Seashell

1. The Cat

While they were living in the country, they decided to keep a cat. It was a black cat with a long tail. Ever since they had begun keeping it, they had been delighted that at least they were finally spared the plague of mice.

About half a year later, they found themselves having to move to Tokyo. Naturally, the cat went with them. But once they had settled in Tokyo, they gradually noticed that the cat no longer caught mice the way it used to.

"What can be the matter with it? Do you suppose it's because we feed it meat and sashimi?"

"Mr. R was saying that the other day. He said that once a cat gets a taste for salty food, it gradually stops catching mice."

After talking it over like that, they decided to try starving the cat.

But no matter how long they waited, the cat did not catch a single mouse. Meanwhile the mice ran across the ceiling overhead almost every night. They began to hate the cat's laziness, especially his wife. But it was not laziness. The cat grew visibly thinner and thinner, rummaging instead through piles of refuse for fish bones. "It's simply become urban," he would say, laughing.

Before long they had to go back to country living once more. Yet the cat still did not catch mice in the least. At last they lost all patience and ordered their strong-willed maid to throw the cat away somewhere in the mountains.

Then, one late-autumn morning, as he was walking through a grove of mixed trees, he happened to discover the cat. It was just then eating a sparrow. He bent down and called its name over and over. But the cat merely fixed him with its sharp eyes and showed not the slightest sign of coming near him. It went on crunching the sparrow's bones with a loud crackling sound.

2. The Kajika Frogs

From a mother staying at a hot-spring resort to her son there arrived, by way of another person: some cherries, some bamboo-leaf rice cakes, sixteen kajika frogs in an earthenware pot, and a hastily scribbled note tied to the handle of the pot.

One passage in the note read as follows:

"These kajika are all males. The females will be sent later. Be sure not to put males and females together in the same cage. The females kill and eat all the males."

3. A Woman's Story

I was just twelve when I went on a school excursion to Naoetsu. (My elementary school was in a town called X in Shinshu.) It was then that I saw the sea for the first time. And I also saw a steamship for the first time. To board the steamship, you had to take a lighter from the pier. At the pier where we were standing, there was also a large crowd of pupils from some other elementary school, apparently there on an excursion too, all chattering noisily.

It happened when those other pupils were about to board the lighter. A teacher, twenty-four or twenty-five years old, wearing a black stand-collar Western-style jacket, suddenly picked me up and put me aboard the lighter. (No, he was not one of my school's teachers.) It was, of course, a mistake. A little later, when one of my own teachers came to take me back, that man apologized again and again, saying, "I really am sorry. You looked exactly like one of our pupils."

How did I feel when he picked me up and put me on the lighter? I remember being very startled, and I suppose I felt frightened too. But besides that, I also recall feeling somehow a little pleased.

4. A Motorman

Ginza, Fourth Avenue. A streetcar driver, it seemed, mistook a red flag for a blue one and suddenly started the car. But the instant he realized his mistake, he shouted at the top of his lungs, "My fault!"

When I heard that voice, I was at once reminded of barracks and drill grounds. Was my intuition right?

5. Failure

Whatever that man did, he failed at it. In the end too—at last he became one of those actors who played swaggering patriots, and got a part in a play called South Pole Expedition, capitalizing on Lieutenant Shirase. It was, of course, a summer show. That man was nothing but a penguin, waddling between icebergs. At length, because of the terrible heat, he collapsed in agony and died.

6. Tokyo People

A proprietress of a teahouse, out of kindness to a geisha she was close to, ordered an obi from a draper who did business with her establishment.

When the obi was finished, it struck not only the proprietress who had placed the order but even the young master of the draper's shop as far too flashy. So the draper said nothing and decided to charge only a hundred and fifty yen for an obi worth two hundred. But the proprietress understood his feelings all the same.

After paying for it, she did not show the obi to the geisha at all, but simply put it away in a chest of drawers. After a while, however, the geisha asked, "Mistress, what about that obi?" The proprietress had no choice but to show it to her, and though she had actually paid a hundred and fifty yen, she told the geisha it had cost a hundred and twenty. From the look on the geisha's face, she could plainly tell that she too thought it rather too flashy. Yet the geisha also said nothing, took the obi home, and afterward decided to send over a hundred and twenty yen.

Though she had been told it was a hundred and twenty yen, the geisha understood perfectly well that the obi had cost more than that. And instead of wearing it herself, she decided to have her younger sister wear it.

What, all this absurd fussing over not giving offense? But that is precisely what Tokyo people are by nature: a breed forever making these absurdly over-delicate gestures.

7. A Happy Tragedy

She loved him. He loved her too. But both were too timid to confess their feelings to the other.

Afterward he began seeing a woman other than her—let us call her Number 3. She grew resentful toward him and began seeing a man other than him—let us call him Number 4. He, suddenly seized by jealousy, tried to take her away from Number 4. She too no doubt had always wished to become intimate with him. But by that time, happily—or perhaps unhappily—she had somehow come to feel love for Number 4. And what was more, to her even greater happiness—or perhaps this too was unhappiness—when the moment came, he found himself unable to part coolly with Number 3 either.

While he is with Number 3, he sometimes remembers her. And whenever she goes on an outing with Number 4, hearing the unfamiliar sound of mountain streams, she too sometimes remembers him. ...

8. Real Feeling

The words of a murderer:

"I killed him. It's only natural—more than natural—that he should come back as a ghost. If only he'd appear as the corpse I made of him, there'd be nothing frightening about it. But what terrifies me is when he stands there, or does something, looking no different from when he was alive. Really, if he's going to appear as a ghost at all, I wish he'd come as a corpse."

9. The Carter

When I was eleven or twelve, I saw a handcart piled with empty boxes struggling up a slope, and I tried to go behind it and give it a push. But the man pulling the cart turned and, over the cart itself, barked at me, "Hey, you!" Naturally I could not help feeling offended by his misunderstanding.

Five or six days later, that man was again pulling a cart, trying to climb the same slope. This time it was loaded with sacks of charcoal. But I thought, "Suit yourself," and merely stood by the roadside. Then, as the cart jolted, one of the sacks fell off. The man finally lowered the shafts and loaded the sack back on again. That in itself meant nothing to me. But as he bent forward and hoisted the sack onto his shoulder, he said, as though speaking to some person, "Damn you, getting smart with me. It's too early yet to be getting off the cart."

From that moment on, I began to feel a kind of affection for him—for that carter, black and darkly sunburned.

10. A Farmer's Logic

A farmer in a certain mountain village stole his neighbor's cow and was sentenced to three months in prison. In jail he behaved like a different man, meekly obeying every prison rule and even being called a model inmate. But as soon as he was released and returned home, he stole the very same cow once more. His neighbor, furious, again decided to call in the police. The village constable promptly hauled him in and, putting on an overbearing air, shouted at him:

"You're a hopeless scoundrel. Haven't you learned your lesson at all?"

The farmer, keeping a sullen face, replied:

"I stole that cow, and I did three months' hard labor for it, didn't I? So that means the cow is mine. When I got home, there she still was in the neighbor's shed. Of course she was fatter than before. So I simply led her back to my own shed. What's wrong with that?"

11. Jealousy

"I seem to be terribly jealous. For instance, when I stay at an inn, the head clerk and the maids bow politely and treat me with great affability, don't they? And then when another guest arrives, they greet him just the same way, just as affably as before. When I watch that, I can't help feeling a certain resentment toward the guest who came after me."

And yet the man who said this to me was, among all the people I know, the gentlest and most mild-tempered gentleman of them all.

12. The First Kiss

After he and she became husband and wife, he decided to tell her about all the love affairs he had ever had in his life. The result, just as he had expected, seemed to guarantee their happiness.

But there was one affair alone that he did not confess to her. It was that when he was eighteen he had kissed an older maid at an inn. It was not that he had deliberately resolved not to speak of this one thing. He merely thought it such a trifling matter that there was no need to mention it.

Two or three years later, however, in the course of some conversation, he casually told her of it. At once she changed color and said, "You deceived me." That became like a tiny thorn, a seed of storms that kept troubling their marriage forever after. Whenever he quarreled with her, he found himself thinking again and again:

"Was I too honest? Or had I, somewhere in my heart, failed to be honest enough?"

13. Words Not in the Primer

While studying in Edinburgh, he tried to jump onto a tram, fell, and was knocked unconscious. Yet even on the way to the hospital he kept babbling in English. After he recovered, one of his friends mentioned the incident to him in passing. From that moment on he gained an entirely new confidence in his command of the language, and in the end became a famous scholar of English.

This is his story of ambition and success. But what amused me was something his mother, who had been living at his house while he was away, said:

"My son studied so much that he has completely mastered Japanese. So now he has gone all the way to the West to learn the words that aren't in the old iroha primer."

14. Mother and Son

Lately he had come to know that his mother had once been a geisha. He had also learned that she was now running a restaurant in Yangrou Hutong in Peking. By good fortune, business required him to stay in Peking for two or three days, and he decided to see her for the first time in a long while.

He went to the restaurant and talked for about an hour with her, her face still thickly powdered. But he could not help feeling disillusioned by her hollow flattery. No doubt that was partly because she felt some sort of constraint before her punctilious son. But it was also because she wanted to conceal from her current patron the fact that her son had come to see her.

After he had gone, she felt as if a stiffness in her shoulders had eased. But by the next day she had begun thinking of the bond between parent and child and feeling sorry that she had been so cold with him. She knew, of course, where he was staying. Thinking she ought to go before dusk, she took a shabby Chinese rickshaw and went to the inn where he was lodging. But unhappily, she arrived just after he had left the inn to head for Hankou. She felt strangely lonely and had no choice but to get back into the rickshaw and ride home through the clouds of dust, thinking all the while how she too had reached the age when plucking out white hairs had become a constant task.

That same day, toward evening, he sat by the window of a carriage on the Peking-Hankou Railway, thinking of his mother with her smell of face powder. And then, as if belatedly, he could not help feeling a certain homesick tenderness for her. Yet the number of gold teeth she had was somehow still disagreeable to him.

15. Rhetoric

In a third-class carriage on the Tokaido Line, a man dressed like a carpenter, wearing a short workman's coat, was looking at the sea around Ejiri and said to his companion:

"Look at that. The waves are like little pups."

(December, 1926)