Unrequited Love

(A close friend of mine, one of those with whom I had graduated from university, once ran into me on the Keihin train one summer afternoon and told me the following story.)

“The other day I had business for the company that took me to Y. While I was there, they held a banquet and invited me. Well, being Y, the place was done up exactly as you would expect: in the alcove hung a lithograph of General Nogi, and before it stood artificial peonies arranged in a vase. But because it started raining toward evening, and because there were fewer guests than usual, it was pleasanter than I had expected. Apparently there was another banquet upstairs as well, but fortunately, unlike the town itself, that one was not especially noisy. And then, you see, among the women pouring drinks—

“You remember, don’t you? At U, where we used to go drinking so often, there was a maid named O-Toku. The one with the low nose, the cramped forehead, the little clown of the place. Well, there she was. Wearing formal tatami-room dress, carrying a sake flask, with the same affectedly chic, aloof air as the other girls. At first I thought I must be mistaken, but when she came near, it was unmistakably O-Toku. Even that old habit she had of jerking her chin whenever she spoke was just the same as ever. I tell you, it really made me feel the pathos of things. And yet, you know, wasn’t she once the object of Shimura’s hopeless crush?

“Shimura, back in those days, was thoroughly serious about her. He would go to Aokido and buy a little bottle of peppermint liqueur and bring it to her, saying things like, ‘It’s sweet, try some.’ The liquor may have been sweet, but Shimura was sweeter.

“And now that very O-Toku is earning her living in a place like this. If Shimura, now in Chicago, were to hear of it, how would he feel? I thought of that and nearly called out to her, but then held back. Being O-Toku, she was hardly the sort to go around telling people she used to work in Nihonbashi.

“Then she called out to me herself. ‘My, it’s been ages, hasn’t it? I haven’t seen you since I was at U. You haven’t changed a bit.’ That sort of thing. The minx had already been drinking before she came in.

“But even drunk, it had been a long time, and there was the whole matter of Shimura, so naturally we had a lot to talk about. Then, you see, the others decided it was their duty to make things lively, and they started raising a racket. The host himself led the charge, declaring that unless she confessed everything in detail, they wouldn’t let her leave her seat. That made it worse. So I told the story of Shimura and the peppermint and said, ‘This is the woman who made my dear friend pine away.’ Silly, of course, but that is what I said. The host was already an older man, you see. From the beginning I had been in the position of a nephew brought along by his uncle to a teahouse.

“Well, once I said ‘made him pine away,’ the whole room erupted. Even the other geisha joined in teasing O-Toku.

“But O-Toku—who now went by Fukuryu—wouldn’t have it. Fukuryu was a fine stage name, really. In a lecture on The Eight Dog Chronicles there’s a line that says, ‘He who enjoys himself in perfect freedom shall be named Fukuryu.’ Which makes it funny, because this Fukuryu was enjoying herself in anything but freedom. Though that’s beside the point. In any case, the way she objected was remarkably logical. ‘Even if Mr. Shimura fell in love with me,’ she said, ‘that doesn’t mean I was under any obligation to fall in love with him in return.’

“And then she added, ‘If that were how things worked, I’d have had much happier days long ago myself.’

“That, apparently, was what she called the sorrow of unrequited love. And then, I suppose intending to give an example, the woman launched into a very curious sort of love story of her own. That is what I wanted to tell you about. Though being a love story, it is not really interesting.

“It’s strange, isn’t it? There is nothing duller to listen to than someone else’s dream or someone else’s love affair.

(At this point I said, ‘That’s because no one but the person concerned can feel what makes it interesting.’ ‘Then dreams and love affairs must be especially hard to write into fiction.’ ‘Dreams at least are probably even harder, since they are so purely sensory. There are almost no dreams in fiction that really feel like actual dreams.’ ‘But there are plenty of masterpieces of love fiction, aren’t there?’ ‘Which only makes one imagine all the bad ones that posterity has kindly forgotten.’)

“If you understand that much, then I feel much easier. This one too is surely among the worst of the bad lot. O-Toku herself put it, ‘Well, it’s the sort of thing you might call my one-sided love.’ So listen in that spirit.

“The man O-Toku fell for was an actor. Back when she was still living with her parents in Tawaramachi, Asakusa, she first saw him in the park and fell in love. Hearing that, you’d probably imagine some extra from the Miyatoza or Tokiwaza, one of those actors who played the horse’s hind legs. But no. In fact, it is a mistake even to assume he was Japanese. He was a foreign actor. Some half-breed fellow, apparently, which is enough to make you laugh.

“And yet O-Toku did not know even his name, much less where he lived. For that matter, she did not even know his nationality. Whether he had a wife or was single—of course, to ask such things would have been vulgar. Ridiculous, isn’t it? Even for unrequited love, it was absurdly foolish. Why, when we used to frequent Wakatake, we may not have known much about narrative singing, but at least we knew the other party was Japanese and had a stage name like Shokiku. So when I teased her about it, she got huffy and said, ‘Of course I wanted to know. But if I couldn’t find out, what could I do? After all, I only ever met him up on the screen.’

“On the screen, she said. If she had said behind the curtain, that would make sense, but on the screen? So I asked a few more questions, and it turned out that this beloved of hers was one of the Western characters in a motion picture version of The Soga Brothers. That really surprised me. She was right: she had indeed met him on the screen.

“The others thought it was some bad punch line. One of them even said, ‘Hah, what a shameless clown she is.’ It was a dock town, and the crowd was rough. But to look at her, it really did not seem as though O-Toku were lying. Her eyes were a good deal bleary, of course.

“‘Even if I wanted to go every day, I couldn’t afford it. So I managed to go only once a week.’ That part was fair enough. But what came next was the real touch. ‘One time I begged my mother and finally got the money, only to find the place full, and I could get in only at the far side. So even when his face appeared, it looked all strangely flat. I was so miserable, so miserable.’ She said she buried her face in her apron and cried. Well, if the face of your beloved looks squashed flat just because it’s on a screen, I suppose that would be sad. I actually sympathized.

“‘I think I saw him play different parts twelve or thirteen times. He had a long face, he was thin, and he had a mustache. He usually wore dark clothes, like what you’re wearing now.’ I happened to be in mourning dress. Remembering what had happened a moment before, I got ahead of her and said, ‘You mean he looked like me?’ She replied coolly, ‘He was better-looking.’ ‘Better-looking’ is a hard blow.

“‘After all, I only ever met him on the screen. If he had been a real, living man, I could at least have spoken to him, or let him know my feelings through my eyes. But no matter what I did, he was only a picture.’ And a motion picture at that. Naturally she could not keep him close to her breast. ‘People say love should be returned. But even if someone doesn’t love you, you can still at least make them inclined to. Even Mr. Shimura used to bring me that blue liquor. But I couldn’t even do anything to make myself loved. Isn’t that hard fate?’ Quite true, every word of it. Absurd as it was, that part struck me.

“‘And after I became a geisha, I often had customers take me out to see pictures, but for some reason he stopped appearing altogether. No matter when I went, all they were showing were things like The Famous Gold or Zigomar, things I had no wish to see. In the end I gave it up completely, thinking it just wasn’t meant to be between us. And then, you see…’

“Since the others were not really listening, O-Toku seized on me alone and kept talking, half in tears.

“‘And then, the very first night I went to the pictures after coming to this town, there he was on the screen again for the first time in years. It must have been some Western city. There were paving stones like this, and in the middle stood a tree, something like a paulownia. On both sides there were rows of Western-style houses. Only, perhaps because the film was old, the whole picture had a dim yellowish cast, like evening, and the houses and the tree all trembled queerly, shivering and flickering. It was such a lonely scene. Then he came out, leading a little dog, smoking a cigarette. He was wearing dark clothes again, carrying a cane, and he had not changed at all since when I was a child…’

“It was as if, after nearly ten years, she had met her beloved again. He was only a picture, so of course he would not have changed, while she herself had gone from O-Toku to Fukuryu. Thinking of it that way, one could not help feeling sorry for her.

“‘Then he stopped for a moment by that tree, turned this way, took off his hat, and smiled. Doesn’t that make it seem as if he were greeting me? If only I had known his name, I would have called out to him…’

“Called out to him? She should have tried it. They would have thought her mad. Even in Y, surely, there still weren’t geisha in love with moving pictures.

“‘Then a little foreign woman came walking toward him and clung to him. According to the benshi, she was his mistress. For a woman her age, with those huge bird feathers stuck in her hat, she was perfectly disgusting.’

“O-Toku was jealous. Jealous of a woman in a film, no less.

(At this point in the story, the train reached Shinagawa. I was to get off at Shimbashi. My friend, knowing that, seemed anxious lest he not finish the tale, and kept glancing out the window while continuing in a somewhat hurried tone.)

“After that, various things happened in the film, and in the end it finished with the man being arrested by a policeman. O-Toku explained in detail what he had done to get arrested, but unfortunately I cannot remember it now.

“‘A whole crowd of people fell on him and tied him up. No, by then it wasn’t the same street as before. It must have been some Western tavern or bar. Bottles of liquor were lined up all along, and in one corner there hung a big parrot cage. It must have been a night scene, because everything everywhere was blue. And in that blue light—I saw his face there, just on the verge of tears. If you had seen it, you would certainly have been sad too. His eyes filled with tears, his mouth half open…’

“And then a whistle blew, and the picture vanished. After that there was nothing but the white screen. What O-Toku said next was excellent: ‘Everything disappeared. Vanished and passed away like a dream, I suppose. But then, everything does, doesn’t it?’

“Hearing only that, you might think she had attained some profound enlightenment. But smiling through her tears, and in a tone almost as if she meant to needle me, she said it that way. If things turned out badly, I tell you, she might become hysterical.

“But hysterical or not, there was something disturbingly serious about it. It may be that this story about falling in love with a picture was invented, and that in truth she had once suffered an unrequited love for someone among our own circle.

(At that moment, the train carrying the two of us arrived at Shimbashi Station in the evening dusk.)

(September 17, Taisho 6 [1917])