The Parrot
Written as a rough memorandum dated September 14, 1923, this brief prose piece records one man’s experience during the Great Kanto Earthquake and the fires that followed. Akutagawa presents the episode with deliberate plainness, preserving the immediacy of testimony rather than shaping it into a polished story. The central figure, an aging performer of Ichichu-bushi, flees through Tokyo carrying almost nothing except a caged parrot, only to become separated from his granddaughter in the chaos. What follows is a stark sequence of heat, smoke, hunger, exhaustion, and anxious searching. The parrot’s small, absurd presence gives the account an eerie tenderness, while the spare documentary style heightens the shock of disaster and the fragility of ordinary human attachments.
This is, as you can see, no more than a memorandum. I am publishing it just as it stands because I have little time to spare. Or perhaps, besides that, because I have little strength of mind to spare as well. Still, it is not entirely without meaning to publish a memorandum in its raw state. Written September 14, 1923.
A master of the Ichichu-bushi narrative style lived in Yokami-cho, Honjo. His name was Kane-dayu. He was sixty-three years old. He lived alone with his seventeen-year-old granddaughter.
His house did not collapse in the earthquake, but nearby fires broke out at once. He fled with his granddaughter toward Ryogoku. The only thing he carried with him was a cage containing a parrot. The parrot’s name was Goro. Its back was gray, its belly pink. The only tricks it knew were imitating the sound of a decorative metalworker’s hammer and saying “Naaru” (a shortened form of naruhodo, “indeed”).
Somewhere between Ryogoku and Ningyocho he became separated from his granddaughter. He was anxious, but had no time to look for her. The streets were a tide of people. Mountains of belongings. He saw a woman carrying a canary cage. She was dressed like the proprietress of a teahouse. “I thought there might be someone else like me,” she said. It seemed that much composure still remained to her.
He came out at Yoroi Bridge. One side of the town was on fire. Facing that side, his face felt so hot he thought it might burn. And whenever he thought something was falling, it was the lead covering on the electric wires, melted by the heat and dropping down. From around there the crush of people grew even worse, and again and again he feared the parrot’s cage would be crushed. The parrot kept frantically flinging itself about without pause.
When he reached Marunouchi, he saw fire-smoke rising over the sky of Hibiya. The Metropolitan Police Department and the Imperial Theatre must have been burning. At last he made it to the area around Kusunoki’s bronze statue. He sat down on the grass, but he could not stop worrying about his granddaughter. Calling her name at the top of his voice, he went searching among the evacuees. Dusk fell. At last he lay down in the shadow of a pine tree. Beside him was a stockbroker with several shop clerks in tow. Because of the smoke from the fires, the whole sky was crimson no matter where one looked. Suddenly the parrot said, “Naaru.”
The next day as well, he searched all around Marunouchi and as far as Hibiya for his granddaughter. “I never felt inclined to turn back toward Ningyocho or Ryogoku,” he said. Around noon, the pangs of hunger and thirst became unbearable. Left with no choice, he drank water from the pond in Hibiya. He never did find his granddaughter. That night too he lay down on the grass in Marunouchi. Setting the parrot’s cage beside his pillow, he worried that someone might steal it. He had seen evacuees eating the ducks from the Hibiya pond. In the sky he could still see the glow of the fires.
On the third day he gave up on finding his granddaughter and set out to look for a nephew in Shinjuku. But when he reached Hanzomon from Sakurada, he heard that Shinjuku too had burned, and thought he might better make for the family temple in Yanaka instead. Hunger and thirst grew worse and worse. “I hated the thought of killing Goro, but if he dropped dead, I meant to eat him,” he said. On the way up to Kudan, he was finally given a little over a cup of brown rice by someone who seemed to be a government office messenger, and he chewed and ate it raw. Then, reflecting further, he realized that carrying the parrot’s cage, he could hardly expect to be taken in at the family temple. So he fed the rest of the brown rice to the parrot and released it from the edge of the moat at the top of Kudan. At dusk he reached the family temple in Yanaka. The priest kindly told him he could stay as many days as he liked.
On the morning of the fifth day, he came to my house. He said he still did not know where his granddaughter had gone. He was so worn and haggard that one could scarcely believe he was the stylish old master one knew in ordinary times.
Postscript. It turned out that his nephew’s house in Shinjuku had not burned down. His granddaughter, it turned out, had taken refuge there.