Mandarins: Stories by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa

  “Hearing this, my friends, you will find it impossible not to laugh at Koen’s folly. At the time, not even a bitter smile would have passed my own face.

  “You will, of course, not be aware of it, but Koen over the last three years has benefited greatly from what Wakatsuki has done for her. He provided not only for her mother but also for her younger sister. He saw to it that she was trained in reading and writing, in the traditional performing arts, and in whatever happened to strike her fancy. Koen had been granted a dancing name by one of the masters. She is also said to be preeminent among Yanagibashi geisha for the nagauta. She can compose hokku and is a skillful kana calligrapher in the Chikage style. And that is again thanks to Wakatsuki . . . As I knew all this, I could not help feeling, I am sure more than any of you, utterly dumbfounded by the absurdity of it all.

  “Wakatsuki told me that he had given no great thought to the breaking of ties with the woman. And yet he said that he had spared no effort in supporting her education and shown understanding for whatever it was she wished to do. He had sought to train her as a woman of broad interests and tastes . . . Such had been his hopes, and now they had been dashed. If she had to take up with a man, it should hardly be a balladeer. If even after all manner of devotion to performance art, a person’s fundamental character has not improved, it is truly a loathsome thing . . .

  “Wakatsuki went on to say that over the last half year, the woman had also become prone to hysterical fits. For a time, she would exclaim—‘Today I have played the shamisen for the last time!’—or some such and then burst into childish tears. And when again he asked why she was weeping, she would argue quite irrationally that he did not love her and that that was why he was having her trained in music and dancing. At such times, she gave no indication of hearing anything he had to say but instead would merely bitterly and endlessly accuse him of heartlessness. Eventually, of course, such paroxysms would cease, the entire episode made a laughing matter.

  “Wakatsuki also said that he had heard that Koen’s lover, the ballad singer, was an unmanageable ruffian. When a waitress in a chicken-brochette restaurant with whom he had a liaison took up with someone new, he seems to have got himself into quite a scuffle with the woman, causing her considerable injury. Wakatsuki had also heard various ugly rumors about the man: that he had been involved in a failed double-suicide pact, that he had eloped with the daughter of an arts teacher . . . What possible discernment on Koen’s part, he asked, could be seen in her willingness to become involved with someone like this . . .?

  “As I have said, I could not help feeling disgusted at Koen’s dissolute conduct. And yet as I listened to Wakatsuki, I felt a growing sympathy for her. Of course, it may well be that in him she had a patron of a sophistication that is quite rare in today’s world. And yet did he not himself admit that separating from her was of no consequence to him? Even if we assume that in saying so he was endeavoring to spare himself humiliation, it is clear that he felt no fierce passion for her. Now ‘fierce’ is the word to describe the balladeer, who, out of sheer odium for the heartlessness of a woman, inflicted serious bodily injury on her. Putting myself in Koen’s place, I think it perfectly natural that she would fall for the vulgar but passionate balladeer over the cultured but phlegmatic Wakatsuki. The fact that he had her trained in all the arts is evidence that he had no love for her. In all of this, I saw something more than hysteria: between the two, I detected a chasmic difference in perception.

  “Yet I do not intend to bestow for her sake my blessing on the liaison with the balladeer. No one can say whether or not she will achieve happiness . . . But if unhappiness is the result, then the curse should fall not on the other man but rather on Seigai the Sophisticate for driving her into his arms.

  “Now Wakatsuki, like the men of the world he personifies, may, as individuals, be charming and lovable. They understand Bashō; they understand Tolstoy. They understand Ike no Taiga and Mushanokōji Saneatsu. They understand Karl Marx. Yet what is the result? Of fierce love, the joy of fierce creativity, or fierce moral passion they are ignorant. All in all, they know nothing of the sheer intensity of spirit that can render this world sublime. And if they are marked by a mortal wound, they surely also contain a pernicious poison. One of its properties is direct, enabling it to transform ordinary human beings into sophisticates; another works by way of reaction, making them all the more common. Someone such as Koen is a case in point, is she not?

  “As we know from time immemorial, thirst will drive one to drink even from muddy water. That is to say, if Koen had not been in Wakatsuki’s milieu, she might not have wound up with the balladeer.

  “If, on the other hand, she finds happiness . . . Well now, I suppose to the extent that she has her new lover in place of Wakatsuki, she has already found it. What was it that Fujii said just now? We all find ourselves riding the same merry-go-round of life and, at some moment as we turn, encounter ‘happiness,’ only to have it pass us by in the very moment that we reach out for it. If such is truly our desire, we should jump off . . . Koen has, as it were, dared to do just that. Such fierce joy and sorrow is something that the likes of Wakatsuki and other men of the world do not know. As I contemplate life’s value, I shall willingly spit on one hundred Wakatsukis, even as I honor and revere a single Koen.

  “What say you all to that?”

  Wada’s tipsy eyes shone round the silent room, but Fujii at some point had put his head down on the table and was now blissfully and soundly asleep.

  THE HANDKERCHIEF

  Hasegawa Kinzō, professor in the Faculty of Law at Tōkyō Imperial University, was sitting in a rattan chair on the veranda, reading Strindberg’s Dramaturgy. Such might come as something of a surprise to readers when informed of the professor’s specialized field of research: colonial policy. He was, however, renowned as an educator as well as a scholar, and so to the extent that leisure allowed, he took it upon himself at least to glance through works which though not immediately useful to his discipline were nonetheless in some way relevant to the thoughts and feelings of today’s students. Being at the time the headmaster of a higher professional school, he had even endeavored to peruse Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis and Intentions, his sole motivation being their popularity among his pupils.

  Thus, there would really have been no cause for astonishment in seeing him absorbed in the world of modern European plays and actors. Indeed, among his charges there were not only those who wrote commentaries on Ibsen, Strindberg, and Maeterlinck but even some passionately seeking to follow in the footsteps of these up-to-date dramatists and to devote themselves to the theater.

  Whenever the professor finished a chapter, each filled with penetrating insights, he would put the book with its yellow cloth cover down on his lap and throw a desultory glance at the Gifu lantern that hung on the veranda. Curiously, his mind would then wander from Strindberg to his wife, with whom he had gone to buy it.

  The professor had studied in America, where he had first met her; naturally enough, she was an American. Yet she, no less than he, was enamored of Japan and of the Japanese people. She was particularly attached to Japan’s exquisitely wrought handicrafts. It would thus seem reasonable to assume that the lantern was more a reflection of his wife’s taste than of his own.

  Such moments invariably set him to thinking—about his wife and about the lantern as representative of Japanese civilization. It was his belief that for all the considerable material progress made over the preceding half century, there had been almost nothing that one could truly call spiritual advancement. Indeed, in some sense there had been degeneration. It was thus, he thought, urgently incumbent upon the nation’s contemporary thinkers to consider a remedy. He had further concluded that such could only lie in traditional bushidō. This should not, he insisted, be viewed as simply the moral code of a blinkered island people. On the contrary, it contained elements that were consistent with the spirit of Christianity in the nations of the West. If bushidō could provide a beacon
for contemporary Japanese thought, it would not only contribute to Japan’s spiritual culture; it would also facilitate greater understanding between Western peoples and the Japanese and thereby promote the cause of international peace . . . In this respect, he often imagined himself becoming a bridge between East and West. To such a scholar, it was in no way unpleasant to bear in mind that his wife, the lantern, and the Japanese civilization were all quite in harmony with one another.

  As he repeatedly savored his satisfaction, it slowly dawned on Professor Hasegawa that even as he was reading, his attention was indeed straying from Strindberg. Feeling somewhat annoyed at this, he shook his head and again single-mindedly fixed his eyes on the fine print before him. Just where he had left off, he found this passage:

  “When an actor discovers an appropriate means for conveying a perfectly ordinary emotion, one that gains him success, he comes, gradually and habitually, to resort to it, regardless of its suitability, both because of the facility he enjoys with it and because of that same success. This is what is called a Manier.”1

  Professor Hasegawa was by nature indifferent to the arts, especially to drama. He had not even been to the Japanese theater more times than he could readily count. A student of his had once written a story in which Baikō was mentioned. Yet for all the erudition of which the professor boasted, the name was quite unknown to him. When the opportunity arose, he took the student aside and asked him: “Who is this Baikō?”

  The young man, dressed in a pleated hakama, replied courteously.

  “Baikō? Why, he is currently playing the role of Misao in the tenth act of the Taikōki at the Marunouchi Imperial Theater.”

  Understandably then, the professor had utterly no opinion concerning the pithy criticisms that Strindberg had contributed to the discussion of dramaturgy. His interest was limited to mental associations with those few theater pieces he had seen while studying abroad. He was, so to speak, hardly different from those secondary-school English teachers who read the scripts of George Bernard Shaw for the sole purpose of finding idiomatic expressions. Yet an interest, however imperfect, is still an interest.

  Readers will readily imagine the length of that early summer afternoon when told that the Gifu lantern suspended from the ceiling on the veranda was still unlit and that Professor Hasegawa Kinzō was still sitting in his rattan chair, reading Strindberg. This should by no means suggest that he was suffering from boredom. Any reader inclined to think so would be willfully assigning an all too cynical interpretation to the writer’s intentions.

  In any case, the professor was obliged to abandon his reading when the maid interrupted his refined pursuits by announcing a visitor. However long the day, it would seem that a professor’s work is never done.

  Professor Hasegawa laid his book down and glanced at the small calling card the maid had brought. Imprinted on ivory paper was the name Nishiyama Atsuko. She appeared to be no one he had met before, but as he associated with a wide range of people, he took the precaution, as he got up, of searching his mental name register. Even so, he could not picture a face to match a single entry. Uneasily, he placed the card between the pages of Strindberg’s Dramaturgy as a provisional bookmarker, placed the volume on his chair, straightened his summer kimono of Meisen silk, and glanced once more at the Gifu lantern, now directly in front of his nose.

  Now it is certainly the general rule that the host who keeps his guest waiting feels greater impatience than the waiting guest. Moreover, it hardly needs to be said that Professor Hasegawa was at all times conscientious, even on this day in regard to a woman visitor he did not know.

  At last, with conscious timing, he entered the drawing room. No sooner had he released the doorknob than a woman in her forties stood up from the chair on which she had been sitting. She was of a refinement that was well beyond the competence of the professor to measure. Over her blue-gray summer kimono she wore a black haori of silk gauze, open slightly in the front to reveal a coldly glistening, rhombic obi pin of nephrite. Though he was usually insensitive to such trivialities, he noted that her hair was arranged in marumage style. With her round, quintessentially Japanese face and amber complexion, she had a wise, motherly air about her. A single glance was enough to suggest to him that he might have seen her before.

  “Hasegawa,” he said affably with a bow. He thought that if he greeted her in this manner, she would remind him of where, if ever, they had previously met.

  “I am the mother of Nishiyama Ken’ichirō,” she replied in a clear voice, and bowed politely in return.

  Now he recognized the name. Nishiyama Ken’ichirō was a student of his. Though specializing, he was fairly certain, in German law, he was among those who had written essays for him on Ibsen and Strindberg. Since his matriculation, he had taken an interest in philosophical trends and had often come to consult with him. Then after the young man’s admission to the university hospital for peritonitis in the spring, he had gone to visit once or twice when other business took him in that direction. It was no coincidence that he seemed to recognize the woman’s face, for she and that spirited youth, with his handsomely thick eyebrows, bore an amazing likeness to each other—as though, to fall back on the old saying, they were two gourds from the same row.

  “Ah, yes, Nishiyama-kun’s . . . I see . . .”

  Half muttering as though to himself as he nodded his confirmation of this, he pointed to a chair on the other side of a small table.

  The lady first apologized for the sudden visit, then, having bowed again, accepted his invitation and sat down. As she did so, she took from her sleeve pocket a white object that appeared to be a handkerchief. Seeing this, he immediately offered her a Korean fan that lay on the table and then took his own seat across from her.

  “You have a most pleasant house,” she remarked, looking about the room in what appeared to be a somewhat forced manner.

  “Oh, it’s large enough,” he replied, accustomed to such conversational conventions. “I’m afraid we have left it quite unattended.”

  At this moment, the maid brought iced tea. He had her place the glass in front of his guest and then turned without delay to the subject at hand.

  “And how is Nishiyama-kun? Have you any news to report of him?”

  “Yes.”

  The woman fell silent for a moment as she modestly crossed her hands on her lap. She then spoke evenly and matter-of-factly.

  “As it happens, it is regarding that son of mine that I am now imposing on you. I regret to say that it has all come to naught, though I thank you for all the trouble you took on his behalf while he was still studying . . .”

  Thinking his visitor too reserved to drink the tea set before her and not wishing to appear an aggressive but somehow at the same time halfhearted host, he had just resolved to set an example by sipping his own rather than risk appearing importunate. The edge of the cup had not yet touched his soft mustache when her words fell upon his ears. Quite apart from his consternation at hearing of the young man’s death was the momentary concern: should he or should he not now drink his tea?

  He could not, however, go on holding the cup indefinitely. In a single gulp he emptied half of the contents. Knitting his eyebrows ever so slightly, he said in a choked voice: “What a pity!”

  “. . . While in the hospital he often spoke of you, and so it is that I have presumed to interrupt you in all your work to inform you of this. Again, I express my gratitude.”

  “No, please . . . ,” he replied glumly, setting down his teacup and picking up the blue waxed fan. “So this was the unfortunate end to it . . . He showed such promise . . . I failed to go to the hospital again and simply assumed that he was on the mend . . . And now . . . When was it?”

  “The seventh-day observance2 was yesterday.”

  “So he was still in the hospital when . . .?”

  “Yes.”

  “I had no idea!”

  “All was done that could be done, so that there is nothing to do but accept it. Yet I
cannot help lamenting that having come so far . . .”

  As the professor was engaged in this exchange, he became aware of something quite extraordinary: there was nothing in her attitude or behavior that would suggest that she was speaking of the death of her own son. She spoke in a normal tone of voice, without a tear in her eyes, and the corners of her mouth even showed a trace of a smile.

  To judge from her outward appearance, without hearing her words, no one would have assumed that she was engaged in anything other than everyday talk of household affairs. This he found baffling.

  . . . Many years before, while he was studying in Germany, Wilhelm I, father of the present Kaiser, had died. Not being greatly affected by the news, which he heard while sitting in his favorite coffee shop, he later returned to his lodgings, his cane under his arm and a cheerful expression on his face. He had scarcely opened the door when two of the children living there threw their arms about his neck and burst into tears. One of them, a girl of about twelve, was wearing a brown jacket; the other, a boy of about nine, was dressed in navy-blue knee breeches. The professor, who was quite fond of children, stroked their light-colored hair and earnestly tried to console them:

  “What has happened?” he asked them repeatedly, but they only went on weeping, until between sniffles they exclaimed:

  “They say that our beloved grandfather, His Majesty the Emperor, has died!”

  The professor was amazed that sadness at the passing of the head of state should affect even children. Yet it was not merely the matter of the bond between the imperial house and the people that gave him pause to think. Since his first experience of living abroad, he had often been struck by how readily and openly Westerners manifested their emotions. Once again, as a Japanese and a firm believer in bushidō, he was astounded. He had never succeeded in putting aside the mélange of suspicion and sympathy he had felt at the time. And yet he was now mystified by something quite the opposite—by this woman who did not weep.