Hanshan and Shide
In this brief, ironic sketch, Akutagawa Ryunosuke brings the legendary Zen eccentrics Kanzan and Jittoku into the everyday Tokyo of streetcars, bookstores, and literary conversation. The narrator begins with a visit to Soseki, then turns to a translated Russian novel full of revolution and dynamite, only to have that modern intensity disrupted by a vision from classical Chinese and Japanese art. Akutagawa’s wit lies in how casually the impossible is treated: saints stroll past Iidabashi, and even their tiger-riding companion is said to wander Ginza. The piece contrasts imported modern seriousness with an older, stranger imaginative world, suggesting that the marvelous may feel more intimate, and perhaps more real, than the grand abstractions of contemporary literature.
After a long while, I went to see Soseki-sensei. He was sitting in the middle of his study with his arms folded, thinking about something. When I asked, "Sensei, what is the matter?" he replied, "I have just come back from seeing Unkei carving the Nio guardians at the Sanmon gate of Gokokuji." In this busy world, I felt that Unkei and the like hardly mattered, so, seizing on the gloomy-looking sensei, I engaged him for a little while in a difficult discussion full of names like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Then I left his house and boarded a streetcar at the old Edogawa terminus.
The car was terribly crowded. Still, I finally managed to catch hold of a strap in the corner and began reading the Russian novel in English translation that I had tucked into my coat. It was about a revolution, or so it seemed. There was something about workers doing one thing or another, someone going mad, throwing dynamite, and at the end even doing something to a woman. In any case, everything in it was urgent, charged with a somber force; it was the sort of thing that no Japanese writer could possibly write, not even a single line of it. Naturally, I was greatly impressed, and while standing there I drew line after line with a colored pencil between the passages.
But when I changed cars at Iidabashi and happened to glance up, I noticed two strange men walking along the street outside the window. Both of them wore the same kind of ragged clothes. Their hair and beards had grown wild, and their faces had an unmistakably ancient, uncanny look. I had the feeling I had seen these two men somewhere before, but I could not for the life of me remember where. Just then a man beside me, who looked like some sort of dealer in secondhand goods, said from the strap next to mine,
"Ah, there go Kanzan and Jittoku again."
Now that he had said so, I saw that indeed the two men were carrying a broom and a scroll, shambling along as though they had stepped straight out of one of Taiga's paintings. But no matter how fashionable auctions had become, it was still strange to think that the genuine Kanzan and Jittoku should appear together, walking through Iidabashi. So I tugged at the sleeve of the man who looked like a curio dealer and asked, as if to make sure,
"Do you mean those really are the old Kanzan and Jittoku?"
But the man answered with the most matter-of-fact expression,
"They are. I ran into them just the other day outside the Chamber of Commerce."
"Well now, I had thought both of them must have died long ago."
"Not at all. They don't die. They may look like that, but they're Fugen and Monju. And that friend of theirs, the Zen master Bukan, that fellow often rides a tiger down the Ginza too."
Five minutes later, as soon as the streetcar started moving again, I returned to the Russian novel I had been reading. But before I had finished even a page, the suspicious figures of Kanzan and Jittoku I had just seen grew dearer to me than the smell of dynamite. So I looked back through the window, and though they had already shrunk as small as beans, I could still clearly make them out, walking along with their broom under the bright late-autumn sunlight.
Still holding on to the strap, I put the book back in my coat as before, and when I got home I thought I would write Soseki-sensei at once to tell him that I had met Kanzan and Jittoku today at Iidabashi. Once I thought that, it somehow no longer seemed at all unnatural that they should be walking through modern Tokyo.