Chapter I: Introduction (1)

Akutagawa Ryūnosuke was born in Tōkyō on the first day of March, 1892, and drank poison and died in Tōkyō early on the morning of July 24, 1927. Of the thirty-five years of his life, lived almost entirely in that same Tōkyō, he spent some eighteen mostly in school as a young prodigy and some eleven mostly at his desk as the fashioner and polisher of perhaps 200 over-wrought short stories, of which this book contains eleven, translated into English as nearly word for word as possible.

His father, a man named Niihara Toshizō, is said to have given him the name Ryūnosuke (Dragon-helper) because he was born at the dragon hour on a dragon day in the dragon month of a dragon year. But his father’s part in the story ends there. His mother was unwell, and he was given in infancy, in the Japanese way, to her childless elder brother, Akutagawa Shōdō. His adoptive mother’s great uncle is reported to have been a man of fashion in the latter days of the old Edo period, but beyond this very frail hint, no home influence has been suggested as contributing to his genius.

When in the third year of primary school, bright young Ryūnosuke picked up Tokutomi Roka’s book of sketches, _Shizen to Jinsei_ (Nature and Man) and read it with a pleasure that is said to have turned him to literature. He went into the First High School in Tōkyō on recommendation without examination, passed through the school an honor student and entered the Imperial University of Tōkyō, where he studied English literature, graduating in 1916. His graduation thesis was entitled, _Wiriamu Morisu Kenkyū_ (A Study of William Morris).

He was like Morris in his surrender to the fascination of the Middle Ages, but he had none of the practical reforming tendencies of that artist socialist. He has been more aptly compared to Flaubert for the seriousness with which he took his art and the preciousness of his style. And the post-bellum point of view has been expressed by a Japanese social worker who, at his death, compared him, as a man with a keen sense of humor and knowledge of human nature and “an arbiter of elegance in the vicious society in which he lived,” to Petronius.

He says of himself while at the University that he did not attend classes very well and was an idle student, but we may take this for the expression of a sincere wish to be more like some of his hardier classmates, for Kikuchi Kan, one of them and to-day the literary Crœsus of Japan, says that Akutagawa went to his classes faithfully and had the confidence of his professors.

Writing some time after 1921, Kikuchi said of his friend Akutagawa that, when he thought of him as he was during their school days together, the first thing he always saw was the bright spot his red lips made in his pale white face. Akutagawa was very quiet and self-contained as an honor student. He was always buying new literary books, and always carried one with him wherever he went. Kikuchi envied him the books but thought at first that he was trying to show off when he carried them about with him. And he disliked the clever remarks and paradoxes with which Akutagawa was wont to pepper his conversation. Later he admired him as a writer. His life, like his writing, was most meticulous. He had a good memory and was full of ideas and of a delicate understanding. He was doing, Kikuchi felt, the most artistic work then being produced in Japan, but he was too cold and intellectual. He played with life with silver tweezers, but never touched it and had no real experience of it.

In 1923 Kikuchi was writing again that he thought Akutagawa, who had turned down an offer of a professorship at the Kyūshū Imperial University, should be given the recently vacated chair of English literature at the Kyōto Imperial University. It was his opinion that Akutagawa, who always had hanging on his door the sign, “Sick, Compliments to Callers,” that he might have more time to read, was the most scholarly of the literary men of Japan. He expressed a wish, however, that Akutagawa would forsake Persia and Greece and their curios and devote more time to men like Marx and Shaw.

Kikuchi first came to admire Akutagawa when, with a few others at the University, they began in 1914 the publication of the third series of the magazine _Shinshichō_. His maiden effort appeared in the first issue, attracting no particular attention. But in the following year he published in the magazine _Teikoku Bungaku_ two stories, the second of which, Rashōmon, became the title story of his first volume, published in May, 1917, and is now always associated with his name. It is a gruesome thing concerning the old two-storied south gate of Kyōto in the days when that landmark was falling into decay with the rest of the ancient capital toward the end of the twelfth century. By way of lame extenuation, this much, at least, may be said for the story (which is the fourth in this volume), that in other tales, Akutagawa has written with even more disgusting realism of this truly distressing period.

In December, 1915, while still at the University, Akutagawa became a disciple of the preëminent writer of the day, Natsume Soseki, who probably had a greater influence than any other man on his literary life. Mori Ogai, the versatile army surgeon, who tried his hand at so many things in the literary field during the periods of Meiji and Taishō, has been credited with having had the next greatest influence on him.

In 1916, in a fourth revival of the magazine _Shinshichō_, Akutagawa published _Hana_ (The Nose), the second story in this book, which drew from Natsume the highest praise. He told his young disciple that if he would write twenty or thirty more stories like it, he would find himself occupying a unique position among the writers of his country, a prophecy which came true. Out of old material, with the greatest attention to detail and to the atmosphere of the period of which he wrote, Akutagawa had produced a grotesquely amusing thing, writing into it some modern psychology and the little lesson that ideals are precious only so long as they remain ideals. This new way of treating historical material in Japan attracted the attention of his countrymen and became characteristic of much of Akutagawa’s work. Of this sort of tale, “Lice” and the Chinese story, “The Wine Worm,” go one step further in grotesquery, while “The Pipe” turns to lighter and more wholesome humor.

In 1917, when Akutagawa published his second volume of short stories, _Tobako to Akuma_ (The Devil and Tobacco), he had already established himself as one of the foremost writers of the day. The title story of the volume is the opening story in this book. In it we see an Oriental saturated with western literature playing with an old theme in a highly amusing and clever way. (Incidentally Akutagawa was himself an inveterate cigarette smoker.) It is one of the many stories he wrote about the early Catholic missionaries of the sixteenth century, one of them so cleverly that it fooled Japanese students of the period into believing that it was a translation from an old Latin text, non-existent, but called by Akutagawa _Legenda Aurea_.

Of the other stories in this volume of translations, a few comments may be of interest. Prof. Hasegawa in “The Handkerchief” is generally recognized as the distinguished author of _Bushidō_, Dr. Nitobe Inazō. “The Spider’s Thread” was written for a young peoples’ magazine. “The Badger” is one of those comic bits in which Akutagawa, making extravagant use of his wide reading, loved to play with a quaint idea in make-believe seriousness. “The Ball” is a re-creation of a fragment of that strange and romantic period in Japanese history when, soon after the Restoration, the West was being swallowed whole, only to be cast up again in revulsion in the inevitable reaction of the nineties. The Rokumeikan was the, to later eyes ridiculous, center of the social phase of this effort, and Pierre Loti, fresh from the sordid little transaction in Nagasaki out of which he made his best-known book on Japan, makes quite a respectable hero there. Who could have been the original of Mōri Sensei in the character study at the end of the volume, I do not know, but I have seen so many Mōri Senseis like him during my years in Japanese schools that I cannot read it without a doubtless gratuitous, but none the less poignant, feeling of the futility of many men’s lives, or should I, in a very general sense, say, “of all our lives?”

Just before he killed himself, Akutagawa coolly set down at considerable length an explanation of the ending of his short life (naming all the suicides of Eastern and Western history, including even Christ) on highly reasoned and philosophical grounds, which do not matter much here, for the simple truth seems to be that he was at the time a physical and nervous wreck, having been all his life a high-strung and frail man. Though he mentions an unnamed woman as furnishing some immediate excuse for it (he was a normal husband and father), and though the poetess Byakuren has gone out of her way to drop a hint that this woman was her own very good friend Kujō Takeko, the poetess and woman of letters whom public sentiment has made the ideal woman of modern Japan, Akutagawa seems simply to have been world-weary and, after coldly contemplating death for years, not able himself to say exactly what did drive him to it. All that can be said surely about it is that it took the vast majority of his countrymen greatly by surprise.

Then here ends the story of a sort of literary ascetic, whose history, as one biographer puts it, is really little more than a list of the dates on which he published his stories and the names of the magazines in which they appeared. But there can be no doubt that he had more individuality than any other writer of his time and has left in Japanese literature a mass of artistic work, often grotesque and curious, that, while it undoubtedly angers the proletarian experimenters who now hold the stage and fight with lusty pens and a highly developed class consciousness against all that he stood for, will continue to live as long as men go on treasuring the fancies their fellows from time to time set down with care on paper.

The translation of _Rashōmon_ here given was first published in the English study magazine, _Eigo Seinen_, in 1920, three years after Akutagawa published the original in his first book. “Lice” was published in the same magazine in 1921. I am grateful to the magazine for permission to republish them in this volume. I am once more grateful, too, to my very sympathetic Japanese colleagues, whom I have always used freely when, from time to time, dictionaries and my own imagination have failed me. And finally I am grateful to the author, whom, though his days of seeing and hearing are over, I here address as would a Japanese: Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, at last I am publishing the book I started with your approval years ago. May you find it pleasing.

Glenn W. Shaw

Osaka, June 10, 1930.

CONTENTS

PAGE

TOBACCO AND THE DEVIL 1

THE NOSE 15

THE HANDKERCHIEF 29

RASHŌMON 45

LICE 57

THE SPIDER’S THREAD 67

THE WINE WORM 75

THE BADGER 89

THE BALL 97

THE PIPE 109

MŌRI SENSEI 123

TOBACCO AND THE DEVIL

TOBACCO did not grow in Japan in the beginning. And the records do not agree as to when it was introduced. Some put it in the Keichō Period (1596-1615) and some in the Tembun Period (1532-55). But the plant seems to have been already widely under cultivation by about the tenth year of Keichō. And in the Bunroku Period (1592-96), smoking was so widespread as to give rise to the pasquinade,

Things without effect
On men are the smoking law,
The counterfeit law,
The imperial voice secluded
And Gentaku the physician.

To the question, “By whom was tobacco introduced?” any historian would answer that it was by the Portuguese or the Spaniards. But these are not necessarily the only answers. There is, besides, one more in the form of a tradition. According to it, tobacco was brought here from somewhere by the Devil. And the Devil was brought all the way over to Japan by a Catholic Padre, perhaps St. Francis.

When I say this, Catholic believers may find fault with me for slandering their Padres. But for myself, I cannot but believe it probable. For it is most natural that when the god of the “Southern barbarians” came to us from across the sea, their devil should come with him,--that is, when the good of the West was brought in, the evil should be brought in too.

But I cannot say positively whether the Devil truly brought tobacco to this land or not. Of course, according to a book by Anatole France, the Devil once tried to tempt a certain priest with mignonette. Then surely we cannot simply say that the story that he brought tobacco into Japan is a mere lie. Even if it is a lie, it may be, in a certain sense, surprisingly near the truth. With this thought, I have decided to try writing here this tradition concerning the introduction of tobacco.

* * * * *

In the eighteenth year of Tembun, the Devil, assuming the form of a Brother in St. Francis Xavier’s company, came safely across the wide seas to Japan. He was able to change himself into this Brother because, while the genuine Brother was ashore at Amakawa or somewhere, the “black ship” which carried the party sailed away and left him behind without knowing it. Then the Devil, who had up to this time been hanging head down with his tail wrapped round a spar secretly watching what was going on in the ship, instantly took on the appearance of this man and began to wait on St. Francis constantly. Of course such a trick was nothing for him, since he was the expert who, when he called on Dr. Faust, could assume the shape of a splendid red-cloaked knight.

But when he reached Japan, he found things quite different from what he had read of them in Marco Polo’s Travels while still in the West. In the first place, in the Travels, the whole country seemed to be overflowing with gold, but look where he might, there was nothing of the kind to be seen. Then he might be able to tempt people a good deal by scratching crosses with his nail and turning them into gold. And it was said that the Japanese knew a way of raising the dead by the power of pearls or something, but this also seemed to be one of Marco Polo’s lies. If it was a lie and he should spit into all their wells and spread a plague among them, practically all men would forget the coming Paradise in their agony. Laudably following St. Francis about here and there sight-seeing, the Devil secretly thought such thoughts and smiled to himself with satisfaction.

But there was one thing that troubled him. Even he did not know what to do about that one thing. Francis Xavier having just reached Japan and it being necessary for him to preach widely before he could make any converts to Christianity, there was not a single all-important believer for him to tempt. With all his being the Devil, this perplexed him not a little. In the first place, for the time being, he did not know how to while away his tedious leisure hours.

So after considering many things, he thought he would kill some time gardening anyway, for he had been carrying various kinds of seeds in the hollow of his ear ever since his departure from the West. As for land, if he borrowed a neighboring field, he would have no trouble about that. Moreover, even St. Francis gave his hearty approval. Of course he supposed that one of the Brothers in his company was going to introduce western medicinal herbs or some such plants into Japan.

The Devil immediately borrowed a spade and a hoe and began energetically to till a roadside field.

It was just at the vapor-laden beginning of spring, and the bell of a far-off temple sent its sleepy boom through the floating mist. The sound was ever so tranquil and did not strike him on the crown of the head with the disagreeable sharp clang of the church bells of the West to which he was accustomed. But if you suppose that the Devil felt calm in these peaceful surroundings, you are quite wrong.

When he once heard the sound of this temple bell, he scowled more unhappily than he had when he heard the bell of St. Paul’s and began to dig furiously in the field. For when, bathed in the warm sunshine, he heard this calm bell, his heart was strangely relaxed. He had no more mind to work evil than to do good. At this rate, his crossing the sea on purpose to tempt the Japanese would be all in vain. The only reason the Devil, who hated work so much that he was once scolded by the sister of Ivan for having no blisters on his palms, was willing to toil away with a hoe like this was simply that he was madly determined to drive away the moral sleepiness that threatened to overcome him.

After some days the Devil at last finished his work and sowed in furrows the seeds he had in his ear.

* * * * *

During the following months, the seeds the Devil had sown sprouted and grew into high plants and, at the end of the summer, broad green leaves completely hid all the earth of the field. But there was no one who knew the name of the plants. Even when St. Francis asked him, the Devil only grinned and held his tongue, vouchsafing no reply.

Meanwhile the plants put out clusters of flowers on the ends of their stems. They were funnel-shaped and light purple. The Devil seemed to be delighted with the flowering of the plants in proportion to the trouble he had taken with them. So every day, after the morning and evening services, he always came out into the field and cultivated them devotedly.

Then one day (St. Francis had gone off on a preaching tour for several days and was absent) a cattle dealer passed by the field leading a yellow cow. There across the fence in the field full of purple flowers stood a southern barbarian Brother in his black priest’s robe and broad-brimmed hat busily picking worms off the leaves. The flowers were so curious that the cattle dealer involuntarily stopped, took off his mushroom hat and called to the Brother politely,

“I say, holy one, what are those flowers?”

The Brother looked round. He had a flat nose and small eyes and was an altogether good-natured looking “red-head.”

“These?”

“Yes.”

The “red-head,” leaning on the fence, shook his head. Then he said in awkward Japanese,

“I’m sorry, but I can’t tell that one thing to anybody.”

“Oh, then did Francis Sama say that you shouldn’t tell?”

“No, not that.”

“Then won’t you just tell me once, for I’ve recently been instructed by Francis Sama and become a believer in your religion, as you see.”

The cattle dealer pointed proudly to his breast. The Devil looked, and sure enough, there was a little brass cross hanging from his neck and shining in the sun. Then, perhaps dazzled by it, the Brother screwed up his face a little and dropped his eyes to the ground, but quickly in a more familiar tone than before and so that you could not tell whether he was joking or not, he said,

“Still I can’t. For by the law of our country, it’s forbidden to tell. Better still, you make a guess at it yourself. The Japanese are clever, so you’re sure to hit it. If you do, I’ll give you all the plants in this field.”

The cattle dealer probably thought the Brother was making fun of him. With a smile on his sun-burnt face, he gave his head an exaggerated tilt.

“What can it be, I wonder. To save me, I can’t guess it right off.”

“Oh, you needn’t do it to-day. Think it over for three days. I don’t care if you consult others about it. If you guess it, I’ll give you all these. Besides, I’ll give you some rare wine. Or shall I give you a picture of the Heavenly Paradise.”

The cattle dealer seemed to be surprised at his earnestness.

“Then if I don’t guess it, what’ll I have to do?”

Pushing his hat back on his head, the Brother waved his hand and laughed. He laughed in a sharp voice like a crow’s, that took the cattle dealer a little by surprise.

“If you fail to guess it, I’ll take something of yours. It’s a gamble. It’s a gamble whether you can guess it or not. If you guess it, I give you all these plants.”

As he talked, the red-head’s voice again took on a friendly tone.

“All right. Then I’ll do my best, too, and give you anything you say.”

“Will you give me anything? Even that cow?”

“If she’ll do, I’ll give her to you right now.”

Smiling, the cattle dealer patted the yellow cow on the forehead. He seemed to be taking everything the good-natured Brother said for a joke.

“And in exchange, if I win, I’ll thank you for those flowering plants.”

“Good. Good. Then it’s a real bargain, isn’t it?”

“It’s a real bargain. I swear in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.”

When he heard this, the Brother flashed his little eyes and snorted twice or thrice as if with satisfaction. Then putting his left hand on his hip and leaning a little back, he put his right hand out and touched the purple flowers.

“Well then, if you don’t guess it--I’ll take you, body and soul.”

With this, the red-head made a large circle with his right hand and took off his hat. There were two horns like a goat’s in his shaggy hair. The cattle dealer, changing color, dropped his hat from his hand. Perhaps because the sun was obscured, the brightness of the flowers and leaves in the field all at once vanished. Even the cow, as if in fear of something, lowered her horns and gave a bellow like the rumbling of the earth.

“Even a promise made to me is a promise. You’ve sworn in the name of one to me unmentionable. Don’t forget. You have three days. Good-bye.”

Speaking thus in the courteous tone of one who has made a fool of somebody, the Devil deliberately made the cattle dealer a very polite bow.

* * * * *

The cattle dealer regretted that he had fallen into the Devil’s trap so carelessly. If he left things as they were, he would finally be seized by that “shag-pate” and have to burn body and soul in the everlasting fires of hell. Then his having forsaken his former religion and having been baptized would be of no avail.

Since, however, he had sworn in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, he could not break the promise he had made. Of course if St. Francis had only been there, something might have been done yet, but unfortunately he was away. Then for three days, during which he could not sleep a wink, he tried to think how to outwit the Devil. To do so, there was absolutely no way but to learn the name of the plant. But where could there be anybody who knew a name unknown even to St. Francis?

Finally, on the last night, the cattle dealer, again leading his yellow cow, stole up to the house in which the Brother lived. It stood beside the field facing the road. When he got there, it seemed that the Brother had already gone to bed, and no light shone from the windows. There was a moon, but it was a hazy night, and here and there in the lonely field the purple flowers showed faintly and lonesomely in the gloom. Of course the cattle dealer had finally crept up here because he had thought of a sort of doubtful plan, but as soon as he saw this quiet scene, he was somehow afraid and felt that it might be best to go back home as he was. Especially when he thought of that demon in the house with horns like a goat’s, perhaps dreaming of the Inferno, all the courage he had worked up melted weakly away. But when he thought of handing himself over, body and soul, to that shag-pate, of course it was no time to squeal and give up.

So the cattle dealer, beseeching the help of the Virgin Mary, boldly carried out the plan he had formed. It was no very great plan. It was only to take off the halter of the yellow cow he was leading and, beating her roundly behind, drive her madly into the field.

The cow, jumping with the pain, broke down the fence and trampled the field. She ran against the weather-boarding of the house with her horns many times. And the noise of her hoofs and her bellowing, stirred the light mist of the night and echoed fearfully through the neighborhood. Then somebody opened a window shutter and stuck out his head. Because of the darkness the face was not recognizable, but it was surely that of the Devil in the form of the Brother. It may have been nerves, but the horns on his head were distinctly visible even in the night.

“You dirty cur, you, what do you mean by tearing up my tobacco field?” yelled the Devil in a sleepy voice, shaking his fist. He seemed extremely angry at being disturbed just after falling asleep.

But to the cattle dealer, who was hiding and watching on the other side of the field, these words of the Devil sounded like the voice of his God.

“You dirty cur, you, what do you mean by tearing up my tobacco field?”

* * * * *

After that everything ended most harmoniously, as always in stories of this kind. The cattle dealer guessed the name “tobacco” successfully and got the best of the Devil. And he took all the tobacco growing in the field. Thus ends the story.

But I have always wondered whether this tradition may not have in it a deeper meaning. For though the Devil was not able to make the cattle dealer’s body and soul his own, he managed instead to disseminate tobacco throughout all Japan. Wherefore, as the escape of the cattle dealer was coupled with his fall, was not the failure of the Devil accompanied by success? Though the Devil falls, he does not simply rise again. May it not be true that when a man thinks he has won out against temptation he finds to his surprise that he has met defeat?

And here let me add a brief account of what became of the Devil after that. When St. Francis came back, he was finally driven off of the land by the virtue of the holy pentagram. But he seems to have wandered about here and there after that still disguised as a Brother. In a certain record, he is said to have appeared occasionally in Kyōto at about the time of the erection of the temple Nambanji. There is also a theory that Kashin Koji, the notorious fellow who made sport of Matsunaga Danjo, was the Devil, but since this has already been written about by Lafcadio Hearn, I shall not repeat it here. And then when the foreign religion was prohibited by Toyotomi and Tokugawa, he still showed himself at first, but finally in the end he left Japan altogether. The records give practically no further information on the Devil. Only it is exceedingly regrettable that we are unable to learn of his movements since he came back to Japan a second time after the Restoration of Meiji.

THE NOSE

There was nobody at Ike-no-O who did not know about the nose of Zenchi Naigu. It was five or six inches long and hung down from above his upper lip to below his chin. As for its shape, it was equally thick at base and tip. A long and slender sausage, so to speak, dangled from the middle of his face.

The Naigu, who was over fifty, had always grieved in secret at this nose of his from the far-off days when he was an acolyte to the present, when he had reached the position of an attendant at the palace chapel. Of course outwardly he even now wore an expression that proclaimed his lack of any particular concern about it. This was not merely because he thought it wrong for a priest who ought to devote his whole heart to the adoration of the anticipated Western Paradise to trouble himself about his nose. Rather it was because he hated to have people know that he was fretting to himself about it. In ordinary daily conversations, he feared above all else the appearance of the word “nose.”

There were two reasons why the Naigu found his nose too much for him. One was that in a practical way the length of it was inconvenient. In the first place, when he ate, he could not do it by himself. If he did, the tip of his nose got into the boiled rice in his metal bowl. So when taking his meals, he had one of his disciples sit across the dining-tray from him and hold his nose up with a piece of wood an inch wide and two feet long while he ate. But for him to dine in this way was by no means an easy thing for either the Naigu, whose nose was held up, or the disciple who held it. In those days a story got abroad even in Kyōto of how a Chūdōji, who once took the place of this disciple, let his hand shake when he sneezed and dropped the nose into a dish of gruel. But for the Naigu, this was not at all the main reason he grieved over his nose. The truth is, he was troubled over his self-respect, which was injured by his nose.

The people in the town of Ike-no-O said it was fortunate for Zenchi Naigu, with such a nose, that he was not a layman. For with him carrying that nose, they thought there would have been no woman willing to become his wife. And some of them even gave it as their opinion that he had probably taken to the priesthood on account of that nose. But the Naigu himself did not feel that his troubles over his nose were the least bit lessened through his being a priest. His self-respect was too delicately strung to be influenced one way or the other by such an ultimate fact as matrimony. So he tried both constructively and destructively to correct the injury done to his self-respect.

The first thing he took thought for was some means by which to make his long nose look shorter than it really was. When nobody was about, he took a mirror, and reflecting his face in it at all sorts of angles, earnestly exercised his ingenuity. Sometimes he could not be satisfied with only changing the position of his face, so first resting his head in his hands, then putting his finger to the tip of his chin, he would peer persistently into the glass. But not once up to this time had his nose looked short enough to satisfy even himself. Sometimes he even thought that the more he worried about it, the longer it seemed. At such times the Naigu always put the mirror back into the box, sighed as if it were something new, and returned reluctantly to his reading stand to go on reading the Kannon Sutra.

And again the Naigu was always paying attention to other people’s noses. The Ike-no-O temple often held preaching services. At the temple there were lines of closely built monks’ cells, and in the bath-room, the resident priests boiled up water daily. Accordingly the priests and laymen frequenting the place were many. The Naigu examined their faces patiently. For he wanted to put himself at ease by finding out at least one nose like his own. So he noticed neither their wide-sleeved hunting coats of deep blue nor their white summer garments. Naturally the orange-colored caps and the sober brown robes of the priests, in that he was accustomed to them, did not exist for him at all. He did not see the people; he only saw their noses. But though there were hooked noses, he failed to find a single one like his own. With the repetition of his failure, his heart became more and more unhappy. His unconsciously taking hold of the end of his dangling nose while in conversation with others, and blushing out of all keeping with his years, was simply the consequence of his being moved by this unhappiness.

Finally he even thought of obtaining some solace at least by finding some man with a nose like his own in the Buddhist scriptures or other books. But it was not written in any scripture that either Mokuren or Sharihotsu had a long nose. Of course Lung Shu and Ma Ming were both Boddhisatvas with ordinary noses. When he heard, apropos of Chinese story, that the ears of Lin Hsuan-ti of the Chu-Han were long, he thought how relieved he would have felt if it had been that worthy’s nose instead of his ears.

It is needless to say that while the Naigu thus troubled himself negatively, he, at the same time, tried positive ways to make his nose grow short. He did just about everything he could in this direction, too. Once he tried drinking a decoction of snake-gourd and once applying rat urine to his nose. But in spite of all his efforts, it still dangled its five or six inches down over his lips as before.

But one year in the autumn, one of his disciples, while in Kyōto on the Naigu’s business, was told by a doctor of his acquaintance of a way to shorten noses. This doctor was a man who had come originally from China and was at that time a priest at Chōrakuji.

The Naigu as usual pretended not to care about his nose and deliberately refrained from proposing an immediate trial of the method. But on the other hand, he dropped cheerful remarks about being sorry to give his disciple so much trouble every time he took his meals. In his heart, of course, he was waiting for his disciple to talk him over and get him to try it. And naturally the disciple could not be unaware of the Naigu’s scheme. But the feelings that made him adopt such a scheme must have moved the disciple’s sympathy more strongly than did his own antipathy to it. The disciple, as the Naigu had expected, began eagerly to urge him to try the method. And the Naigu himself, also in accordance with his expectation, finally followed this earnest counsel.

The method was the very simple one of just boiling his nose in hot water and letting someone trample on it.

Water was boiled daily in the temple bath-room. So the disciple poured water so hot that he could not stand his finger in it directly into a bucket and brought it from the bath-room. But there was a fear of the steam scalding the Naigu’s face if he dipped his nose directly into the bucket. So they decided to make a hole in a tray and, putting it on the bucket for a cover, to insert his nose through the hole into the hot water. If he soaked only his nose in the water, it did not feel hot at all. After a while, the disciple said,

“It must be boiled now, I think.”

The Naigu smiled a forced smile. This was because he thought that if any one heard only that, he would never imagine that it was a remark about a nose. After being steamed in the boiling water, it itched as if it had been bitten by fleas.

When the Naigu had drawn his nose out of the hole in the tray, the disciple began with all his might to trample it, still steaming, with both his feet. The Naigu, lying on his side and stretching out his nose on the floor boards, watched the disciple’s feet moving up and down before his eyes. From time to time the disciple looked down with a pitying face on the Naigu’s bald head and said,

“Doesn’t it hurt? The doctor said to trample it torturingly. But doesn’t it hurt?”

The Naigu tried to shake his head to show that it was not hurting him. But since his nose was being trampled on, he could not move his head as he wished. So, rolling up his eyes and fastening them on the cracks in the disciple’s chapped feet, he answered in an angry-sounding voice,

“No, it doesn’t!”

As his nose was being trampled on where it itched, he really found it more comfortable than painful.

After a while, something that looked like grains of millet began to come out on his nose. It looked, so to speak, like a bird plucked and roasted whole. The disciple, seeing this, stopped moving his feet and observed as if to himself,

“He told me to pull these out with hair-tweezers.”

The Naigu, puffing out his cheeks with dissatisfaction, without a word, left his nose to the disciple to deal with as he wished. Of course it was not because he was unaware of his disciple’s kindness. But though he was aware of that, he was displeased at having his nose treated just as if it were a commodity. Reluctantly, with the expression of a patient being operated on by a doctor in whom he has no faith, he watched the disciple with hair-tweezers pulling the fat out of the pores of his nose. The fat came out in the shape of bird quills half an inch long.

Finally when the nose had once been gone over, the disciple looked relieved and said,

“If you boil it once more, it’ll be all right, I think.”

The Naigu, still knitting his brows and looking dissatisfied, did as the disciple told him.

Well, when he took his boiled nose out the second time, indeed it was short as it had never been before. Now it was not greatly different from the ordinary hooked nose. The Naigu, stroking his shortened nose, peered shame-facedly and nervously into the mirror the disciple gave him.

His nose, that nose which had hung down below his chin, had shrunk up almost unbelievably and now simply clung on spiritless above his upper lip. The red blotches on it here and there were probably bruises left by the trampling. Now surely nobody would laugh at him. The Naigu’s face in the mirror looked at the face outside and blinked its eyes contentedly.

But during all that day, he was uneasy for fear his nose might become long again. So while he read the sutras and while he ate his meals, whenever opportunity offered, he put up his hand and stealthily felt the tip of his nose. But it simply kept its place decently above his lips, and there was no sign of its getting any longer. Then after a night’s sleep, when he awoke early the next morning, he felt his nose the very first thing. It was still as short as ever. Whereupon, for the first time in many years, the Naigu experienced the same sense of relief he had enjoyed when he had finished heaping up merit for himself by copying out the Hoke Sutra.

But within the next two or three days, the Naigu discovered a surprising fact. It was that a samurai who was at the temple at Ike-no-O on business at that time looked more amused than ever and, unable to talk as he wished, did nothing but stare at the Naigu’s nose. Moreover, the Chūdōji who had once dropped his nose in the gruel kept his eyes on the ground at first, and stifled a laugh when he met the Naigu outside the hall, but finally burst out laughing as if he could restrain himself no longer. It happened not only once or twice that the under priests who were being given orders listened respectfully while face to face with him, but fell to tittering whenever he so much as looked around behind him.

At first the Naigu interpreted this as being due to the change in his features. But by this interpretation it seemed by no means possible to arrive at a full explanation. Of course the reason for the Chūdōji’s and under priests’ laughing must have lain in that. But all the same, there was in the way they laughed something that had not been there in the days when his nose was long. If his unfamiliar short nose looked more ridiculous than his familiar long nose, so much for that. But there seemed to be something more to it.

“They didn’t laugh so constantly before,” the Naigu would murmur sometimes, interrupting the sutra he had started to recite and cocking his bald head on one side. On such occasions, the amiable Naigu was sure to look absent-mindedly at a picture of Fugen hanging beside him and, thinking of the time a few days back when his nose was still long, fall into low spirits, thinking, “like unto a man utterly ruined pondering the time of his glory.” Unfortunately he was lacking in the perspicacity to solve this problem.

In the human heart there are two feelings mutually contradictory. Of course there is no one who does not sympathize at the misfortune of another. But if that other somehow manages to escape from that misfortune, then he who has sympathized somehow feels unsatisfied. To exaggerate a little, he is even disposed to cast the sufferer back into the same misfortune once more. And before he is aware of it, he unconsciously comes to harbor a certain hostility against him. What somehow displeased the Naigu, though he did not know the reason, was nothing other than the egoism he indefinably perceived in the attitude of those onlookers, both priests and laymen, at Ike-no-O.

So the Naigu’s humor became worse every day. He scolded everybody ill-naturedly at the slightest provocation. Even the disciple who had operated on his nose finally came to say behind his back that he would be punished for his avarice and cruelty. It was that mischievous Chūdōji who enraged the Naigu most.

One day, hearing a dog yelping noisily, he went out casually and found the Chūdōji brandishing a stick about two feet long and chasing a thin shaggy dog with long hair. And he was not simply chasing the dog around. He was running after it crying tauntingly, “Watch out for your nose there! Watch out for your nose there!” The Naigu snatched the stick from his hand and gave him a hard thwack in the face with it. The stick was the one with which his own nose had formerly been held up.

The Naigu came to feel angry regret that he had thoughtlessly shortened his nose.

Then one night the wind seemed to have suddenly begun blowing after sunset and the ringing of the wind-bells on the pagoda came to his pillow annoyingly. Moreover, as the cold increased perceptibly, the old Naigu could not get to sleep, try as he might. Then as he lay blinking in bed, he suddenly became aware of an unaccustomed itching in his nose. When he felt it with his hand, it was swollen as if a little dropsical. There even seemed to be fever in that part only.

“Since I shortened it against nature, it may have got diseased,” he murmured, pressing his nose with his hand as reverently as he was accustomed to offer incense and flowers to the Buddhas.

The next morning when the Naigu awoke early as usual, the leaves of the maidenhair trees and horse chestnuts in the temple grounds had fallen over night, and the garden was as bright as if carpeted with gold. It may have been because of the frost which lay on the roof of the pagoda that the nine metal rings in its spire sparkled dazzlingly in the still faint light of the morning sun. Zenchi Naigu stood on the veranda with the shutters up and drew a deep breath.

It was at just about this moment that a certain sensation which he had all but forgotten came back to him again.

He put his hand to his nose excitedly. What it touched was not the short nose of the night before. It was his long old nose dangling some five or six inches from above his upper lip to below his chin. He found that it had grown again in one night as long as it was before. And at the same time he realized that a light-hearted feeling similar to that which he had felt when his nose became short had come back to him from somewhere.

“Now nobody will laugh at me surely,” murmured the Naigu in the depths of his heart, the while he dangled his long nose in the wind of the early autumn morning.

THE HANDKERCHIEF

Prof. Hasegawa Kinzō, of the Law College of the Imperial University, was sitting in a cane chair on his veranda reading Strindberg’s “Dramaturgy.”

His special study was colonial policy. Wherefore the fact that he was reading “Dramaturgy” may cause the reader some surprise. But he, a professor noted not only as a scholar but as an educator, even if the books were not necessary for his special investigations, always, so far as his leisure permitted, looked through any books that were connected in any sense with the thought or feelings of present-day students. In truth, not long before, he had read Oscar Wilde’s “De Profundis” and “Intentions” only because the students of a certain college of which, along with his other work, he acted as president, were fond of them.

Since he was such a man, we need not marvel that the book he was now reading was a treatise on the modern drama and players of Europe. For among the students under him there were not only those who wrote criticisms on Ibsen, Strindberg and Maeterlinck, but even some enthusiasts who intended to follow in the footsteps of such modern dramatists and make play writing their life work.

Every time he finished one of the excellent chapters, he put the yellow cloth-covered book on his lap and glanced carelessly at the Gifu paper lantern hanging on the veranda. Strange to say, no sooner would he do this than his thoughts would part company with Strindberg. And in place of Strindberg, he would begin to think of his wife, with whom he had gone to buy the Gifu lantern. He had married in America while studying there. So his wife was of course an American. But she loved Japan and the Japanese not a whit less than he did. Especially was she fond of Japan’s exquisite objects of industrial art. Wherefore, that the Gifu lantern hung on the veranda should be looked upon rather as an expression of one phase of her taste for things Japanese than of his own predilections.

Whenever he put down his book, he thought of his wife and the Gifu lantern, and of the Japanese civilization represented by that lantern. In his belief, Japanese civilization had made rather remarkable progress during the last fifty years in material things. But spiritually it was practically impossible to find any progress worth mentioning. Nay, rather, in a sense, it was degenerating. Then what (and this was the urgent task of the day’s thinkers) was to be done to develop a way of saving it from this decline? He concluded that there was nothing for it but to rely upon Japan’s peculiar Bushidō. Bushidō should by no means be regarded as the narrow-minded morality of an insular nation. Rather there was even that in it which should be identified with the Christian spirit in the nations of Europe and America. If through this Bushidō a trend could be shown in the modern current of thought in Japan, it would not only be a contribution to the spiritual civilization of Japan alone, but it would be, in addition, advantageous in making easy a mutual understanding between the Japanese people and the peoples of Europe and America. Or international peace would be promoted by it.

For some time he had been thinking, in this sense, of becoming a bridge between East and West. For such a professor it was by no means unpleasant that the thoughts of his wife, the Gifu lantern and the Japanese civilization represented by it should arise in his consciousness with a certain harmony. But, as he enjoyed such satisfaction again and again, he gradually realized, even as he read, that his thoughts were getting far away from Strindberg. Then he shook his head, a little provoked, and began to pore diligently over the fine type again, and just where he had begun to read, the following passage occurred: “When an actor discovers a suitable expression for a most common sentiment and gains some popularity for himself by means of this expression, because, on the one hand, it is easy and, on the other, because he has succeeded with it, he is apt, without regard for its suitability or unsuitability, to incline toward this means. And this is a mannerism.”

The professor had always been indifferent to art, especially to drama. Even Japanese plays he had seen only a few times in his life. Once the name of “Baiko” appeared in a story by a certain student. Even this professor, who prided himself on his encyclopaedic knowledge, did not know what this name meant. So when he had an opportunity, he called the student to him and asked him.

“I say, what’s ‘Baiko’?”

“Baiko? Baiko is an actor at present attached to the Imperial Theatre at Maru-no-uchi and now taking the part of Misao in ‘Taikoki Judanme’.”

Thus politely replied this student dressed in a hakama of Kokura duck. Hence the professor had no opinions of his own at all on the various rules of stage presentation on which Strindberg pithily commented. Only, he was able to take some interest in it in so far as it reminded him of certain things he had seen in western theatres while studying abroad. There was, so to speak, not much difference between him and a middle school English teacher who reads Bernard Shaw’s dramas to hunt for idioms. But interest is interest anyhow.

The still unlighted Gifu lantern hung from the ceiling of the veranda. And Prof. Hasegawa sat in the cane chair reading Strindberg’s “Dramaturgy.” If I write only this, I believe the reader can easily imagine what a long early-summer afternoon it was. But by this I do not mean at all that the professor was overcome with ennui. If anybody should try to interpret it thus, he would be deliberately trying to give it a cynical and perverse interpretation.

Actually he was forced to leave off in the midst of his reading even Strindberg. For the maid suddenly interrupted his innocent amusement by announcing a caller. Be the day as long as it might, it seemed that the world would never stop working him to death.

The professor put down his book and glanced at the small calling card the maid had just brought him. On the ivory paper was printed small the name, Nishiyama Atsuko. He felt sure that she was no one he had ever met. But all the same, as he left his chair, the widely acquainted professor, just to make sure, ran over the name-list he kept in his head. But still no face that seemed as if it might be hers came into his memory. Therefore, putting the card into the book for a marker, he laid the book down on the chair and, ill at ease, adjusted the front of his unlined kimono of coarse silk, giving the while, another little glance at the Gifu lantern in front of his nose. It is probably always true in such cases that the host who keeps the visitor waiting is more impatient than the visitor who is kept waiting. Of course I need not go out of my way to explain that, since the professor had always been an austere man, this would be true in this case even if his visitor had not been such an unknown woman as had come this day.