School Friends

Though I say this is about my school friends, it is not about all of them. It is only about those school friends who happened, on a winter night, to rise suddenly in my mind as I sat before manuscript paper under the electric light.

Kamitaki Takashi He has been my friend since elementary school. Takashi is written with the character read takashi. His wife’s name is Akina. Hata Toyokichi calls them a “Southern-painting couple.” He graduated from the Medical College in Tokyo and is now at some hospital or other in Xiamen. In his view of life he is a realist, but when it comes to dealing with actual life he is not always quite so realistic. He resembles the doctors one finds in Western novels. His child bears the name ※. Since it was Kamitaki’s father who gave the name, one may suppose that a taste for unusual names is one of the family’s inherited traits. He is quite skilled at calligraphy. He also composes waka and haiku passably well for an amateur. One of his verses is: “Looking down at the rehearsal of shin’nai, lanterns.”

Noguchi Shinzo He too has been my friend since elementary school. He is the young master of the draper’s shop Daibiko. That said, he is not much like a young master. His conduct is impeccable, and he loves scholarship. If, when leaving the gate of his own house, he happens not to like the way he has gone out, he will turn back inside and start out again; from this alone one may imagine how nervous a temperament he has. In our elementary-school days he and I wrote adventure stories together. He may well have been better at it than I was.

Nishikawa Eijiro He has been my friend since middle school. I, of course, was an excellent student too, but Nishikawa’s brilliance was not to be compared with mine. He graduated from the Agricultural College in Tokyo and is now at the agricultural and forestry school in Tottori. His nickname is Lion, or sometimes Rai-ko. That is because his appearance resembles that of an undernourished lion. In middle school we studied English together, and I remember our reading English translations of A Sportsman’s Sketches, Sapho, Rosmersholm, and Thaïs. Besides that, I practiced judo, swimming, and the like with Nishikawa as well. He returned from Europe shortly before the great earthquake and, they say, burned every last one of his imported books. Rather than calling him a realist, it may be better to say that he has shed sentimentalism of himself. The other day he sent me persimmons from Tottori. I promised to give him a book by Butler in thanks, but have still not sent it. To be fair, one third of the persimmons were astringent.

Nakahara Yasutaro He too has been my friend since middle school. His nickname is Badger, though his face does not resemble one, nor is there anything badger-like in his character. He is a brilliant man, the equal of Nishikawa, though he may be more seasoned in worldly matters. He is an admirer of Kikuchi Kan’s works, especially Father Returns. He graduated from the Law College in Tokyo, entered Mitsui Bussan, and is now an independent businessman. In practical life he is a humanist with a proper measure of realism added in. He promised that when he made a great fortune he would buy me a villa, but since he has not yet bought me one, we may conclude that his income is nothing remarkable.

Yamamoto Kiyoshi He too has been my friend since middle school. At the same time, he is also one of my relations by marriage. He graduated from the Agricultural College in Tokyo and is now with Mitsubishi in Beijing. In matters of love, though not in any grave way, he is a sentimentalist. He used to be an ardent reader of Suzuki Miekichi and Kubota Mantarō, though lately he probably does not read them much. Despite his elegant appearance, he is unexpectedly not the sort to lose in a fight. It seems he is planting cotton or something of the sort in China.

Tsunefuji Kyo He has been my friend since higher school. His former family name was Ikawa. If there is such a thing as a cool-headed man of feeling, Tsunefuji is exactly that. He graduated from the Law College in Kyoto, became an assistant professor there or something of that sort, and is now studying in Paris. My fondness for argument is entirely the result of the influence of this caustic logical genius. He is a man of many gifts, composing haiku, waka, novels, poems, and even paintings. No doubt he now pretends not to know anything about such things. While I was at the university, I once spent a summer lodging in the Tsunefuji household in Matsue, in Unshu. Around that time, stirred up by Tsunefuji, I wrote a travel sketch of Matsue and contributed it to a newspaper called the Shoyo Shimpo. That was the first time I coolly signed my real name and made my writing public. His wife’s name is Masako. When people speak of “a fine mate for a gentleman,” it is just such a wife they mean.

Hata Toyokichi He too has been my friend since higher school. He is a nephew of Matsumoto Koshiro. He graduated from the Law College in Tokyo and is now with Mitsubishi in Berlin, a good-hearted and urbane man of talent. Of all my friends, he seems to be the one most often fallen in love with by women. To be sure, even when women do fall in love with him, he is not the sort of man to suffer any great loss from it. He used to be a devotee of Nagai Kafu, the Goncourts, Utamaro, and the like, though lately he sometimes starts brandishing Tolstoy. He promised to send me an astrakhan hat, but has still sent me nothing at all. His freedom and ease in writing are perhaps rare even among professional men of letters. He says he translated Strindberg’s Last Love in only two or three days.

Fujioka Zoroku He too has been my friend since higher school. He graduated from the Faculty of Letters in Tokyo and is now at Hosei University or somewhere of that sort. I have many friends, but there can hardly be another man among them who has come off worse in life as often as Fujioka. The fact that Fujioka is forever drawing the short straw is not because there is anything bad in him. It is simply because he is an idealist. If, moreover, one says that a man who stood in the relation of grandfather to Fujioka, upon seeing a beggar crouching by the riverside and thinking how cold he must be, stripped down to a single undergarment himself and sat out on the veranda in the dead of winter, finally catching a chill and dying, then one must understand that his line has been ferocious idealists for generations. A society incapable of understanding such idealism mistakes Fujioka for a sharp operator. It goes beyond comedy and becomes pitiable. No matter what the world may say, Fujioka is decidedly no operator. He is a scholar of single-minded honesty, easy to deceive and easy to be deceived. Anyone who doubts my words need only consider this: Ryunosuke Akutagawa is a talented man. Fujioka Zoroku is an old friend of Ryunosuke Akutagawa. Has there ever been a talented man who has been deceived by an old friend for fifteen years running, or has there not? (Since Fujioka Zoroku’s seniors and acquaintances are for the most part philosophers and the like, this is how one uses a syllogism.)

Besides these, Kikuchi Kan, Kume Masao, Yamamoto Yuzo, Oka Eiichiro, Naruse Seiichi, Matsuoka Yuzuru, Eguchi Kan, and others are also school friends of mine. But as I have already written at least once about these friends, or else because within a hundred years gentlemen such as yourselves will in any case have occasion to make me write something about them, I shall not write of them here. I would only like, in passing, to add a few words about unforgettable friends who have died.

Oshima Toshio He was my friend in elementary school. In those days I too was a boy with a large head, but I remember that Oshima’s head surpassed mine by one or two full steps. He loved gardening, and he also loved literature, but before he was even twenty he contracted intestinal tuberculosis and died. There was something mature about him somewhere in his manner, though it now seems to have been a sign that he would die young. Pitifully enough, I often made Oshima cry, then teased him by calling him crybaby, crybaby.

Hiratsuka Itsuro He was my friend in middle school. Since we were often mistaken for one another, it should be clear that he too had a long face and a lean frame. He was a romantic brilliant student, but after entering the higher school in Okayama he contracted renal tuberculosis and died. I have heard that Hiratsuka’s father was a painter, and I once saw a large hanging scroll of Jizo said to be his last work. Along with illness he also suffered a disappointed love, and because he died all alone in a hospital at Ohara in Chiba, he may have been the most pitiable of my friends. For a time he served as secretary at our middle school and lived by cooking for himself; then he wrote, mocking his own sickly body: “Slender is the secretary who buys horse mackerel in the evening moon.” I once saw the person with whom he had fallen in love, but what has since become of her I do not know.

(January 1925)