蜜柑 English

It was a certain overcast winter evening.

I sat hunched in a corner of a second-class car bound up from Yokosuka, absently waiting for the whistle that would signal departure.

Inside the car, where the electric lights had long since come on, there was, unusually, not a single other passenger besides me.

Peering outside, even the dim platform was, unusually for this day, entirely deserted of anyone come to see a traveler off, and only a small dog shut in a cage was barking mournfully from time to time.

These things were a scene strangely well suited to my state of mind at that moment.

An indescribable weariness and tedium had settled over my mind like a leaden shadow, just like a sky heavy with snow clouds.

With both hands thrust deep into my overcoat pockets, I could not summon even the energy to take out the evening paper that was in there and look at it.

But presently the departure whistle blew.

Feeling a faint easing of my heart, I rested my head against the window frame behind me and waited, not quite waiting, for the station before my eyes to begin its sluggish retreat.

But before that could happen, a clatter of wooden rain-clogs rang out from the direction of the ticket gate, and almost at once, amid the conductor's scolding shouts, the door of the second-class compartment I was riding slid open with a crash, and a girl of about thirteen or fourteen hurried in—at the same moment the train gave one heavy lurch and slowly began to move.

The platform pillars ticking past one by one, a water cart that looked left behind, and a red-capped porter calling out his thanks for a tip to someone inside the car—all of these, amid the soot blowing against the windows, toppled backward with a lingering air and were gone.

At last feeling something like relief, I lit a cigarette and, raising heavy-lidded eyes for the first time, took a brief glance at the face of the girl seated in the seat across from me.

She was an unmistakably country girl, with lusterless hair pulled tight into a ginkgo-leaf coil, her cracked and chapped cheeks—bearing the traces of a cross-wise rub—flushed a disagreeably vivid red.

And on her lap, beneath a grimy yellow-green wool muffler that drooped loosely down, sat a large bundle wrapped in a cloth.

In her chilblained hands, which clutched that bundle, a red third-class ticket was gripped tight, as though it were something precious.

I did not care for this girl's common-looking features.

The dirtiness of her clothes also displeased me.

And finally, the dull-wittedness that could not even distinguish between second and third class irritated me.

So having lit my cigarette, partly wishing to forget the girl's existence, I now took the evening paper from my pocket and spread it idly across my knees.

Just then the outside light that had been falling on the newspaper's surface suddenly changed to electric light, and the poorly printed type in several columns floated up before my eyes with unexpected clarity.

Needless to say, the train had now entered the first of the many tunnels on the Yokosuka line.

Yet even scanning the pages of the evening paper by that electric light, the world was filled, as before, with nothing but the most commonplace events—far too unremarkable to console my melancholy.

Peace negotiations, a bride and groom, a corruption case, a death notice—for one instant as we entered the tunnel I felt the strange illusion that the train was running in reverse, and I passed my eyes almost mechanically from one bleak article to the next.

Yet all the while I could not help being constantly aware that the girl, sitting before me with the air of someone who had been made the embodiment of vulgar reality, was there.

This train inside a tunnel, this country girl, and this evening paper buried in its commonplace news—what were these if not a symbol?

What were they if not a symbol of incomprehensible, low, and tedious human life?

Everything suddenly seemed worthless; I flung down the half-read newspaper and, resting my head once more against the window frame, closed my eyes as though dead and began to drift into a doze.

Some time passed.

I felt suddenly as though something had startled me, and looked up involuntarily—and at some point the girl had moved from the opposite seat to the one next to me and was persistently trying to open the window.

But the heavy glass pane seemed not to rise as easily as she wished.

Those chapped cheeks grew redder than ever, and the sound of her sniffling, together with small breathless gasps, kept entering my ears in quick succession.

This was certainly not without a degree of sympathy-inspiring quality for me as well.

But that the train was now about to enter the mouth of a tunnel could be readily understood from the slopes on either side, where only the dead grass stood bright in the fading dusk, closing in close to the windows.

And yet this girl was trying to lower the window that was deliberately shut—the reason for it was beyond my comprehension.

No, it could only strike me as a mere whim of hers.

So, with harsh feeling still harbored deep in my chest, I watched those chilblained hands struggling to raise the glass pane with cold, cruel eyes—as though I were praying it would never succeed.

Then, with a tremendous roaring sound, the moment the train plunged headlong into the tunnel, the glass pane the girl had been trying to open finally dropped down with a thud.

And through that square opening, a dark, sooty air like dissolved soot abruptly poured in as suffocating smoke and billowed in dense clouds into the car.

As it happened, I had been suffering from a throat ailment, and with no time even to press my handkerchief to my face, I had this smoke driven full into my face and was forced to cough so badly I could scarcely breathe.

But the girl showed no sign of caring about me; she thrust her head out the window, letting the wind blowing through the dark stir the side-locks of her ginkgo coil, and fixed her gaze on the direction in which the train was running.

When I saw her figure amid the soot and the electric light, had the outside of the window not at that moment grown visibly brighter, with the cool scents of earth and dead grass and water flowing in, then I—having finally stopped coughing—would surely have scolded this unknown girl outright and made her close the window again.

But by that time the train had already glided smoothly out of the tunnel and was passing a railway crossing at the edge of some poor little town hemmed in between hills of withered grass.

Near the crossing, a jumble of shabby thatched and tiled roofs were crowded together in cramped disorder, and what must have been the crossing-keeper's single white flag waved languidly in the fading light.

Just out of the tunnel—or so it seemed—at that moment I saw, beyond the desolate crossing gate, three rosy-cheeked boys standing pressed together in a row.

They were all, as if crushed down by the overcast sky, uniformly small in stature.

And they wore clothes of the same dreary color as the gloomy outskirts of this town.

As they looked up watching the train pass, the moment they raised their hands in unison, they flung their tender throats high back and burst forth with all their might into some cry whose meaning was unclear.

And at that instant—

The girl who had been leaning half her body out the window suddenly stretched out those chilblained hands and swung them vigorously to left and right, and immediately five or six mandarins dyed in a warm and heartening color of sunlight came tumbling down from the sky upon the children who had seen the train off.

I caught my breath involuntarily.

And in that instant I understood everything.

The girl—most likely on her way now to a place of service—had thrown the mandarins she had hidden in her breast out the window, to repay her younger brothers who had come all the way to the crossing to see her off.

The railway crossing at the edge of town in the fading dusk, the three children who had raised their voices like small birds, and above them the vivid color of the mandarins scattered falling—all of it swept past outside the train window in less time than a blink.

But on my heart, with painful clarity, that scene had been seared.

And I was conscious of a certain inexplicable brightness of feeling welling up from it.

I raised my head with a lifted spirit and gazed at the girl as though seeing an entirely different person.

The girl had already returned to the seat before me, and with her same chapped cheeks buried in the yellow-green wool muffler, she gripped her third-class ticket firmly in the hand that held the large cloth-wrapped bundle.…………

It was only then, for the first time, that I was able to forget, if only briefly, the indescribable weariness and tedium, and that incomprehensible, low, and tedious human life.