“There’re gods in this mine. You can save your money, but they won’t let you take it out of here. It always comes back to them.”
“What gods?” I asked.
“Let’s call ’em goddesses,” he replied, and the four men enjoyed a good laugh among themselves. I kept silent. Ignoring me, the others launched into a discussion of the “goddesses.” It must have gone on for ten minutes or more while I thought about other things. What most interested me were my thoughts about how Tsuyako and Sumie would react if they could see me squatting down in this dark mine wearing these mud-stained clothes. Would they feel sorry for me? Would they cry? Or would they think I had fallen so low they could no longer love me? I had no difficulty in arriving at the conclusion that they would, indeed, feel sorry for me and cry, which made me want to give them at least a glimpse of me like this. Next I thought about the ridicule I had suffered by the fire last night and how Tsuyako and Sumie would have reacted if they had seen that. My conclusion here was quite the opposite of the earlier one. I was glad that neither had been at my side. When I imagined to myself what the scene would have looked like—the two stylish women there with me as I submitted spinelessly to my tormenters—I felt my armpits ready to start streaming from the embarrassment. In other words, the sheer fact of my having descended to the ranks of the miners didn’t bother me so much. I even felt a touch of pride in it. But what I didn’t want the women to see was my lack of standing as a new miner. We always want to conceal a loss of dignity from anyone, but we especially want to conceal it from women. Women are helpless creatures who depend on us, and the more we are depended on, the more we want to demonstrate that we are men of dignity. This feeling would seem to be especially strong in unmarried men. There’s a bit of the showman in every human being, however dire his straits. As I sat there resting in the depths of the mine, seat-pad beneath my buttocks, lantern in hand, my thoughts took on precisely this dramatic quality—which was, in a sense, a respite from my suffering. The theater, which may be called a publicly sanctioned respite, must certainly have developed from this kind of experience. Playing the protagonist in a non-developing drama deep inside me, I was feeling both defeated and triumphant at the same time.
Suddenly there came a huge sound that seemed to slam through my lungs. I couldn’t tell whether it had occurred underfoot or overhead. Both the log I was sitting on and the black ceiling above me gave a jump. My head and arms and legs moved. Sometimes, if you’re dangling your legs over the edge of the veranda and something hits your knee, the lower part of your leg twitches up. That’s just how my whole body moved, but much more violently. And not just my body. My mind did the same. Turning a somersault in the midst of my private “drama,” I came back to myself all at once. The sound lingered on, as if a thunderbolt had been buried in the earth, its free reverberations chained down until, frustrated, writhing with pent-up energy, it could only smash against the rocks, be enveloped again, rage once more only to be hurled back, and, all hope of escape closed off, go on roaring and roaring.
“Don’t let it scare you,” Hatsu said. He stood up.
I stood up.
The three miners stood up. “There’s not much left,” one of them said, picking up his chisel. “Let’s get it over with.”
Hatsu and I started out of the work site. Then the smoke hit us. With the smell of gunpowder, it entered my eyes, my nose, my mouth. Choking, I whirled around. A clanging sound in the work site told me the miners had begun their job.
“What is this?” I asked Hatsu in my misery. When I had first heard the roaring sound, I had been convinced that a huge explosion had occurred in the mine and that our lives would be in danger if we didn’t get out of there fast. Hatsu, meanwhile, seemed to be burrowing deeper into the mine. Though frightened, I followed after him. Being neither physically capable of doing as I pleased nor psychologically independent, I was able to comfort myself with the thought that, even though as my senior he could do whatever he wanted to, when the time came to flee, I could count on him to flee. That was when the choking cloud of smoke blew in. I whirled around, partly out of fear of going too far into this place, when the clanging sound of the three miners smashing ore in the smoke moved me to ask my question out of sheer amazement that we might be safe after all.
“Don’t be scared,” Hatsu said, coughing a few times. “It’s just dynamite.”
“Is it OK?”
“Maybe it’s not OK, but there’s nothin’ you can do about it. If you’re gonna be scared of dynamite, you can’t spend one day in the hole.”
I kept silent. Hatsu forged on ahead as if elbowing his way through the smoke. I couldn’t believe that he was totally free of discomfort; rather, I thought, he must be putting on a bold front for me, the newcomer. Either that or the smoke had already passed from one tunnel into another and, had we been on the surface, I would have seen that it was gone by now, but because of the darkness here below I might have just thought that the smoke was hanging in the tunnel and that I was choking, in which case it was not Hatsu who was to blame but me.
At any rate, I followed after him, enduring the discomfort. When we had passed through another womb-like opening and descended another set of twenty-five-foot terraces, turning right and left, we came to a fork in the road. A clattering sound came from the far end of the branch road. It sounded like the noise a rock makes when you throw it down a deep well, but the “well” in this case seemed much deeper than the ordinary well. By which I mean that the sound of the rock hitting the sides as it fell was particularly sharp and clear. And it lasted a very long time. The final clatter came from the absolute bottom and it took a long time to reach us. But reach us it always did in the end. It had only to travel in a straight line where there were no escape routes. Though it might be on the verge of dying halfway home, every bit of sound produced at the bottom, however far away and faint it might be, would be sent up by the reverberating walls without loss. That, roughly, was what it sounded like.
Hatsu came to a halt.
“Hear that?”
“Yes.”
“They’re throwin’ ore down the pit.”
“Oh, I see …”
“As long as we’re here, I’ll give you a look at the pit.”
He said this as if it had occurred to him on the spur of the moment. With a vigorous backward step, Hatsu turned the heels of his sandals in a new direction. He cut to the right before I could answer, so completely was I absorbed in listening to the sounds. I followed him into the darkness.
The side road ran up against a wall just four feet past the entrance. A sharp turn to the right, and six feet ahead a dull glow filled the tunnel, which broadened and rose in height. In the glow were two black shadows. When we approached them, one of the black shadows thrust his left foot forward and, with a powerful scooping motion, flipped a large winnowing basket behind him at an angle. The basket landed upside-down atop the planks on which he was standing, the contents falling far below with that clattering sound. A foot beyond him was a large hole, maybe six feet across. The man was a digger, and he had just thrown in a basketful of loose ore. A sheer rock wall rose above the far side of the hole. The glow of the lanterns was too dim to bring out the color of the rock, but the entire wet surface of the wall shone in their light.
“Take a peek,” Hatsu said.
The planking extended some three feet out over the lip of the hole. I stepped about a third of the way onto the planks.
“More,” Hatsu urged me from behind.
I hesitated. Even at this point, there was no telling how far I’d fall if the planks gave way. And if I went out a foot farther, I’d have to jump one more foot to solid ground in an emergency. A foot may not seem like much, but down here it’s the same as sixty feet on the surface. And so I hesitated.
“Go ahead, you can do better than that. How’re you ever gonna be a digger?”
This was not Hatsu’s voice. It probably belonged to one of the black shadows. I did not look back. But neith
er did my feet move forward. Only my eyes moved—slowly, down the wet, dimly shining wall at the other side of the pit, as far as they could see, maybe six feet altogether, beyond which there was only perfect darkness. And because it was so perfectly dark, I couldn’t tell how much my eyes were taking in. But once you sensed that it was deep, it might as well have been infinitely deep. Nerves on edge at the awful prospect of falling in, I began to feel as if I were being nudged from behind. My feet remained planted where they were.
“Hey, get outa the way,” a voice said.
I turned to see one of the diggers standing there with a heavy-looking straw bag in his arms. The bag itself was no more than half as big as a bale of rice, but I could tell it was heavy from the way he clutched the bottom with both hands and supported some of its weight on his hip, holding his breath with the effort. I moved aside immediately, drawing back to a relatively safe spot, from which, if the planks were to break, I could leap to solid ground. I assumed the digger would proceed with caution since the bag was blocking his view, but much to my surprise he continued to move forward with heavy steps. Some two feet from the edge, he brought his legs together, and I assumed he was going to stop. But then he took another step. Now he had only one foot to go. This he cut in half with another step. Then he brought his feet into perfect alignment. And then he gave a grunt. His chest and hips moved forward simultaneously. Certain he was going over the edge, I was about to cry out when the heavy bale somersaulted from his hands and he remained rooted to his spot on the planks. Of the fallen bale, nothing more was to be heard. Or so I was thinking when there came a distant thud. The bale had apparently fallen all the way to the bottom.
“Neat trick, huh? Think you can do it?” asked Hatsu.
“I don’t know,” I said, cocking my head in all-too-obvious bewilderment. Hatsu and the diggers laughed out loud. I simply went on with my bewilderment, resigned to being laughed at. Hatsu then delivered the following speech to me:
“It’s like anything else. You gotta have training. It looks easy till you try it. Say they make you a digger and you’re scared to go near the edge. You try throwing stuff in at arm’s length. Everything’ll fall on the planks and miss the pit. It’s even more dangerous that way ’cause the weight of the ore pulls you in. You have to throw it from the chest like these guys, or else—”
The other man interrupted Hatsu, laughing. “You gotta fall into the pit a few times. It’s good for you. Ha ha ha ha.”
Retracing our steps to the earlier tunnel, we walked with the diggers, who turned right after fifty yards. Hatsu and I continued straight down an incline. At the bottom, we wove our way twenty-five or thirty feet to the end of a level passage, where Hatsu came to a stop.
“Ready to climb down more?” he asked.
No, of course not, I had ceased being “ready” a long time ago. But while, on the one hand, it would seem that I had endured one hardship after another to come this far because I was sure I’d fail the test if I gave up partway, I had also been figuring that we would reach the bottom before too long. If Hatsu now had to stop and make a point of asking me whether I was ready for more after all we’d been through, that meant we still had more than one or two blocks left to go. I looked at his face in the darkness as I pondered this question. Maybe I ought to say I’ve had enough, I thought. One’s course of action at a time like this is determined entirely by the other person’s whim. Idiot or genius, it’s the same for everybody. Which is why it was faster to decide by studying Hatsu’s face than by consulting my own heart’s desire. This was one of those cases in which my surroundings rather than my character were to decide my fate, in which the worth of my character would sink far below the norm. Among all such cases in which the character I was so confident I had established for myself simply crumbled to pieces, this was one of the most vivid examples. It was also one of the sources of my theory of the non-existence of character.
So, as I’ve said, I studied Hatsu’s face. I saw in it no friendly invitation to join him in continued descent. Neither did I find there sage counsel to climb down for my own good, nor a threat to make me go down whether I wanted to or not. Of course there was no hint that he was teasing me—C’mon, I know you want to go down. I saw in Hatsu’s face only contempt, a firm conviction that I could never make it. This in itself was not a problem for me. But beyond the look of contempt there lurked the urgent question of failing the test they were giving me. If I failed now, that would be far more important than my honor, my dignity, or anything else. I would have to continue on down, even if it meant suffocating to death.
“Let’s go,” I declared.
Hatsu looked as if I had taken him off guard. “OK, then,” he said gently. “But don’t forget, it’s gonna be a little risky.”
And no wonder. We had to climb straight down a perfectly perpendicular shaft like a couple of monkeys. A ladder hung there against one wall of the shaft, though it seemed more like a pole dangling in midair, the lower end of which could not be seen from above. How far down it went, and where it was fastened to the wall, there was no way of telling.
“OK, I’ll go first, and you follow. But please be careful.”
I had never expected to hear such considerate language from Hatsu. Probably he was feeling a little sorry for me, the way I had offered so passively to climb down. He did an about-face, precisely aiming his hindquarters toward the opening. Then he knelt down. And, without a moment’s delay, he began to sink into the hole, step by step, feet first, until only his face was left. Eventually, even his face disappeared. As long as his face was visible, I felt reasonably confident, but of course as soon as the top of his black head slipped down into the hole, anxiety and helplessness made it impossible for me to stand still and, on tiptoe, I peered down from above. Hatsu continued his downward climb. All I could see were his black head and the light of the lantern. Unnerving as this was, I still found it possible to think, “If I don’t get down there while Hatsu is still visible, I might never make it.” This would result in total humiliation. Concluding that the only thing to do was to get down there as quickly as possible, I spun around and set my hands and knees on the ground as Hatsu had done. Lowering myself into the hole, I felt for the rungs of the ladder with the bottoms of my sandals.
Grasping the top rung with both hands, back curled like a shrimp’s, I lowered my feet to where I guessed there might be something to stand on. Slowly, I stretched my legs out. When I was standing straight, the flame of the lantern came close to my chest. If I didn’t move, I’d be smoked to death. All I could do was lower one foot. And to accomplish that, I had to bring one hand down to the next rung. As I lowered my right hand, the lantern hooked over my thumb began to move in unpredictable ways. When I was careless enough to let it swing freely, it seemed about to set my clothes on fire. But when I tried to be extra careful, it smashed against the rock wall and almost went out. Back when I had thrust my thumb in the cup and let the lantern dangle like a pendulum, I had thought it was a very handy device, but now it was just a bother. Besides, the ladder was narrow. And the distance from one rung to the next was awfully long. It took at least twice the effort of the ordinary ladder to go down a rung. My fear only made matters worse. And each new rung felt slimy in my grasp. All but pressing my nose against one to peer at it in the feeble light, I saw it was coated with clay—smeared on, no doubt, by the sandals going up and down. Partway down the ladder, I craned my neck and looked down. I never should have done that. My head started to spin and my desperate grasp began to loosen. “I might be killed! No! No!” I clung to the ladder, shutting my eyes tightly. Through a swirling mass of large soap bubbles, I saw Hatsu climbing down. Strictly speaking, if I could have seen Hatsu, it would have been when I looked down. There was no way he could have been there amid soap bubbles whirling before my closed eyes. And yet he was. Climbing down. It was very strange. Now that I think of it, I must have glanced at Hatsu the moment before the dizziness hit me, but what with the reeling and the fumbling and
the sudden fear of dying, I forgot about the image of Hatsu impressed on my retinas until it revived itself when I closed my eyes and grabbed onto the rung of the ladder. Whether there is any scientific basis for such an event, I don’t know. I was in a dream state. I was in the dark, in fear for my life, and in mental chaos, unsure whether I was alive or dead. When I saw Hatsu climbing down, I was too far gone to know whether he was doing it inside my eyes or beneath my feet. Strange to say, though, I opened my eyes and looked down again. And yes, there he was again. But now he seemed to be climbing down the opposite wall. Maybe because this was my second glance down, it didn’t make me dizzy enough to let go. Instead, I focused my eyes on Hatsu, who was, in fact, climbing down the opposite wall. How in the world …? But just then the lantern started to hiss again. This was upsetting. The thing was supposed to be failure-proof. Meanwhile, Hatsu seemed to be zooming down. In this situation, that would be the best thing for me to do, too, I realized. Grabbing one slimy rung after another, I eventually made it down another twenty feet or so, where my feet came to rest on earth. Yes, it was earth, I found with a tentative step. Just in case, I kept my hands on the ladder while inspecting underfoot, and there was no doubt about it: the ladder ended there. But so did the foot-deep shelf of earth I was standing on. Below was more vertical shaft. On the opposite wall, though, was another ladder, positioned so you could reach out from here and grasp it. Which is what I did, since there was nothing else I could do. Then I went down as quickly as I could. This ladder was the same length as the first one. And where it ended, there was another one on the opposite wall, as before. Having no choice in the matter, I switched again. And when I managed, with what seemed to be my last breath, to reach the bottom of this one, another new one hung on the opposite wall. There was virtually no end to them. By the time I came to the sixth ladder, the strength had gone out of my hands, my legs were beginning to tremble, and I was breathing in a very odd manner. Below, all trace of Hatsu had disappeared long before. The harder I looked, the deeper the darkness became. My lantern kept hissing with the drops that hit it. Cold water seeped into the straw of my sandals.