Authors: Ogai Mori
Directly above me clusters of trumpet flowers were blooming as if aflame. The cries of the locusts were vigorous, energetic. There were no other sounds. It was the hour when the great god Pan still sleeps. I pictured to myself a multitude of images.
Afterwards, even when I talked things over with Eiichi, I never mentioned anything to him about his mother.
*
*
*
After the final exams at the close of the past year there had been such a great weeding out of students that each class had some members who left school. The majority of these sacrificial candidates were mashers. Even little Hanyu was eliminated along with the others.
Henmi also dropped out of school. But only recently had he suddenly turned into a masher, lengthening his kimono sleeves and his
hakama
skirt and plastering his hair with perfumed pomade, that hair of his which had formerly pointed to the heavens like the leaves of a palm tree.
In those days I became acquainted with two friends, Koga and Kojima.
Koga was a big fellow with prominent cheekbones on his square ruddy face. Due to the fact that he had taken special interest in a handsome beautiful boy named Adachi, in addition to the way he himself dressed, Koga certainly seemed to be one of the shining lights of the queers. From about the fall of the preceding year he had been trying to get to know me. I couldn't help but keep a firm grip on the handle of that dagger of mine.
However, after the great shakeup in our school, a change occurred in the allotment of dormitory rooms, and I found Koga and I were roommates. Waniguchi said to me, a look of mockery on his face, "Well, go on over to Koga's place and he'll make you one of his pets," and he laughed.
He spoke in that same imitation of my father's voice. And yet this was the man who had never offered to give me the slightest bit of protection. Instead of being troubled by this fact, I considered myself fortunate. Though from first to last I had been made uncomfortable by his cynical words and actions, he was at least an independent spirit. I remember the concluding lines a poet in his class had presented to him:
Quiet evening,
Calm brooding over the bamboo
Beyond your window
As you read
Kanpi.
Many were afraid of Waniguchi, were in fact in awe of him. I realized that had been a form of protection he offered me indirectly.
I was about to lose this indirect protection. And I was about to move into the room of the notoriously dangerous Mr. Koga. I was instinctively terrified.
I moved into that room as if I were entering a lion's den. Once Hanyu had said to me, "Your eyes are triangles with the base line standing up," and I suppose those same reversed triangular eyes of mine were now even more angular. Sitting cross-legged on an old woolen blanket which had discolored into a dirty grey and which he had spread over a broken desk without even a solitary book or anything on it, Koga was staring at me. His perfectly round eyes, too small for his large face, were overflowing with joy.
"Even though you've been so afraid of me that you've been running away all over the place, you've finally come to me, haven't you?" And he laughed.
He broke into a broad grin. His was a strange face, both clownish and dignified. It didn't seem the face of a bad guy.
"Can't be helped since I've been assigned here." My reply was certainly blunt.
"I guess you feel I'm the same type Henmi is, don't you? I'm not."
Without replying, I began to put my section of the room in order. Ever since my childhood, I had had a great aversion to having any of my things scattered about. From the moment I had entered this school, I had precisely and systematically classified my school notebooks and my other concerns. By that time in this period of my life, I already had a great many notebooks, exactly twice the number other students had. The reason I had so many was that I used two notebooks for each subject. Furthermore, I always carried these sets of notebooks to class, and while listening, I would sort out the important facts and the points for future reference and write these down in ink in whichever notebook was appropriate, the opened notebooks piled one over the other. There was no need to make a clean copy of my notes the way the other students did after returning to the dorm. In my room I had only to look up some scientific terms used during the lecture and some Greek and Latin etymologies and annotate these in red ink along the margins of my notebook. That was just about the extent of the work I did outside the classroom.Whenever I heard anyone saying it was difficult and troublesome to memorize these technical terms, I couldn't help feeling amused. I almost felt like asking them why they tried to memorize these words mechanically without looking up their etymologies.
I always arranged my notebooks and reference books in the same order on the shelf. As a precaution against overturning my bottles of red and black ink, I lined these up with my pens in an empty cake box I set on the far corner of my desk. On the front of my desk I spread a huge sheet of blotting paper. To the left I piled two notebooks with thick bindings. One was my diary in which before going to bed I kept a precise record of each day's events. The other notebook was for memos that had nothing to do with school subjects. For its title I had pretentiously written in pen as seal letters the two scholarly and academic Chinese characters
kan
and
ju
y
which can supposedly awaken memory. Under my desk I concealed about ten volumes of
Teijozakki
with their essays on the samurai. In those days the most elegant and refined miscellaneous essays available in the circulating libraries were in books of this sort, and when one had completed, as I had, all the novels of Bakin and Kyoden, the only thing to do was turn to such essays. Whenever I happened to find anything worthwhile in them, I would make a note of it in my
kanju
notebook.
Koga, a broad grin on his face, was watching what I was doing, but when he saw me trying to conceal the
Teijozakki
volumes under my desk, he said, "What sort of books are those?"
"Teijozakki"
"What's in them?"
"On these pages in this volume they're writing about ceremonial costumes."
"What's your purpose in reading that kind of stuff?"
"It's not for any particular purpose."
"Then it's all useless, isn't it?"
"If that's the case, then my, or anyone's, entering this school and pursuing an education is useless, don't you think? You probably didn't enter only to become a government official or a teacher, did you?"
"You mean that when you graduate, you don't want to become a government official or teacher?"
"Well, I may. But I'm not studying just to become one.
"You mean, then, you're studying in order to learn, that is, you're studying for the sake of study?"
"Well. Yes, I guess that's right."
"Well, you're an interesting kid."
Suddenly I felt angry. To talk to someone for the first time and to conclude by saying I was an interesting "kid" was too insulting. I glared at him with those same reversed triangular eyes of mine. Koga was still calmly grinning at me. I felt somewhat disarmed, so I couldn't really hate this innocent strapping fellow.
Toward evening that same day Koga suggested we go for a walk. Even though Waniguchi had shared the same room with me for a long time, he had never said to me, "Let's go for a stroll." At any rate, since I felt I might as well try going out with Koga, I agreed.
It was a pleasant evening of early summer. We walked along the streets of Kanda. When we came to a secondhand bookstore, I stopped to look in. Koga browsed with me. In those days five sen was enough to buy a one-volume collection of any Japanese poet. On first entering Yanagiwara there was a public square. A large umbrella stood open, and under it a pretty girl about twelve or thirteen had been ordered to do a Japanese street dance, the
kappore
. Later in my life when I was reading Victor Hugo's
Notre Dame
and saw something written about a little girl with a name similar to that of a precious stone, perhaps Emeraude, I was reminded of this little girl, feeling Emeraude was like the girl I saw dancing the
kappore
under that umbrella.
"I don't know what kind of child she is," Koga said, "but she's been treated badly, hasn't she?"
"Probably Chinese children are treated more harshly. I once heard that a Chinese baby was placed in a square box, forced to grow square, and then put on display. The Chinese may be capable of that kind of thing."
"How did you come to hear that story?"
"It's in the
Gushoshinshi,
a Chinese book on biography and anecdotes."
"You certainly read strange things. You're an interesting kid."
That was how Koga, in rapid succession, had repeated, "You're an interesting kid." While we were walking through Yanagiwara toward Ryogoku, he stopped in front of a shop whose paper-covered lantern had on it the characters for eels broiled in soy sauce.
"Do you eat eels?"
"I eat them."
Koga entered the shop. He ordered large ones. When the sake was brought in, he seemed to enjoy drinking it by himself. Before long some phlegm caught in his throat. Suddenly clearing his throat with a loud noise, he sent that phlegm flying into an alley over the bamboo fence surrounding the small garden just off the veranda. I watched with a stupid look of amazement on my face. The eels were brought in. Only once had my father taken me to an eel restaurant, and only once had I eaten eels. I was first surprised that Koga had ordered as many as the amount of money he had taken out could buy, and I was again surprised to see how he ate them. He would draw the skewer from the eel. Then folding a big thick piece double with his chopsticks, he would cram the whole thing into his mouth. I didn't say anything, merely watching him as I thought to myself,
"He's
the interesting kid!"
That evening Koga returned to the dorm as meek as a lamb. Just before going to bed, he asked me to wake him the next morning, and then he fell into a sound sleep.
It became light out around four in the morning. I would get up at six. After washing, I'd look over some books. At seven they would beat the wooden clappers that breakfast was ready. I woke Koga. The eyes he opened were heavy with sleep.
"What time is it?"
"Seven."
"It's still early."
He turned over in bed and again fell into a sound sleep. I went to eat breakfast. It was seven-thirty. At eight classes would begin. I woke him.
"What's the time?"
"Seven-thirty."
"It's still early."
It was a quarter to eight. About to set out with my notebooks I had prepared the previous night for my daily schedule, I again woke him.
"What time is it?"
"Quarter to eight."
Without uttering a sound, he sprang out of bed. Carrying some toilet paper and a towel, he rushed from the room. He went to the lavatory, washed, ate breakfast, and hurried over to his classroom.
This was the usual daily routine Koga followed. Occasionally his friend Jujiro Kojima came over to visit him. He looked like the famous hero Genji in the colored prints we saw hanging in the print shops in those days. The skin all over his body was a kind of bluish white. He was nicknamed "Blue Striped Snake," though he always became angry whenever anyone called him that. It was quite reasonable for him to get angry because I heard the nickname was fastened on to him after a certain part of his anatomy was seen in the bath. Kojima was not a drinking man. His words and actions seemed like those of a young aristocrat. He was the younger brother of a well-known scholar on Occidental learning, a professor given his rank directly by imperial decree. Due to his being the twelfth child in his family, I heard he had been given the name meaning just that, Jujiro.
I first had my doubts as to why Koga and Kojima were on friendly terms with one another. But after observing them, I gradually discovered something they shared in common.
Koga was quite devoted to his father. It seemed, nevertheless, that his parent treated him as an unworthy child because of his own grief over the premature death of Koga's younger brother, who was something of a child prodigy. The more his father treated him as unworthy, the more Koga felt he had to relieve his father's anxiety by making up for the deficiency over the loss of this child. Kojima's father had died, but his mother was still living. She had given birth to more than ten children. Her thirteenth, a boy named Jusaburo, was quite talented, and apparently she was very much attached to him. In spite of the fact that Jusaburo was quite talented, he was something of a libertine. He stirred up quite a row after a girl employed in the reading room of a certain newspaper fell in love with him, the incident appearing more than once in the papers. The woman was employed by a man who ran the reading room, and after being coerced by him, a man more than thirty years her senior, she had given herself to him and had become his mistress. He was jealous because she adored Jusaburo, so he continually abused her. The woman begged Jusaburo for help. Because he was the young aristocratic son of a professor by imperial decree, he became quite a fashionable topic for the papers. On account of the scandal, Jusaburo, who had been adopted into a fine aristocratic family without sons, had to sever his connections with that family. His mother was very much worried about him. It was Jujiro who was doing his best to console her.