Letter from the Hot Springs

...I have been staying at this hot-spring inn for about a month now. And yet I have not finished a single one of the “landscapes” that matter. Instead, I soak in the baths, read storytellers’ books, stroll around the cramped little town, and live by repeating such things over and over. I am appalled myself at how slack I have become. (Author’s note: At this point there were a dozen or so lines that might have mentioned the cherry blossoms scattering, the wagtails coming to the roof, my spending seven yen fifty sen at the shooting gallery, the country geisha, my astonishment at a Yasugi-bushi performance, my going out to gather bracken, my watching a fire drill, my dropping my purse, and so on.) Now then, let me take the occasion to report a curious true story with something of a novelistic flavor. Of course, I am only an amateur, so I do not know whether it would really make a story. All I mean is that, when I heard it, I felt exactly as if I had read a novel or something of the sort. Please read it in that spirit.

Sometime in the Meiji thirties, it seems, there lived in the mountainward part of this town a carpenter named Hagino Hannojo. To hear the name Hagino Hannojo, one might imagine some handsome dandy. But he was said to stand six shaku five sun tall and weigh thirty-seven kan, so he was a giant who would have outmatched even Tachiyama. No, perhaps even Tachiyama would have come off second best. In fact one of my fellow guests at this inn, a certain Mr. N— (I follow here the patriotic abbreviation once used by Kunikida Doppo), the young master of a wholesale drug house, says that as a child he thought Hannojo larger than a cannon. At the same time, he says, he thought his face the very image of Inagawa.

By all accounts Hannojo was an exceptionally good-natured man, and a highly skilled one as well. Yet every story told about him has some slightly comic element; perhaps, like giants everywhere, he could not quite get all the wit in his body to circulate properly. Before I enter the main thread, let me give one example. According to the proprietor of my inn, there was once a local conflagration, on a fierce winter afternoon when the north wind was raging, that burned some fifty houses in this hot-spring town. Hannojo happened to have gone to a house in the village of K—, about a ri away, for a frame-raising or something of the sort. But the moment he heard that the town was on fire, he rushed out onto the O-road, so pressed for time that he could scarcely spare a moment even to hitch up his clothes. In front of a farmhouse he found a chestnut horse tied up. Thinking, perhaps, that he could apologize afterward, he leapt onto the horse and drove it wildly down the road. Up to that point it must have been a stirring sight. But no sooner had the horse started than it plunged into a barley field. Then it wheeled round and round in the barley, cut at an angle through a daikon patch, charged straight down a mandarin-orange hillside—until at last it flung the giant Hannojo into a sweet-potato pit and disappeared somewhere. Having met with such a disaster, he naturally did not make it to the fire. Worse still, Hannojo came crawling back to town covered in wounds. When people later inquired, it turned out the beast had been a vicious blind horse that no one could handle.

It must have been two or three years after that great fire that Hannojo sold his body to T Hospital in O-town. But by selling his body I do not mean that he entered, in the old style, into lifelong service or anything of that kind. It was simply that, in exchange for permitting an anatomical dissection of his corpse after his death some years later, he was to receive five hundred yen. No, not exactly that: two hundred yen were to be paid after his death, and for the present he received only three hundred yen in exchange for signing the contract. Then into whose hands, one may ask, was that two hundred yen payable after death to pass? According to the wording of the contract, it was to be paid to “the bereaved family, or any person designated by the deceased.” Indeed, without such a provision, the clause concerning the remaining two hundred yen would have been meaningless, for Hannojo had neither wife nor children, nor even a single relative.

Three hundred yen in those days must have been a considerable sum. At least for a country carpenter like Hannojo, it surely was. No sooner had he got hold of the money than he bought a wristwatch, had himself a Western suit made, took O-Matsu from the “Blue Paint” to O-town, and at once began indulging himself in every extravagance. “Blue Paint” was the name of a Daruma teahouse with a roof painted blue. Since those days it had not yet become as Tokyo-like as it is now, and loofah gourds were still hanging from the eaves, so the women too were probably quite rustic. But even at the “Blue Paint,” O-Matsu was reckoned the greatest beauty of them all. Just what sort of beauty she was, I do not know. All I know is what the proprietress of O-tei in O-town—a place that was both sushi shop and eel restaurant—told me: that she was a small woman, somewhat dark-skinned, with curly hair.

That old woman told me all sorts of stories. The one that struck me as especially pitiful was about a guest so addicted to mandarins that he could not write even a single letter unless he was eating one. But let that wait for another occasion. Only the story of O-Matsu’s killing her cat, while Hannojo was crazy for her, ought to be added here. O-Matsu kept a black cat called Santa. One day Santa carelessly fouled the proprietress of the Blue Paint’s best dress. Now the proprietress of the Blue Paint had always hated cats, and she made no end of complaints. In the end she showered abuse even on O-Matsu, the cat’s owner. At that, without saying a word, O-Matsu tucked Santa into her bosom, went to K Bridge over K River, and flung the black cat into a green, stagnant pool. After that—well, perhaps what follows is an exaggeration. But according to the old woman’s story, the ringleading proprietress gave not only O-Matsu but every woman in the Blue Paint welts all over their faces.

Hannojo’s life of luxury lasted perhaps no more than half a month, or at most a month. Though he was walking about in a Western suit, by the time his shoes were finished he could not even pay for them. I cannot vouch for the following story either. But according to the master of F-barber shop, where I go to have my hair cut, the shoemaker set the shoes out before Hannojo and bowed his head, begging him, “Master Carpenter, please buy them at cost at least. If these were shoes anyone could wear, I would not say such a thing. But your shoes, sir, are like the straw sandals of a guardian deity.” Yet of course Hannojo probably could not buy them even at cost. For when one asks people in this town, every last one says he never once saw Hannojo wearing those shoes.

But it was not only the shoemaker’s bill that Hannojo could not meet. Less than a month later he had even begun selling off his prized wristwatch and his suit. And where did that money go? Into O-Matsu, poured there thoughtlessly, without a scrap of prudence. Yet it was not as though O-Matsu simply let Hannojo spend on her. According to the same proprietress in O-town, in the Daruma teahouses of this town it was customary, on the night of the annual Ebisu gathering, for the women to refuse customers and amuse themselves among their own circle by playing shamisen and dancing, and even coming up with O-Matsu’s share of the expense had at one point become difficult. Still, Hannojo must have been deeply besotted with her. Whenever O-Matsu flew into a temper, she would seize him by the chest, drag him down, even strike him with beer bottles. Yet no matter what he suffered, Hannojo usually ended up trying to placate her instead. Only once, when he heard that O-Matsu had gone into O-town with the son of a villa caretaker, did he apparently become angry like another man altogether. This too may be somewhat exaggerated. But to write the old woman’s tale exactly as she told it: (Author’s note: Here there were several lines that, plausible enough as an expression of pastoral jealousy, cannot but be omitted.)

The Mr. N— mentioned earlier knew Hannojo at just this period, I believe. Mr. N—, then still an elementary-school boy, went fishing with Hannojo and climbed M Pass with him. Naturally he had no idea at all that Hannojo was constantly going to see O-Matsu, or that he was in financial trouble. None of Mr. N—’s recollections are directly related to the main story. One thing was rather amusing, however: after Mr. N— returned to Tokyo, he received a parcel from Hannojo. It was about as bulky as a packet of hanshi paper, but absurdly light; when he opened it, he found an empty twenty-cigarette Asahi box stuffed with what seemed to be fresh grass sprinkled with water, and clinging to it were several fireflies with red necks. On the surface of the same Asahi box, moreover, there were awl-holes punched all over, plainly meant to let in air; so it was Hannojo-like after all.

Mr. N— says he expected to play with Hannojo again the following summer. Unfortunately that hope missed the mark entirely. For on the equinoctial middle day that autumn, Hagino Hannojo suddenly committed a strange suicide, leaving behind a single letter addressed to O-Matsu of the Blue Paint. Why he killed himself—well, I will leave that explanation to the letter itself. The copy I transcribed is not the original, to be sure. But since it was printed in a newspaper of the time that my innkeeper had pasted into his scrapbook, I think it must be substantially accurate.

“As for me, if I have no money, I cannot become husband and wife with you, nor can I deal with the child in your belly, and because this floating world has become hateful to me, I shall die. I ask that my dead body be sent to T Hospital (if they should come and fetch it themselves, that will also be all right), and that in exchange for this contract you please receive the two hundred yen. With that money, I beg you to make good only what I have used of Master A’s money [this is the proprietor of my inn]. I am truly, truly ashamed before Master A. The rest of the money I ask you to keep all for yourself. Leaving this bitter world, a lone traveler—Hannojo. [This, perhaps, is his death verse.] To O-Matsu.”

It was not only Mr. N— who found Hannojo’s suicide unexpected. The people of this town too, it seems, had never dreamed of such a thing. If there had been any sign of it beforehand, it would have been only this. One evening shortly before the equinox, the master of F-barber shop was talking with Hannojo on the bench in front of the shop. A woman from the Blue Paint happened to pass by. Seeing the two men, she said that just a moment before a ball of fire had flown over the roof of the barber shop. At this Hannojo said in all seriousness, “That’s what just came out of my mouth.” Suicide may already have been in his mind at that time. But naturally the woman from the Blue Paint only laughed and passed on. The barber too—no, the barber said that even while laughing he thought, “That’s a bad omen.”

And then, only a few days later, Hannojo suddenly killed himself. Nor was it by hanging himself, or cutting his throat. There is a communal bath called Dokko no Yu, an enclosed bath built in the shallows of K River. In the stone basin of that hot spring he remained submerged for an entire night, and in the end died of heart failure. According again to the barber, the wife of the tobacco shop next door went alone to the communal bath that night at around midnight. She suffered from blood-related troubles or something of the sort, and had been there earlier in the evening as well. Hannojo had been sitting then too, his great body sunk in the hot spring. But to find him still there now—even that valiant woman, who in broad daylight would crawl to the bath along the stepping-stones in the river clad in nothing but a bath cloth, was startled. More than that, when she spoke to him Hannojo did not grunt or mutter in reply. He merely exposed his face, flushed crimson, in the dim steam, staring fixedly up at the lamp in the rafters without so much as a blink. It must have been eerie. So the tobacconist’s wife could not stay in long herself and soon left the bath.

In the middle of the communal bath there is a great stone vajra, from which the bath called Dokko no Yu takes its name. Before this vajra Hannojo had neatly folded his clothes, sleeve over sleeve, and his letter had been tied to the thong of his wooden clog beside them. Since the corpse was floating naked in the hot spring, had it not been for that letter they might perhaps not even have known it was suicide. According to my innkeeper, since Hannojo had once sold himself to T Hospital, he must have thought it would never do to damage a body intended for dissection; that is surely why he chose such a death. This, however, is not the settled opinion of the town. The sharp-tongued barber of F-shop, for one, loudly advanced another theory: “Nonsense. It wasn’t about whether it would do or not. He figured that if he damaged the body, it wouldn’t fetch two hundred ryō.”

That is the whole story of Hannojo. But let me add one thing more, for yesterday afternoon, while taking a walk through the cramped town with my innkeeper and Mr. N—, I happened to speak of him. If anyone was interested in the story, however, it was less I than Mr. N—. With his camera slung from him, Mr. N— questioned the innkeeper, who wore reading glasses, with great earnestness.

“So what became of this woman O-Matsu?”

“O-Matsu? After she gave birth to Hannojo’s child...”

“But the child O-Matsu had—was it really Hannojo’s?”

“Yes, it was Hannojo’s child all right. You could have called them identical melons.”

“And what became of the woman O-Matsu?”

“O-Matsu married into a sake shop called I.”

Mr. N—, who had grown quite intent, looked faintly disappointed.

“And Hannojo’s child?”

“She took the child along. Then the child came down with typhus...”

“Died?”

“No, the child lived, but O-Matsu, who nursed it, fell ill instead. It’s ten years now since she died...”

“Typhus too?”

“Not typhus. The doctor called it something or other, but it was really nursing herself out.”

At just that moment we had come out in front of the post office. Before the small Japanese-style post office, fresh green maple branches stretched outward. Through a dusty glass window half hidden by those branches, we could see a stocky young man in an Ogura-cloth uniform at work.

“There he is,” said the innkeeper. “That’s Hannojo’s child.”

Both Mr. N— and I stopped in our tracks and peered in through the window. Somehow the sight of that young man, one hand pressed to his cheek while his pen moved over something on the desk, filled us with joy. But the world does not allow one to be moved so carelessly. The innkeeper, standing two or three steps ahead, turned back toward us through his spectacles, already wearing a thin smile.

“That one’s no help for it either. He does nothing but go to the Blue Paint.”

After that we walked on in silence as far as K Bridge...

(April, 1925)