

To say that seventeen syllables can easily be done means that one can easily become a poet, and since becoming a poet is a kind of enlightenment, there is no need to despise it for being easy.

The easier it is the greater the merit, so I think it should rather be honored.

Suppose one is a little angry.

One puts the anger straight into seventeen syllables.

In the act of putting it into seventeen syllables, one's own anger has already turned into someone else's.

One man cannot be angry and make a haiku both at once.

One sheds a tear.

One puts that tear into seventeen syllables.

No sooner done than one is glad.

By the time the tear is folded into seventeen syllables the tear of pain has left one, and one is nothing but the gladness of being a man who can weep.

This has long been my contention.

Thinking I would put the contention into practice tonight as well, I worked the affair over in verse inside the bedding.

Since it would grow diffuse unless I wrote them down as they came, and since this was training in earnest, I opened the sketchbook and set it by my pillow.

"Shaking the dew from the crab apple — a madwoman"

I wrote first, and reading it over found nothing particularly good in it, but nothing uncanny either.

Next, "The shadow of blossom, the shadow of a woman — how hazy"

But this had two season words in it.

Never mind; anything will do so long as the mind settles and grows easy.

Then "A deity of the First Rank, changed into a woman — the hazy moon"

But this came out like a comic verse, and even to me it seemed absurd.

At this rate I shall do, I thought, warming to it, and I wrote down every verse that came.

Bringing down a star of spring for a hair ornament at midnight

Spring night — she wets in the clouds her newly washed hair

Spring, and this evening a figure offering up a song

A moonlit night on which the spirit of the crab apple comes out

Her song now and again, and the spring under the moon moving here and there

Cutting it short, the spring wears late — and I am alone

While I tried these over, I grew drowsy without noticing it.

Entranced is, I think, the adjective one ought to use for such a case.

In deep sleep, no one can recognize himself.

Wide awake, no one forgets the outer world.

Only, between the two there lies a phantom borderland fine as a thread.

Too dim to be called waking, with a little too much life in it to be called sleeping.

It is the state of having the waking world and the sleeping world poured into one jar and stirred steadily with the coloring brush of poetry.

The colors of nature are blurred to the very edge of dream, and the universe as it is is pushed one stage into the land of haze.

Borrowing the uncanny arm of the god of sleep, one smooths away the corners of every reality, and at the same time sends one's own faint, slow pulse through the heaven and earth so softened.

It is like smoke crawling along the ground, trying to fly and unable to; my soul tries to leave my shell and cannot bear to leave it.

It tries to slip out and hesitates, hesitates and tries again, and at last, unable to hold the individual thing called a soul together by force, a hazelike vapor clings, without seeming to disperse, to my limbs and my whole body, and the feeling is of regret and longing.

While I was wandering thus on the border of neither sleeping nor waking, the papered door at the entrance slid softly open.

In the opening the shadow of a woman appeared, faint as an apparition.

I was not startled.

Nor afraid.

I simply watched with pleasure.

To say watched is putting it a little too strongly.

The phantom woman had slipped, without leave, behind my closed eyelids.

The phantom came softly, softly into the room.

Like a fairy crossing the waves, she made no human sound on the matting.

Since it was a world seen from within closed eyes I could not make it out clearly, but she was a woman with white skin, thick hair and a long nape.

It was like holding one of the soft-focus photographs now in fashion up to the light.

The phantom stopped before the cupboard.

The cupboard opened.

A white arm slid from the sleeve and gleamed faintly in the darkness.

The cupboard shut again.

The waves of the matting carried the phantom back of themselves.

The papered door at the entrance closed by itself.

My sleep grew deeper by degrees.

The state of a man who has died and is not yet reborn as ox or horse must be something like this.

How long I slept between man and horse I do not know.

I thought I heard a woman's laugh close to my ear, and woke.

The curtain of night had long since been dropped, and the world was bright from corner to corner.

Seeing how the serene spring sun printed the bamboo lattice of the round window in black, one felt there could be no room left in the world for anything mysterious.

The mystery must have gone home to the far Pure Land and crossed to the other side of the River of Three Crossings.

I went down to the bath in my cotton robe and floated my face in the tub for about five minutes, doing nothing.

I had no mind either to wash or to get out.

In the first place, how had I come to feel as I did last night?

It is strange that heaven and earth should turn over like this with the boundary of day and night.

Even drying myself was too much trouble, so I did it anyhow, and getting out still wet I opened the bathroom door from the inside — and was startled again.

"Good morning. Did you sleep well last night?"

The opening of the door and these words came almost together.

Since it was a greeting sprung on me when I had not even expected anyone to be there, before an answer could come out of me on the instant,

"There, put this on."

and going round behind me she laid a soft garment lightly over my back.

At last I got out, "Ah, thank you…"

and turned round, and at that moment the woman drew back two or three steps.

From of old it has been the settled rule that a novelist must describe his hero's or heroine's looks with all his might.

If one listed all the words of all times and countries that have been used in appraising a beauty, they might rival the Buddhist canon in bulk.

There is no telling how many terms one could gather from this wearisome mass of adjectives to describe most fitly the woman who stood three paces from me, her body turned aside, watching my surprise and confusion out of the corner of her eye with evident enjoyment.

But in the thirty-odd years since I was born, I had never yet seen such an expression.

According to the critics of art, the ideal of Greek sculpture comes down to the two words: grave repose.

By grave repose I take it is meant the human vital force about to move and not yet moving.

Because it is impossible to tell how it will change when it moves — into wind and cloud, or into thunder — a lingering resonance hovers dimly there, and so a suggestive quality is handed down a hundred generations.

Most of the dignity and majesty in this world lies hidden behind such quietly brimming possibility.

Move, and it appears.

Once it appears it is one thing or two or three, and is certainly settled.

One and two and three are all no doubt particular powers; but once it has become one, or two, or three, it shows in full the meanness of a thing smeared with mud and trailing water, and there is no going back to the original perfect shape.

So whatever goes by the name of movement is necessarily mean.

Unkei's guardian kings and Hokusai's sketches both fail entirely on this one word, movement.

Movement or stillness?

This is the great question that governs the fate of us painters.

From of old, nearly every description of a beautiful woman ought to be assignable to one of these two great frames.

But looking at this woman's expression, I was at a loss to judge which it was.

Her mouth was closed in a straight line and still.

Her eyes were in motion, as though bent on finding the smallest opening.

Her face was an oval full toward the chin, showing an ample calm; but against that her forehead was cramped and fussy, with the commonness of what is called a Fuji brow.

Not only that, but her eyebrows pressed in from both sides and twitched irritably, as though a few drops of peppermint had been let fall between them.

Only the nose was neither flippantly sharp nor dully round.

Painted, it would be beautiful.

With such scattered features, each with its own quirk, all tumbling out of tune into my two eyes at once, no wonder I was at a loss.

Suppose a corner of the earth, which ought by nature to be still, gives way, so that the whole is jolted into motion; and understanding that to move is against its nature it strives to return to its old shape, but is overborne by the momentum of lost balance and has gone on moving against its will, until today, out of desperation, it seems to say, very well, then I shall move on purpose — if such a state can exist, it would describe this woman exactly.

So behind the contemptuous expression there is something that looks as though it wanted to cling to somebody.

At the bottom of the air of making a fool of one, a modest good sense glimmers.

From beneath a force that, given rein to her wit and her pride, would count a hundred men as nothing, a docile tenderness wells up without her knowing it.

There is no unity at all in the expression.

It is enlightenment and delusion living in one house and quarreling as they live.

That there is no sense of unity in this woman's face is proof that there is none in her heart, and that there is none in her heart must be because there was none in her world.

It is the face of one pressed down by misfortune and trying to master that misfortune.

An unlucky woman, no doubt of it.

"Thank you,"

I said again, and made a slight bow.

"Ho ho ho ho, your room has been swept. Go and look at it. Until later, then."

and no sooner said than she turned lightly on her hip and went off down the corridor at a nimble run.

Her hair was dressed in the ginkgo-leaf style.

A white under-collar showed beneath the swell at the nape.

The black satin of her sash must be on one side only.

Four

Going back absently to my room, I found that it had indeed been neatly swept.

Being a little uneasy, I opened the cupboard to make sure.

Below there was a small chest of drawers.

That a Yuzen-dyed sash cord hung half out from above could be taken to mean that someone had pulled out some clothing and gone off in a hurry.

The upper part of the cord was hidden among voluptuous garments, and its end was out of sight.

On one side a few books were packed in.

At the very top the priest Hakuin's Orategama and a volume of the Tales of Ise stood side by side.

I thought that last night's half-waking vision might be fact after all.

Sitting down carelessly on the cushion, I found my sketchbook on the rosewood desk, opened as though with care, the pencil still between its pages.

Wondering how the verses I had scribbled in my daze would look in the morning, I picked it up.

Under "Shaking the dew from the crab apple — a madwoman"

somebody had written "Shaking the dew from the crab apple — a morning crow."

That was what was written there.

Being in pencil the hand was not clear, but it was too hard for a woman's and too soft for a man's.

Well, well, I thought, startled again.

Looking further, under "The shadow of blossom, the shadow of a woman — how hazy"

was added "The shadow of blossom and the shadow of a woman lay one upon the other."

That was the addition.

Under "A deity of the First Rank, changed into a woman — the hazy moon"

stood "A young lord changed into a woman — the hazy moon."

So it read.

Whether she meant to imitate, or to correct, or as a courtesy between lovers of elegance, or whether she was a fool, or was making a fool of me, I could not help tilting my head over it.

She had said until later, so perhaps she would appear at mealtime.

If she did, I should understand a little more.

By the way, what time was it? I looked at my watch: past eleven already.

I had slept well.

At this rate it would be better for my stomach to make do with luncheon alone.

I opened the screen on the right side and looked out to see whereabouts last night's traces were.

What I had taken for a crab apple was indeed a crab apple, but the garden was smaller than I had thought.

Green moss covered the five or six stepping stones entirely, and it would surely be pleasant to tread on them barefoot.

To the left was the cliff running up into the hills, and a red pine leaned out over the garden from among the rocks.

Behind the crab apple was a little thicket, and beyond that a great bamboo grove spread a hundred feet of green to the spring sun.

To the right the ridge of the roof cut off the view, but judging by the lie of the land it must slope gently down toward the bathhouse.

The mountains end in hills, the hills end in a level strip some three hundred yards wide, the level ground ends by diving under the sea, and seventeen ri out it swells and rises again as the island of Maya, six ri around.

Such is the lie of the land at Nakoi.

The hot spring inn is built at the foot of the hill as close as possible to the cliff, and is so laid out that half the view of the sheer slope is enclosed in the garden; so what is two storeys at the front is one storey at the back.

Dangle one's feet from the veranda and one's heels touch the moss at once.

No wonder I went endlessly up and down the stairs last night and thought it a house of strange contrivance.

Next I opened the window on the left side.

In a natural hollow of rock about the size of two mats, spring water had gathered without one's noticing and quietly steeped the shadow of a mountain cherry.

Two or three clumps of bear bamboo set off the corners of the rock. Beyond was a hedge that looked like Chinese matrimony vine, and outside it must be the cliff path that climbs from the beach to the hill, for now and then one heard voices.

Beyond the path, mandarin oranges were planted on a gentle southward slope, and where the valley ended another great bamboo grove shone white.

That bamboo leaves shine white when seen from a distance I learned then for the first time.

Above the grove was a hill full of pines, and between the red trunks five or six stone steps could be seen as though within reach.

A temple, most likely.

Opening the sliding door at the entrance and going out onto the veranda, I found the balustrade turning at a right angle, and where by the compass the sea ought to be visible there was a room in the front upper storey across an inner court.

It amused me to think that my own room too, if one went to the balustrade, was an upper storey of the same height.

Since the bath is below ground level, in point of bathing I am living and sleeping on the third floor.

The house is very large, but apart from the one room in the upper storey opposite and the one room round to the right along the balustrade from my own, everything that might be called a guest room — whatever the living quarters and the kitchen may be — is shut up.

There can hardly be a guest here besides myself.

The closed rooms do not have their shutters opened even by day, and once opened they seem not to be closed even at night.

One cannot even tell whether the front of the house is locked or not.

For a journey free of human feeling it is a faultless place, made to order.

The clock came near noon, but there was no sign whatever of anyone giving me a meal.

I began at last to feel hungry, but remembering that there is a line of poetry that runs, in the empty mountain no man is seen, I had no complaint about going short of one meal.

Painting is too much trouble. I need not make haiku, for I am already in the very absorption of haiku, and to make them would be gross.

The two or three books I had strapped to my folding stool meaning to read, I had no mind to untie.

To lie thus on the veranda among the shadows of blossom, toasting my back in the warm spring sun, is the greatest happiness on earth.

To think is to fall into heresy.

To move is dangerous.

If I could, I would not even breathe through my nose.

I should like to live for a fortnight as still as a plant rooted in the matting.

Presently there were footsteps in the corridor, and somebody came up gradually from below.

Listening as they came nearer, it seemed there were two of them.

Just as I thought they had stopped in front of my room, one of them went back the way she had come without a word.

The sliding door opened, and thinking it might be the woman of that morning, I found it was the same young maid as last night.

Somehow I felt let down.

"I am late."

she said, setting down the tray.

She offered no excuse whatever about breakfast.

There was grilled fish garnished with something green, and when I took the lid off the bowl there were prawns dyed red and white sunk among young bracken shoots.

Ah, what a good color, I thought, and gazed into the bowl.

"Do you dislike it?"

asked the maid.

"No, I shall eat it presently."

I said; but in truth it seemed a shame to eat it.

I once read in some book the anecdote that Turner, at a dinner, stared at the salad on his plate and said to his neighbor, a cool color; this is the color I use — and I should rather like to show Turner the color of these prawns and bracken.

On the whole there is not one Western dish with a good color in it.

If there is, it is salad and red radish, and that is about all.

How it may be in point of nourishment I do not know, but from the painter's side it is a very undeveloped cuisine.

In that respect the Japanese bill of fare, whether soup or hors d'oeuvres or raw fish, is neatly made.

Even if one sits before a banquet tray, gazes without touching a chopstick to it and goes home, one has had value enough for going to a teahouse, so far as feasting the eyes goes.

"There is a young woman in the house, is there not?"

I asked, setting down the bowl.

"Yes."

"Who is she?"

"She is the young mistress."

"Is there an older mistress besides her?"

"She died last year."

"And the master?"

"He is here. She is the master's daughter."

"That young woman?"

"Yes."

"Are there any guests?"

"There are none."

"Only myself?"

"Yes."

"What does the young mistress do all day?"

"Sewing…"

"And what else?"

"She plays the samisen."

This was unexpected.

It amused me, so I asked again,

"And what else?"

That was my question.

"She goes to the temple."

said the young maid.

This was unexpected again.

The temple and the samisen are an odd pair.

"Does she go to worship?"

"No, she goes to the priest."

"Is the priest learning the samisen or something?"

"No."

"Then what does she go for?"

"She goes to Master Daitetsu."

So Daitetsu must be the man who wrote the tablet.

Judging from the phrase, he seems to be a Zen priest.

The Orategama in the cupboard must certainly be that woman's.

"Is this room one that somebody usually occupies?"

"The mistress is usually here."

"Then she was here until I came last night."

"Yes."

"That was too bad of me. And what does she go to Master Daitetsu for?"

"I do not know."

"And what else?"

"What might that be?"

"And besides, she must do something else."

"And besides, all sorts of things…"

"All sorts of things — what sort?"

"I do not know."

There the conversation broke off.

At last the meal came to an end.

When the young maid opened the sliding door at the entrance to take away the tray, there beyond the shrubbery of the inner court, at the balustrade of the upper storey opposite, the woman with the ginkgo-leaf coiffure sat with her chin on her hand, gazing down like a Kannon of the willow branch grown up in the age of enlightenment.

It was a very quiet figure, quite unlike this morning.

Can it be that because she looked down, and the working of her eyes did not reach me, her face seemed so far changed?

The ancients said, they tell us, that of all a man has there is nothing better than the pupil of the eye; and truly, how should a man hide his real heart? Of all human instruments there is none so alive as the eye.

From under the balustrade with its Chinese-character lattice on which she leaned so quietly, two butterflies came fluttering up, now together, now apart.

At that very moment the sliding door of my room was opened.

At the sound the woman suddenly turned her eyes from the butterflies to me.

The look pierced the air like a poisoned arrow and, with no greeting, fell between my brows.

Before I could catch my breath the young maid slid the door shut with a clatter again.

After that it became a wholly easygoing spring.

I lay down flat once more.

What came suddenly into my mind was the lines,

Sadder than is the moon's lost light,

Lost ere the kindling of dawn,

To travellers journeying on,

The shutting of thy fair face from my sight.

Those were the lines.

If I were in love with that ginkgo-leaf coiffure and bent on meeting her though it broke me, and if such a parting after a single glance as I had just had struck me as joyful or as galling enough to take my soul away, I should certainly put such a meaning into such a poem.

And on top of that I might well have added the two lines,

Might I look on thee in death,

With bliss I would yield my breath.

I might well have added them.

Fortunately, I have already passed beyond the ordinary condition of what is called love or affection, so that I could not feel such pain if I wanted to.

But the poetic quality of what happened in that instant is richly present in these five or six lines.

Even if there is no such anguish between me and the woman with the ginkgo-leaf coiffure, it is amusing to fit our present relation into the poem.

Or it is pleasant to take the sense of the poem and read it into our own case.

Between us, on a thin thread of karma, some part of the situation the poem describes is bound fast as a fact.

When karma's thread is as thin as this, it is no trouble.

And it is no ordinary thread, besides.

It is the rainbow's thread across the sky, the thread of haze trailing over the fields, the spider's thread shining with dew.

Try to break it and it breaks at once; while one looks at it, it is beautiful beyond anything.

But what if this thread should thicken as one watched and grow as stout as a well rope?

There is no such danger.

I am a painter.

And the other party is no ordinary woman.

Suddenly the sliding door opened.

Turning over and looking toward the entrance, I saw that very woman of the ginkgo-leaf coiffure, my partner in karma, standing on the threshold with a celadon bowl on a tray.

"Lying down again? You must have been put out last night. I disturbed you so many times — ho ho ho ho."

she laughed.

There was no sign of diffidence, no sign of concealment — and of course no sign of shame.

It was simply that she had got in ahead of me.

"Thank you for this morning."

I said, thanking her again.

Come to think of it, that made three times I had thanked her for the padded gown.

And all three times it was nothing but the one word, thank you.

The woman had already sat down by my pillow as I was trying to get up.

"Stay lying down. We can talk while you lie down."

she said, in the friendliest way.

I thought she was quite right, so for the moment I lay on my stomach, propped my chin in my hands, and set up the pillars of my elbows on the matting.

"I thought you must be bored, so I have come to make tea."

"Thank you."

Out came thank you again.

Looking into the sweet dish, I saw fine slabs of bean jelly laid out.

Of all sweets, bean jelly is what I like best.

I did not particularly want to eat it, but the way that texture takes the light — smooth, close-grained and half translucent — makes it, however you look at it, a work of art.

The bluish kind especially, in the way it is worked, is like a cross between jade and agalmatolite, and very pleasant to look at.

Not only that, but blue bean jelly heaped in a celadon dish looks as glossy as if it had just been born out of the celadon, and one wants to put out a hand and stroke it.

There is not one Western sweet that gives so much pleasure.

The color of cream is soft enough, but it is a little heavy.

Jelly looks at a glance like a jewel, but it trembles and has none of the weight of bean jelly.

As for building a five-storeyed pagoda out of white sugar and milk, that is beyond all speech.

"Yes, it is very fine."

"Genbei bought it and brought it back just now. This at least you will be able to eat."

So Genbei must have stayed the night in the castle town.

I made no particular answer, but looked at the bean jelly.

Where or by whom it was bought does not matter.

If only it is beautiful, it is quite enough merely to think it beautiful.

"The shape of this celadon is very good. The color is fine too. It hardly suffers by comparison with the bean jelly."

The woman gave a snorting laugh.

A faint ripple of scorn moved at the corner of her mouth.

She must have taken my words for a joke.

And indeed, taken as a joke, they certainly deserved contempt.

When a man of no great wit forces himself to be witty, this is just the sort of thing he says.

"Is this Chinese?"

"Is what?"

the other answered, with the celadon quite outside her field of view.

"It looks Chinese to me."

I said, lifting the dish and looking at the bottom.

"If you care for such things, shall I show you some?"

"Yes, please do."

"My father is very fond of curios, so we have a great many of them. I shall tell him and one of these days we shall give you tea."

At the word tea I flinched a little.

There is no man of taste in the world so pompous as a tea master.

To stake out a deliberately cramped preserve in the wide world of poetry, and then, with the utmost self-importance, the utmost affectation and the utmost pettiness, to shrink oneself up in a posture of reverence, drink froth and pronounce it excellent — that is your tea master.

If elegance lay in such vexatious rules, then the barracks at Azabu must be so thick with elegance that one could not breathe.

The right-about-face, forward-march men must every one of them be great tea masters.

That business is an art invented by merchants and townsmen, people with no education in taste at all, who, having no notion of what elegance consists in, swallow the post-Rikyu rules mechanically, decide that this must be roughly what elegance is, and then use it to make fools of the truly elegant.

"When you say tea, do you mean the tea with all the schools to it?"

"No, there is no school or anything about it. It is tea you need not drink if you do not like it."

"In that case I may as well drink some while I am here."

"Ho ho ho ho. My father does so love having people look at his things…"

"Must I praise them?"

"He is an old man; praise them and he will be pleased."

"Well, I shall praise them a little."

"Give in and praise them a great deal."

"Ha ha ha ha. By the way, your speech is not countrified."

"Is the person countrified, then?"

"The person is better for being countrified."

"Then I shall get on well enough."

"But you have lived in Tokyo, surely."

"Yes, I have. I have lived in Kyoto too. I am a wanderer, so I have lived all over."

"Which is better, here or the city?"

"They are the same."

"A quiet place like this must be the easier, though."

"Easy or not easy, the world is whatever one's frame of mind makes of it. If you tire of the land of fleas, it is no use moving to the land of mosquitoes."

"Then a country with neither fleas nor mosquitoes would do."

"If there is such a country, produce it here. Come, produce it."

said the woman, pressing me.

"If you wish it, I shall produce one."

and taking my sketchbook I drew the feeling of a woman on horseback looking at mountain cherry — of course, being dashed off on the spot, it did not amount to a picture.

I merely scribbled the feeling of it and said,

"There, step into this. There are no fleas and no mosquitoes."

and thrust it under her nose.

Would she be startled, or embarrassed? Judging by her manner she would hardly be distressed; and as I watched to see,

"Dear me, what a cramped world — nothing but width, is it? So that is the sort of place you like. Just like a crab."

she said, and there was an end of it.

I said,

"Wa ha ha ha ha."

and laughed.

A bush warbler that had begun to sing near the eaves broke off in the middle and moved away from branch to branch.

We deliberately stopped talking and listened a while, but a throat that has once fumbled its song does not easily open again.

"You met Genbei on the mountain yesterday, I think."

"Yes."

"Did you see the five-ringed stone of the Maiden of Nagara?"

"Yes."

"When autumn comes, like the dew that settles on the plume grass, so would I vanish away: such is my thought."

With no explanation, and without so much as a tune to it, the woman simply recited the song.

What it was for I could not tell.

"That song — I heard it at the teahouse."

"Did the old woman teach it to you? She was once in service at our house, when I was still a bride…"

she began, and then looked at my face as though to say, now then; so I pretended to know nothing.

"When I was still young, every time she came I used to tell her the story of Nagara. The song alone she was slow to learn, but by hearing it over and over she came at last to be able to say the whole of it by heart."

"No wonder — I thought she knew some difficult things. But it is a pitiful song."

"Is it pitiful? I should never compose such a song. In the first place, throwing oneself into a pool or a river is a silly business, is it not?"

"True enough, it is silly. What would you have done?"

"What would I have done? It is simple enough. I should have taken both Sasada and Sasabe as my kept men, that is all."

"Both of them?"

"Yes."

"Splendid."

"Not splendid; only natural."

"Indeed; then you need jump neither into the land of mosquitoes nor into the land of fleas."

"One can live without having to feel like a crab."

Ho-o, hokekyo — the warbler I had half forgotten, having somehow gathered its strength again, suddenly struck up a high note out of season.

Once it has recovered itself, the rest seems to come of its own accord.

Turning itself upside down, shaking the depths of its swelling throat, its small beak stretched almost to bursting,

ho-o, hokekyo-o.

Ho-o-, hokek-kyo-o — it sang on and on without a pause.

"That is a real song."

said the woman, instructing me.

Five

"Begging your pardon, sir, but you would be from Tokyo, I take it?"

"Do I look it?"

"Look it, he says — one glance and — well, for a start, it is in the way you talk."

"Can you tell what part of Tokyo?"

"Let me see. Tokyo is a monstrous big place. — It is not the lower town, seemingly. It is the uptown. Uptown — Kojimachi, is it? Eh? Koishikawa, then? If not that, Ushigome or Yotsuya."

"Something like that, I dare say. You know your business."

"For all I look like this, I am a child of Edo myself."

"No wonder I thought you had a smart air."

"Eh heh heh heh. Not a bit of it. When a man comes down to this, sir, it is a wretched thing."

"And what brought you drifting into a country place like this?"

"Right you are, sir, just as you say. Drifted is the very word. I was clean out of a living…"

"Were you a master barber from the first?"

"Not a master, a journeyman. Eh? Whereabouts? Kanda Matsunagacho, that is where. A poky little dirty place no bigger than a cat's forehead. You would not know it, sir. There is a bridge there called Ryukanbashi. Eh? Do you not know that either? Ryukanbashi is a bridge with a name to it."

"Here, put a little more soap on, will you? It hurts."

"Does it hurt, sir? I am a particular man, and I am never satisfied unless I go against the grain like this and dig out every whisker one by one. — Your journeymen nowadays do not shave, they stroke. A bit more; bear with it."

"I have borne with it a good while already. For pity's sake put on a little hot water or soap."

"Cannot bear it, eh? It ought not to hurt so much. The truth is your beard has grown out too long."

The master let go, with evident regret, of the hand with which he had been pinching up my cheek, took a thin cake of red soap down from the shelf, dipped it for a moment in the water, and with that rubbed it over my whole face.

It is not often that bare soap has been rubbed onto my face.

And when I considered how many days ago the water it was wetted in had been drawn and left standing, it was not a pleasant thought.

Since this was after all a barber's shop, it was my right as a customer to face a mirror.

But for some time now I had been wanting to renounce that right.

A mirror is a thing made flat, and it owes it to us to reflect a face smoothly.

If one hangs up a mirror that lacks this quality and compels a man to face it, then the compeller, like a bad photographer, must be said to have damaged the sitter's looks on purpose.

To crush a man's vanity may be a kind of expedient in self-cultivation, but there is no need to insult him by showing him a face below his real worth and saying, this is you.

The mirror I was now obliged to endure facing had certainly been insulting me for some time.

Turn to the right, and the whole face becomes nose.

Show it the left, and the mouth splits open to the ear.

Look up, and one is squashed flat like a toad seen from the front; stoop a little, and the head bulges out like a child of the long-headed god of fortune.

So long as one is before this mirror, one must play the part of several monsters at once.

That the face reflected is not artistic one might put up with; but taking together the make of the mirror, its coloring, and the way the silvering has flaked off so that the light comes through, the thing itself is ugliness in the extreme.

When one is abused by a worthless man, the abuse itself is neither here nor there; but if one had to live and sleep in front of that worthless man, anyone would find it disagreeable.

On top of that, this master is no ordinary master.

Looking in from outside, he had seemed thoroughly bored, sitting cross-legged with a long pipe and blowing smoke at a toy flag of the Anglo-Japanese alliance; but when I came in and entrusted my head to his handling, I was astonished.

So mercilessly was I handled that I began to wonder whether, while he shaved, the ownership of my head lay entirely with him or whether some part of it still remained with me.

Even granting that my head is nailed onto my shoulders, it could not stand this for long.

In wielding the razor he has no understanding whatever of the laws of civilization.

When it struck my cheek there was a rasping sound.

At the sideburns an artery gave a thrilling twinge.

When the keen blade flashed about my chin there came a queer noise, gori-gori, gori-gori, like treading down frost pillars.

And the man rates himself the finest barber in Japan.

And last of all, he is drunk.

Every time he says "sir" there is an odd smell.

Now and then he breathes a strange gas onto the bridge of my nose.