Fish Market

One spring night the year before, around nine o'clock, though the wind was still cold and the moon shone with a sharp, clear brightness, Yasukichi was walking along the Fish Market streets with three friends. The three friends were the haiku poet Roshiba, the Western-style painter Fuchu, and the maki-e artist Jotan. None of the three made his real name public, but each was a master well known in his own field. Roshiba in particular was the oldest of them, and as a poet of the new school he had long since made a name for himself.

We were all drunk. Still, Fuchu and Yasukichi could not hold their liquor, while Jotan was a famous heavy drinker, so those three were no different from usual. Only Roshiba, now and then, was a little unsteady on his feet. With Roshiba in the middle, we walked on toward Nihonbashi through streets blown over by the fish-smelling moonlight.

Roshiba was a true-born Edo man. His great-grandfather had been close friends with Shokusan and Buncho. And if one spoke of Marukiyo of the riverbank, there was no one in that district who did not know the house. Yet for a long time Roshiba had left the family business almost entirely to others and gone off to enjoy himself in the back lanes of Sanya, devoting himself to haiku, calligraphy, and seal carving. That was why Roshiba possessed a certain easy, rakish grace that we lacked. It was less the temperament of the downtown merchant class than something rougher, more openly Edokko, something with no connection at all to the genteel uplands of Yamanote. You might say it had something in common with tuna sushi from the fish market itself. ...

Roshiba, flicking back the sleeves of his overcoat now and then as if they annoyed him, kept up a lively stream of talk with us. Jotan smiled quietly and chimed in at the right moments. Before we knew it, we had come to the entrance of the market itself. None of us felt quite satisfied at the thought of simply passing straight through and leaving. Just then we saw a Western-style restaurant, its white noren hanging in the moonlight that lit one side of the place. Even Yasukichi had heard rumors of this restaurant more than once.

"Shall we go in?"

"Might as well."

By the time we had said as much, Fuchu already in front, we had all poured into the narrow place.

There were two customers inside, seated at a long narrow table. One was a young fish-market worker; the other looked like some kind of factory hand. We squeezed ourselves into the same table, facing each other in pairs. Then, with fried tairagi clam as a snack, we began sipping Masamune little by little. Of course, the weak drinkers Fuchu and Yasukichi did not refill their cups more than once. In return, once food was set before them, both proved to have very healthy appetites.

The tables and stools in the place were plain unfinished wood, without any varnish. And the walls of the restaurant were enclosed with old-fashioned reed screens. So although we were eating Western food, it hardly felt like a Western restaurant at all. When the steak he had ordered arrived, Fuchu said it looked more like sashimi cuttings. Jotan showed the knife immense respect for actually being sharp. Yasukichi, for his part, was simply grateful for the brightness of the electric light in a place like this. As for Roshiba, being a local man, nothing seemed especially novel to him. But with his hunting cap tilted back on his head, he kept exchanging cups with Jotan and talking away as cheerfully as ever.

Then, right in the middle of this, a customer in a soft felt hat suddenly ducked through the noren. Burying his plump cheeks in the fur collar of his overcoat, he cast his eyes over the cramped interior less as if he were looking than as if he were glaring. Then, without a word of greeting, he wedged his large body into the seat between Jotan and the young market worker. As Yasukichi scooped up his curry rice, he thought, What a disagreeable fellow. If this were a novel by Izumi Kyoka, he'd be the sort of man to get taught a lesson by some chivalrous geisha or other, he thought. But then he also thought that modern Nihonbashi could never possibly move the way things did in a Kyoka novel.

After placing his order, the man began smoking with an overbearing air. The more one looked at him, the more perfectly he fit the measurements of a stock villain. His greasy, ruddy face, his Oshima pongee haori, the flashy ring on his finger, every detail was exactly of a type. Yasukichi felt more and more put off, and in the hope of forgetting the man's presence he spoke to Roshiba beside him. But Roshiba answered only with vague grunts and yeses. Worse still, perhaps he too had been put off, for he turned his back to the electric light and deliberately pulled his cap low over his eyes.

Having no choice, Yasukichi tried talking with Fuchu and Jotan about the food and the like. But the conversation would not come alive. Since the appearance of this fat customer, something in the mood of the three of us had gone strangely out of tune; that was simply a fact there was no denying.

When the fried dish he had ordered arrived, the man picked up a bottle of Masamune and was about to pour himself a cup. At that moment, someone clearly called out from the side, "Koh-san."

The man plainly started in surprise. And yet the startled look on his face changed at once to one of confusion as soon as he saw who had spoken.

"Oh! So it was you, sir."

Taking off his felt hat, he bowed again and again to the speaker. The speaker was the haiku poet Roshiba, the master of Marukiyo of the fish market.

"It's been a while," said Roshiba coolly, lifting his cup to his lips.

The moment that cup was empty, the customer, not missing his chance, filled it from his own bottle. After that he began watching Roshiba's mood with a solicitude that was almost comical to see from the side. ...

Kyoka's novels are not dead. At least in the fish market of Tokyo, incidents just like that still happen.

But when they stepped outside the restaurant, Yasukichi's spirits were low. Of course he felt no sympathy at all for "Koh-san." Besides, from what Roshiba said, the man was bad in character as well. And yet, in spite of that, Yasukichi could not somehow bring himself to feel cheerful. On the desk in Yasukichi's study there lay an unfinished volume of La Rochefoucauld's maxims. As he walked on through the moonlight, these were the kinds of thoughts that came to him.

(July, 1922)