Yes, there was more: it was in middle school that he hated teachers most of all. As individuals, his teachers were surely not bad people. But their “educational responsibility”—and in particular their right to punish students—turned them into tyrants. They did not hesitate to use any means at their disposal to infect students’ minds with their own prejudices. And in fact one of them, the English teacher they nicknamed “Dharma,”13 often beat Shinsuke for being what he called a “smart aleck.” What made Shinsuke a “smart aleck” was nothing worse than that he was reading such writers as Doppo and Katai.14 Another of the teachers, the one with an artificial left eye who taught Japanese and classical Chinese, was not pleased with Shinsuke’s lack of interest in martial arts and athletics. “What are you, a girl?” he would often taunt Shinsuke. Infuriated by this, Shinsuke once shot back at him, “And you, Sir? Are you a man?” for which he was of course severely punished. The number of humiliations he endured was endless, as he could see by rereading his already-yellowing “Diary without Self-Deceit.” He always had to counter such humiliations to protect himself, determined as he was to preserve his great self-esteem. Had he not done so, he would have ended up despising himself as did all juvenile delinquents. He naturally turned to his “Diary without Self-Deceit” to equip himself for his mental fitness program:
Many are the criticisms that have been leveled at me, but they fall into three groups:
1. Bookish. A “bookish” person is one who prizes the power of the mind over the power of the flesh.
2. Frivolous. A “frivolous” person is one who prizes the beautiful over the useful.
3. Arrogant. An “arrogant” person is one who refuses to compromise his beliefs in deference to others.
Not all of his teachers tormented him, however. One invited him to family teas. Another lent him English novels. Shinsuke still remembers the joy with which he read the English translation of Turgenev’s A Hunter’s Diary,15 when he discovered it among those borrowed books at the end of his fourth year of middle school. The teachers’ “educational responsibility,” however, always prevented him from interacting warmly with them as fellow human beings. For in his efforts to win their good graces, there always lurked his base need to play up to the teachers’ authority—or their homosexuality. He could never behave with complete freedom in their presence. Sometimes he would make a show of grabbing a cigarette, or hold forth on a play he had seen on a standing-room ticket. They of course chalked up such behavior to his insolence, which was reasonable enough: he was never a very likeable student. The old photos he keeps stashed away show a sickly boy with a head too big for his body and huge, shining eyes. This pale-faced boy took his greatest pleasure in tormenting kindly teachers by constantly hurling venomous questions at them.
Shinsuke always received high grades in examinations, but his grade for deportment never rose above a 6. In the Arabic numeral “6” itself, he seemed to feel the sneers of the entire teachers’ room. And the teachers actually were mocking him for his deportment grade. That 6 kept his class standing from going above third place. He hated this kind of revenge, and he hated the teachers for taking their revenge. Even now—no, no longer: Shinsuke has let go of his hatred. Middle school was a nightmare for him, but it was not necessarily a misfortune. At least it enabled him to develop a personality that could endure loneliness. Otherwise, the course of his life would have been far more painful than it is today. In fulfillment of his long-standing dream, he became the author of several books. But what he got in return was a desolate loneliness. And now that he has made peace with that loneliness—or, rather, now that he has learned that he has no choice but to make peace with that loneliness— he can look back twenty years and see the schoolhouse where he was so tormented standing before him in a rose-colored twilight. Of course, the poplars still harbor the lonely sound of the wind in their thick gloomy branches…
5. Books
Shinsuke’s passion for books started when he was in elementary school. What taught him this passion was the Teikoku Library edition of Outlaws of the Marsh16 that he found in his father’s bookcase. A grammar-school boy with an outsized head, he read the novel over and over again in the dim glow of the lamp. And even when the book wasn’t open before him, he was imagining scenes from it: the battle flag inscribed “We Act in Heaven’s Behalf”; the huge tiger of Jinyang Pass; the human thigh meat hanging from the beam in the gardener Zhang Qing’s inn. Imagining? His imaginings were even realer than reality to him. Any number of times, armed with his wooden sword, he had done battle with characters from Outlaws of the Marsh—with the fierce warrior beauty called Ten Feet of Steel, and with the wild monk, Lu Zhishen. This passion continued to rule him for thirty years. He still recalls many whole nights he spent reading. He remembers reading with feverish energy at his desk, in trains, in toilets—and sometimes even walking down the street. He never picked up his wooden sword again once he stopped reading Outlaws of the Marsh, but he had gone on endlessly laughing and crying over books. Each was a kind of transformation for him. He would become the characters in the books. Like India’s Buddha, he traveled through numberless past lives—Ivan Karamazov, Hamlet, Prince André, Don Juan, Mephistopheles, Reineke Fuchs17—and his transformations were not always short-lived. One late autumn afternoon, for example, he visited his old uncle to pick up some spending money. His uncle was from Hagi, the city in Chōshū that had produced so many leaders in the overthrow of the Tokugawa regime and the 1868 Restoration of imperial rule. Standing before his uncle, he expounded on the great feats of the Restoration and sang the praises of Chōshū’s talented men, everyone from Murata Seifū to Yamagata Aritomo.18 As he was declaiming, though, this pale-faced higher-school student full of false emotion was not Daidōji Shinsuke but Julien Sorel, the hero of The Red and the Black.
Shinsuke thus quite naturally learned everything he knew from books—or at least there was nothing he knew that didn’t owe something to books. He did not observe people on the street to learn about life but rather sought to learn about life in books in order to observe people on the streets. This might have been a roundabout way of doing it, but to him passersby on the street were nothing but passersby. In order to learn about them—their loves, their hatreds, their vanities—he had no choice but to read books, and in particular the novels and dramas of fin-de-sieècle Europe. Only in their cold light did he discover the human comedy unfolding before him. Indeed, it was there as well that he discovered his own soul, which made no distinction between good and evil. Human life was not all he learned about from books. He discovered the beauty of nature in the neighborhoods of Honjo, but the eyes with which he observed nature owed some of their keenness to certain of his favorite books—most notably, books of haiku from the Genroku Period. Thanks to them, he discovered other natural beauties that Honjo could not teach him—“Shape of the mountain/Near the capital,” “In turmeric fields/The wind of autumn,” “Offshore in chilly rain/Sails running, sails reefed,” “Into the darkness goes/A night heron’s scream.”19 From books to reality was a constant truth for Shinsuke. He loved several women in the course of his life, but it was not they who taught him the beauties of woman—or at least none beyond those he had learned of from books. Sunlight shining through an ear, or the shadow of eyelashes falling on a cheek: these he learned from Gautier and Balzac and Tolstoy. Thanks to these writers, women could still communicate beauty to Shinsuke. Without them, he might have discovered only “the female,” not “woman.”
Because he was poor, though, Shinsuke could not afford to buy all the books he read. He managed to overcome this difficulty first of all through institutional libraries, secondly through commercial lending libraries, and thirdly by means of his own frugality, which went so far as to invite charges of stinginess. He still clearly remembers the lending library by the Big Ditch, the nice old lady who ran it, and the ornamental hairpins she made on the side. She called him “sonny boy” and believed in the perfect guilelessness of this new elementary-scho
ol student, but he very quickly figured out how to read her books on the sly while pretending to search for something. He still clearly remembers the clutter of used bookstores that lined Jinbōchō Avenue20 twenty years ago and, above the shop roofs, Kudanzaka hill shining in the sun. In those days, there were neither electric nor horse-drawn streetcars running down the avenue. As a twelve-year-old pupil clasping his lunch box or notebooks under his arms, he went up and down this avenue any number of times on his way to and from the ōhashi Library—three-and a-half miles roundtrip from the ō hashi to the Imperial Library.21 He still remembers his first impression of the Imperial Library: his fear of the high ceilings, his fear of the large windows, his fear of the numberless people who filled all the numberless chairs. Fortunately, his fears vanished after two or three visits to the place. He was soon familiar with the reading room, the iron stairway, the catalogue cases, the basement lunchroom. He moved on from there to the University Library and the Higher School Library, borrowing hundreds of volumes from them all, loving dozens of those volumes. And yet—
And yet, the books he loved most of all, the books he loved most as books irrespective of their contents, were the books he bought. In order to buy books, Shinsuke stayed away from cafés. Still, he never had enough money. And so he taught mathematics (!) to a middle-schooler relative of his three days a week. When even that failed to bring in the money he needed, he would, as a last resort, sell his own books. Never once did that earn him more than half what the book had cost him to buy, even when the book he sold was still new. Even worse, whenever he handed a used-book dealer a volume he had owned for some years, it felt like a tragedy to him.
One night there was a light dusting of snow on the ground as he made his way along Jinbōchō Avenue from one used bookstore to the next. Before long, he came across a copy of Zarathustra—and not just any copy. It was the very copy he had sold them two months earlier, still smudged with the oil from his hands. He stood out front re-reading passages from this old Zarathustra, and the more he read, the more he missed the book. After ten minutes of this, he finally asked the woman who owned the shop, “How much is this?”
“One yen sixty sen, but for you I’ll make it one yen fifty sen.”
Shinsuke recalled that he had sold it to her for a mere seventy sen, but he decided to buy it anyway after he had bargained her down to one yen forty sen—exactly twice what he had sold it for. The snowy nighttime streets were subtly quieter than normal—the houses, the streetcars. All along the way, as he trudged back to the university in Hongō, he felt the steel-colored cover of Zarathustra against his chest. He also felt his mouth working every now and then with derisive laughter, directed at himself.
6. Friends
Shinsuke could not befriend anyone without evaluating the person’s intelligence. If all a young man had to recommend him was his good behavior, the finest young gentleman in the world was to Shinsuke a useless passerby—indeed, a clown deserving only of his ridicule. This attitude was quite natural to Shinsuke, with his grade in deportment a low 6. He made fun of such people all along his way from one school to the next—middle school to higher school, higher school to university. He angered some of them, of course, but others were too nearly perfect as gentlemen to perceive his ridicule. He always felt a certain amusement when others found him obnoxious, but he could not suppress his anger when his ridicule failed to have its intended effect. One such unperceptive model gentleman, for example, a student in the higher school’s Faculty of Letters, was a worshipper of Livingstone.22 Shinsuke, who lived in the same boarding house, once told him in the sincerest tone he could manage that Byron had wept uncontrollably upon reading Livingstone’s biography. Today, twenty years later, that Livingstone worshipper is still singing the praises of the missionary-explorer in the official magazine of his Christian church, and his piece begins: “What does it tell us when even that satanic poet Byron himself shed tears upon reading the life of Livingstone?”
Shinsuke could not befriend anyone without evaluating the person’s intelligence. Even a non-gentleman was a mere roadside bystander to him if the young man was not intellectually voracious. It was not kindness Shinsuke looked for in his friends. Nor did he mind if his friends were young men who lacked youthful hearts. If anything, he feared so-called “best friends.” Friends of his had to have brains—strong, well-built brains. He loved the owner of such a brain far more than he did the handsomest boy. He also hated the owner of such a brain more than he did any gentleman. For him, the passion of friendship contained hatred in its love. Even today Shinsuke believes that there is no such thing as friendship apart from this passion—or at least that apart from this passion there is no friendship that does not stink of Herr und Knecht.23 His friends in those days, especially, were in one sense irreconcilable mortal enemies to him: he engaged in endless combat with them, his brain his weapon. Everything was a battlefield: Whitman, free verse, creative evolution. He struck his friends down on these battlefields and there he was struck down by them. Surely it was the joy of carnage that propelled this mental combat, but just as surely the struggle revealed new ideas and new forms of beauty. Oh, how brightly a candle flame lighted their 3:00 a.m. war of words! How powerfully the works of Mushanokōji Saneatsu24 ruled over that war of words! Shinsuke has vivid memories of the huge moths that crowded around the candle flame one September night. The moths were born from the deep darkness in a sudden brilliant flash, but no sooner did they touch the flame than they fluttered to their deaths as if they had never existed. Such a minor event may not be worth such latter-day wonderment, but whenever Shinsuke recalls it—this strangely beautiful death of moths in a flame—a bewildering loneliness fills his heart.
Shinsuke could not befriend anyone without evaluating the person’s intelligence. That was the only standard he applied. But there was an exception to this standard: the class distinctions between him and his friends. Shinsuke felt no strain with middle-class young men who had an upbringing like his. But toward the few upper-class (or upper-middle-class) young men he knew, he felt a strangely impersonal hatred. Some of them were lazy, others were cowardly, still others were slaves to sensuality—but it was not necessarily for these qualities that he hated them. No, it was for something vaguer—something which a few of them hated in themselves, even if unconsciously, and which caused them to yearn almost pathologically for their diametrical opposites in society, the lower classes. Shinsuke sympathized with them, but his sympathy finally led nowhere. Before he managed to shake hands with them, this “something” always stabbed his hand like a needle.
One windy, cold April afternoon, he was standing with one of them—a higher-school student like himself, but the eldest son of a baron—at the edge of a cliff on the island of Enoshima. The rocky shore was just below them. They threw out a few copper coins for boys on the shore to dive for. Whenever a coin fell, the boys would plunge into the ocean. One girl diver, however, simply watched the boys as she crouched smiling by a fire at the base of the cliff.
“This time I’ll make her dive in, too,” Shinsuke’s friend said, wrapping a copper coin in the silver paper from his cigarette pack. Then he leaned back and heaved the coin with all his might. Sparkling like silver, the copper coin sailed far out beyond the waves being stirred up by a high wind. This time the girl diver was the first to jump into the sea. Shinsuke still vividly remembers the cruel smile on his friend’s lips. This boy had a special talent for languages. He also had unusually sharp canine teeth…
(9 December 1924: To be continued)25
THE WRITER’S CRAFT
“Could you write us a eulogy, Horikawa? The Headmaster needs something for Lieutenant Honda’s funeral on Saturday.”
Captain Fujita spoke to Yasukichi as they were leaving the mess hall.
Here at the Naval Engineering School, Horikawa Yasukichi taught the translation of English texts, but there were other jobs for him between classes. He had written some funeral orations, put together a textbook, touched up a lect
ure someone then gave in the presence of the Emperor, and translated articles from foreign newspapers. It was always Captain Fujita—a swarthy, high-strung, bony man perhaps forty years of age—who brought the new assignments.
Yasukichi was a step behind Captain Fujita in the gloomy hallway. “What! Lieutenant Honda is dead?” he exclaimed in surprise. The Captain turned to look at him; his own surprise seemed as great as Yasukichi’s. Yasukichi had invented an excuse to skip work the day before and missed the notice on Honda’s sudden death.
“It happened yesterday, in the morning. A stroke. Anyway, have it done by Friday morning, will you? That gives you two days.”
“I suppose I can get it done all right…”
Fujita was quick to sense Yasukichi’s hesitation. “You’ll need some information for the eulogy. I’ll send his file over.”
“But what sort of man was he? I’d recognize him if I saw him on the street, but that’s all.”
“Well, let’s see. He was a good brother… And he was always at the head of his class. Let your famous pen do the rest.”
By now they were standing at the yellow door to Fujita’s office. The Captain was Assistant Headmaster.
Yasukichi abandoned any hope of maintaining his artistic integrity in writing the eulogy. “I guess it’s time for the old saws—‘a man of innate brilliance,’ ‘affectionate to his brothers and sisters,’ ‘a swift and glorious end, like the shattering of a precious stone’—I’ll make something up.”
“Thanks, I’m sure you’ll do fine.”
Instead of stopping off at the lounge, Yasukichi went straight to the instructors’ office, which was empty. November sunshine flooded his desk from the window on the right. He sat down and lit a cigarette.