Doubt

It is now a little over ten years ago, but one spring I was asked to give a series of lectures on practical ethics, and for about a week I was to stay in the town of Ogaki in Gifu Prefecture. I had long since grown weary of the troublesome hospitality of local worthies, so I sent a letter ahead to the educational association that had invited me, requesting that I be spared all the pointless diversions that usually accompany a lecture tour: receptions, banquets, sightseeing, and the like. Fortunately, my reputation as an eccentric seems already to have reached that district, for when I arrived, through the good offices of the mayor of Ogaki, who was president of the association, not only were my selfish wishes fully respected, but I was also lodged, instead of at an ordinary inn, in a quiet house that served as the villa of a wealthy townsman, one Mr. N. What I am about to relate is the course of a certain tragic affair that I happened to hear there during my stay.

The house stood in a section of Kuruwa-machi near Kyoro Castle, a part of town far removed from vulgar bustle. The eight-mat room in shoin style where I slept and rose had the defect of poor sunlight, it is true, but the paper screens and sliding doors were touched with just the right degree of age, and the room possessed an air of perfect composure. The caretaking couple who looked after me at the villa always withdrew to the servants' quarters unless there was some particular need, so this dim eight-mat room was usually deep in silence and empty of human presence. It was so quiet that one could distinctly hear even the white blossoms of the magnolia, whose branches stretched over the stone washbasin in the garden, when they happened to fall. Since I lectured only in the mornings, I was able to pass my afternoons and evenings in that room in great peace. At the same time, however, with nothing in my possession but a bag containing reference books and a change of clothes, I often felt a chill of loneliness in the spring cold.

In the afternoons, the occasional visitor distracted me, and I did not feel especially lonely. But once the old-fashioned lamp, set on a bamboo stand, was lit, the human world, with all its living breath, at once seemed to contract until it existed only in the faint circle of light around me. And even that small circle inspired no confidence. Behind me, in the alcove, stood a single bronze vase with no flowers in it, heavy and overbearing in its solidity. Above it hung a dubious scroll of Willow Kannon, the ink tones dimly visible through a sooty brocade mounting. Whenever I happened to lift my eyes from my reading and glance back at that old Buddhist painting, I always felt as if incense that was not there were burning somewhere. So strongly did the room seem steeped in the stillness of a temple. For that reason I often went to bed early. But even in bed I could not easily fall asleep. Outside the shutters the cries of night birds startled me without seeming either near or far. Those cries made me picture the castle keep rising above this house. By day, whenever I saw it, the keep, stacking its three tiers of white walls among dense pines, seemed to scatter countless crows into the sky from its upturned roofs. And as I sank at last into a light, fitful sleep, I remained aware of a watery spring chill still drifting in the pit of my stomach.

Then one night, when the scheduled series of lectures was almost at an end, I was sitting cross-legged as usual before the lamp, idly absorbed in a book, when suddenly the sliding door between my room and the next opened with an uncanny quietness. At the moment I noticed it, I unconsciously expected it to be the villa's caretaker, and happened to think I might ask him to mail a postcard I had written earlier. So I glanced casually in that direction. There, in the dimness beside the sliding door, sat a man of about forty whom I had never seen before. To tell the truth, in that instant I was seized not so much by surprise as by a kind of superstitious terror. Indeed, the man, bathed in the blurred light of the lamp, possessed a strangely ghostlike appearance, fully enough to account for the shock he gave me. But when our eyes met, he spread both elbows high in the old-fashioned manner and bowed deeply, then, in a voice younger than I had expected, recited in an almost mechanical tone the following greeting:

"To intrude at night, and particularly when you are occupied, is inexcusable beyond words. Yet I have a matter of some urgency on which I wish to beg a favor of you, sir, and so, heedless of my own rudeness, I have ventured to call."

Having at last recovered from the first shock, I was able, while he was speaking, to observe him calmly. He was a half-gray man of good bearing, broad of forehead, hollow-cheeked, with eyes more lively than one would expect for his age. He was not wearing a formal crested garment, but his haori and hakama were neat and presentable, and an open fan had been properly laid beside his knees. What stimulated my nerves, however, even in that first instant, was that one finger of his left hand was missing. Once I noticed it, I could not keep my eyes from that hand.

"What is your business?"

Closing the book I had been reading, I asked this bluntly. Needless to say, I found his abrupt visit both unexpected and irritating. At the same time, I was also puzzled that the caretaker had not announced this visitor with a single word. But the man did not seem discouraged by my coldness. After pressing his forehead to the tatami once more, he said, in a tone as though he were about to begin a formal recitation:

"I should first introduce myself. My name is Nakamura Gendo. I attend your lectures every day as well, though naturally among so many people you would not remember me. I hope that through this chance connection I may ask for your guidance in the future also."

At this point I felt I had finally grasped the purpose of his visit. Even so, having my quiet night reading disturbed remained decidedly unpleasant.

"Then is it that you have some question about my lecture?"

When I asked this, I already had in reserve the polite dismissal: "If it is a question, please ask it tomorrow at the lecture hall." But without moving a single muscle of his face, and keeping his gaze fixed on the knees of his hakama, he replied:

"No, it is not a question. However, I do wish to ask your opinion, as one versed in ethics, regarding the good or evil of my own conduct. About twenty years ago now, I met with an unforeseen event, and as a result I have never since been able to understand myself. I thought that if I could hear the views of so eminent a scholar of ethics as yourself, some natural power of judgment might return to me. That is why I have taken the liberty of coming here tonight. Would it be possible, even though it may weary you, for you to listen to my story from beginning to end?"

I hesitated to answer. Strictly speaking, I was indeed an ethicist by profession, but regrettably I was not vain enough to imagine that I possessed a mind so flexible that I could at once set my specialized knowledge in motion and produce a living solution to whatever practical problem lay before me. He seemed at once to notice my hesitation. Raising the eyes that had until then remained lowered to his knees, he looked timidly at my face, half pleading, and in a voice somewhat more natural than before, continued with great politeness:

"No, of course I do not mean that I must absolutely have your judgment on right and wrong. It is only that this is a question that has tormented me without cease even into my present age, and I would like, at the very least, to place before the ears of someone like you the suffering I have borne all this time, and by doing so perhaps bring some small relief to my own heart."

After hearing him say this, I could not, as a matter of common decency, refuse to listen to the tale of this unknown man. At the same time, I felt as though an ominous foreboding and a vague sense of responsibility had begun to press heavily on my mind. Wanting only to cast off those uneasy feelings, I deliberately assumed a light manner and, motioning him nearer across the dim lamp glow, said:

"Very well, then. At least let me hear your story. Though even after hearing it, I cannot say whether I shall be able to offer any opinion of much use to you."

"No, if you will only listen, that alone will already be more than I could hope for."

The man who called himself Nakamura Gendo picked up the fan from the tatami with the hand missing a finger, and, glancing from time to time not so much at me as stealthily toward the Willow Kannon in the alcove, began in a dark, monotonous voice, poor in inflection, to tell his story in broken phrases.

It was in the twenty-fourth year of Meiji. As you know, that was the year of the great Nobi earthquake. Since then Ogaki has been utterly transformed. At that time there were exactly two elementary schools in town: one founded by the feudal lord and one built by the townspeople. I was employed at the K Elementary School, the one established by the lord. I had graduated top of my class from the prefectural normal school two or three years earlier, and thereafter I had also won a fair measure of trust from the principal and others, so that although I was still young, I was receiving the comparatively high salary of fifteen yen a month. Today a man on fifteen yen would hardly be able to keep body and soul together, no doubt, but this was twenty years ago; though it was not abundance, it was enough to live on without hardship, and among my colleagues I was, if anything, an object of envy.

My entire family in heaven and earth consisted of a single wife, and at that time we had been married only about two years. She was a distant relative of the principal. Having lost both her parents in childhood, she had been looked after like a daughter by the principal and his wife until she came to live with me. Her name was Sayo, and though it is a strange thing for a man to say of his own wife, she was extremely gentle and easily shy; at the same time, she was perhaps too quiet, a woman of such faint and lonely nature that she seemed almost shadowlike. Yet we were well matched, and though our life lacked any especially brilliant happiness, we were able to pass our days in peace.

Then came that great earthquake. I remember it well: October 28, at about seven in the morning, I believe. I was at the well using a toothpick, while my wife was in the kitchen transferring the rice from the pot. And then the house collapsed on top of us. It happened in only a minute or two. A terrible subterranean roar struck us, like a great wind, and in an instant the house cracked and tilted; after that, all I remember seeing was tiles flying through the air. Before I had even time to cry out, I was trapped beneath an eave that had come crashing down, and for a while, mindless and insensible, I was shaken by wave after wave of the violent tremors surging in from who knows where. At last I crawled out from under the eave into the cloud of dust, and what I saw before me was the roof of my own house, crushed flat onto the ground, with grass still growing between the tiles.

What I felt then, whether you call it astonishment or panic, was almost the same as stupefaction. I collapsed where I stood and, still sitting there blankly, looked over the houses to right and left, all with their roofs fallen as though on a storm-tossed sea, and listened vaguely to the roaring of the earth, the crash of beams falling, the snapping of trees, the collapse of walls, and above all the confused tumult, neither voice nor sound, of thousands of people fleeing in terror. But it was only for an instant. When I suddenly noticed something moving beneath an eave over there, I sprang up at once, as though waking from an evil dream, and rushed toward it, shouting senselessly at the top of my lungs. There under the eave was my wife, Sayo, writhing in agony with the lower half of her body pinned beneath a beam.

I seized her hand and pulled. I pushed at her shoulders to raise her up. But the beam crushing her would not move so much as enough for a worm to crawl through. In my confusion I tore away the boards of the eave one by one, and as I did so I shouted again and again, "Hold on!" to my wife. To my wife? Or perhaps I was trying to encourage myself. Sayo said, "It hurts." She also said, "Please, do something." But even without my urging she had turned pale as another person and was frantically trying to lift the beam herself; and even now, the sight remains vividly and painfully in my memory, of both her hands, bloodied so thoroughly that her nails could not be seen, trembling as they searched blindly under the beam.

That went on for a long, long time. Then suddenly I became aware that from somewhere a mass of black smoke came rolling over the roof and blew full into my face. At the same moment there was a deafening exploding sound beyond the smoke, and sparks like gold dust rose loosely into the air. I clung to my wife like a madman. Once more, with reckless desperation, I tried to drag her body out from beneath the beam. But again her lower half could not be moved even an inch. Drenched in the smoke that came gusting over us, I dropped to one knee on the eave and said something to her through clenched teeth. You may ask what I said. No, you certainly will ask. But I truly do not remember at all. I only remember that then my wife, clutching my arm with her bloody hands, said one word: "You..."

I stared into her face. All expression had vanished from it; only the eyes were unnaturally wide open, making it a terrible thing to look at. Then not only smoke but a surge of heat fanning the sparks swept over me, so blinding that my eyes reeled. I thought there was no hope. I thought my wife would be burned alive. Burned alive? Still holding her blood-covered hand, I shouted something again. And she too repeated only that one word: "You..." In that word, at that moment, I felt countless meanings, countless emotions. Burned alive? Burned alive? A third time I cried out something. I remember it as though I said, "Die." I also remember it as though I said, "I will die too." But before I knew what I had said, I snatched up whatever roof tiles lay at hand and struck them down again and again upon my wife's head.

What happened after that I must leave to your imagination. I alone survived. Hounded by the fire and smoke that burned through nearly the whole town, I crawled between the roofs of houses that blocked the road like little hills and somehow saved my wretched life. Whether it was fortunate or unfortunate, I could not tell. Only one thing I have never been able to forget: that night, while the light of the still-burning fires glowed against the dark sky, I sat with one or two of my colleagues outside the school, which had also been crushed flat, in a temporary hut, and when I took into my hand a rice ball from the emergency rations, tears began to flow without end.

Nakamura Gendo broke off for a while and lowered his timid eyes to the tatami. I, having heard so sudden a tale, felt more than ever as though the spring chill of that broad room were pressing up to the very collar of my robe, and I lacked the spirit even to say, "I see."

In the room there was only the sound of the lamp drawing up its oil. Then there was the fine ticking of my pocket watch on the desk. And then, amid those sounds, there came so faint a sigh that it seemed as though the Willow Kannon in the alcove had stirred.

I raised my uneasy eyes and watched the figure of the man sitting there in desolation. Was it he who had sighed? Or was it I myself? Before that question could be settled, however, Nakamura Gendo once more resumed his story in a low voice.

Needless to say, I grieved over my wife's death. More than that, at times, when I received kind words of sympathy from the principal and my fellow teachers, I even shed tears before them without shame. Yet for some reason I could never bring myself to say aloud that during the earthquake I had killed my wife.

"Thinking it better than having her burned alive, I killed her with my own hands." If I had said as much, it is not as though I would have been sent to prison. On the contrary, the world would surely only have pitied me all the more. Yet whenever I tried to speak of it, the words clung at once to my throat and not a single syllable would move across my tongue.

At the time, I believed the reason for this lay entirely in my own cowardice. But in truth the cause was something deeper than mere cowardice. And I myself did not understand what that cause was until a proposal of remarriage arose and I was on the verge of entering a new life. When at last I did understand it, I could only become a pitiable spiritual wreck, forever disqualified from living the ordinary life of other men.

It was the principal, in whose household Sayo had effectively been raised, who brought me the proposal of remarriage, and I understood perfectly well that he did so from sincere concern for me. In fact, by then a little over a year had passed since the great earthquake, and even before the principal broached the matter, others had more than once quietly sounded me out with similar suggestions. But when I heard the details of the principal's proposal, I was astonished to learn that the prospective bride was none other than the second daughter of this very N household where you are now staying, the elder sister of the eldest son, then a fourth-year primary-school boy to whom I occasionally gave lessons outside school. Naturally I declined at first. In the first place, there was a considerable difference in status between myself, a mere teacher, and the wealthy N family. Besides, because of my position as tutor, I found it distasteful to invite suspicions that there must have been some prior understanding between us. At the same time, behind my reluctance there must also have lingered, though more faintly than before as the dead receded day by day, the image of Sayo, whom I myself had beaten to death, trailing dimly after me like the tail of a comet.

Yet the principal, fully understanding my feelings, patiently pressed me with every argument he could muster: that a man of my age would find it difficult to continue unmarried; that this proposal was earnestly desired by the other side; that since he himself would willingly act as matchmaker, there could be no occasion for malicious gossip; and that ambitions I had long cherished, such as going to Tokyo for further study, would also be greatly facilitated once I was married. Hearing all this, I could not simply refuse out of hand. Moreover, the young woman in question was reputed to be beautiful, and, to my shame, I also cast an eye toward the wealth of the N family. As the principal's urging continued, my answer softened little by little from "I will think it over carefully" to "Perhaps after the New Year." And by early summer of Meiji 26, the matter had progressed so far that it was all but settled that the wedding would be held in the autumn.

And from about the time that arrangement was settled, I fell into a strange depression. To my own surprise, I lost the energy I had once had for everything I did. Even when I went to school, I would lean against the desk in the teachers' room, sunk absentmindedly in thought, and more than once I failed even to hear the clapper announcing the start of class. And yet, if you ask what exactly was troubling me, I myself could not clearly determine it. It was only that the gears in my head seemed somehow out of alignment, and beyond that misalignment there seemed to lie some secret beyond the reach of my own consciousness. It gave me a sinister feeling.

This went on for about two months, I think. It was just after the summer holidays had begun. One evening, while out for a walk, I happened to glance into the front of a bookstore behind the Honganji branch temple. There were five or six copies of a magazine called Fuzoku Gaho, which was much talked about at the time, displayed together with Yaso Kidan and Gekko Manga, all with their lithographed covers facing out. Standing there at the shopfront, I casually picked up one copy of Fuzoku Gaho. On the cover was a picture of houses collapsing and fires breaking out, with two bold lines printed across it: "Published November 30, Meiji 24. Eyewitness Record of the Earthquake of October 28." The instant I saw it, my heart suddenly began to pound. I even felt as though someone by my ear were whispering delightedly, with a mocking laugh, "That's it. That's it." In the dim light of the shopfront, where no lamp had yet been lit, I hurriedly opened the cover.

At the very beginning there was a picture of old and young members of a family alike crushed to death beneath a fallen beam. Then there was a picture of the ground splitting in two and swallowing women and children who had happened to be passing by. Then... there is no need to list them one by one, but that issue of Fuzoku Gaho unfolded before my eyes once more the scenes of the great earthquake two years earlier. The collapse of the Nagara River railway bridge, the destruction of the Owari Spinning Company, the excavation of the bodies of soldiers of the Third Division, the treatment of the wounded at Aichi Hospital, such ghastly pictures drew me one after another back into the accursed memories of that time. My eyes filled with tears. My body began to tremble as well. A feeling that was neither exactly pain nor exactly joy violently stirred my whole soul. And when the final picture opened before my eyes, the shock of that moment remains vivid in my mind even now.

It showed a woman struck in the hips by a fallen beam, writhing in unbearable agony. Beyond where the beam lay, black smoke was billowing upward in thick clouds, and even sparks of flame were flying wildly through the air. Who could this be if not my wife? What could it be if not my wife's final moments? I nearly dropped the magazine from my hand. I nearly cried out aloud. And yet what made my heart leap even more at that instant was that all at once the surroundings grew glaringly bright, and a gust of smoke suggestive of a fire struck my nose. Forcing myself to stay calm, I put down the magazine and looked around the shopfront. The shop boy had just lit a hanging lamp and was tossing a still-smoking matchstick out into the twilight street.

From that time on, I became even gloomier than before. Up to then, what had tormented me was only a vague and nameless anxiety; afterward, a definite suspicion lodged in my mind and tortured me day and night. That suspicion was this: when I killed my wife during that great earthquake, had it really been unavoidable? Or, to put it more nakedly, had I not killed her because from the very beginning I had wanted to kill her? Had the earthquake merely given me the opportunity? That was the suspicion. Of course, in the face of that suspicion, I do not know how many times I resolutely answered, "No, no." But whatever it was that had whispered in my ear at the bookstore, "That's it. That's it," would always laugh mockingly again and ask, "Then why were you unable to speak openly of having killed your wife?" Whenever that fact occurred to me, I would start in terror. Ah, why was it that, if I had killed my wife, I could not simply say that I had killed her? Why had I concealed to this very day so terrible an experience?

And what came vividly back to my memory at such times was the hateful fact that, in those days, I had secretly resented my wife, Sayo. Unless I confess this shameful thing, I fear it may be difficult to understand. My wife was unfortunately a woman with a physical defect. (The following eighty-two lines are omitted.) ... Thus, until that moment, uncertainly though it was, I had believed that my moral feelings had in one way or another won the victory. But when a catastrophe like that great earthquake occurred, and every social restraint vanished from the earth, how could one say that my moral feelings did not crack along with them? How could one say that my selfishness did not flare up as well? Having come to this point, I could no longer help acknowledging the suspicion that I had in fact killed my wife in order to kill her. That I became more and more melancholic was only natural, so to speak.

Still, one path of escape remained to me: "Even if I had not killed my wife in that situation, she would surely have burned to death in the fire. If so, then it cannot be said that killing her was especially my own sin." But one day, when the season had already shifted from midsummer to lingering heat and school had resumed, we teachers were all gathered around the table in the teachers' room, drinking coarse tea and chatting idly. By some turn of conversation, the subject came around again to the great earthquake two years before. I alone kept my mouth shut and only half listened as my colleagues spoke. They told of the roof of the Honganji branch temple collapsing, of the embankment at Funamachi giving way, of the road at Tawaramachi splitting open. The talk grew livelier from one story to the next, and then one teacher said that the wife of a liquor merchant called Bingoya in Nakamachi had once been pinned beneath a beam and scarcely able to move, but then a fire broke out, and the beam fortunately burned through and snapped, so that in the end she had barely escaped with her life.

The moment I heard that, everything suddenly went dark before my eyes, and for a while I felt as if even my breathing had stopped. Indeed, during that interval I must have looked as good as unconscious. When at last I came to myself, my colleagues, alarmed that my face had suddenly changed color and that I had nearly toppled over with my chair, had all gathered around me, some giving me water, others medicine, all in a great commotion. But I had not even the presence of mind to thank them. My head was filled to overflowing with that dreadful mass of suspicion. Had I, after all, killed my wife in order to kill her? Even though she had been pinned under the beam, had I struck her to death for fear that she might somehow survive? If I had only left her alive, then, like the wife of Bingoya now, she too might perhaps have found some chance to escape death by a hair's breadth. But I had mercilessly killed her with a single blow from a roof tile. The suffering I felt when I thought that is something I can only ask you, sir, to imagine for yourself. In the midst of that torment, I resolved that, if nothing else, I would at least cleanse myself somewhat by breaking off the marriage arrangement with the N family.

Yet when the time actually came to carry that out, my hard-won resolve once again began, shamefully, to weaken. After all, we were already at the point of preparing to hold the wedding before long, and if I were now suddenly to say I wished to break off the engagement, I would have to confess everything: not only the circumstances in which I had killed my wife during that earthquake, but the anguish I had carried within me ever since. For a timid man like myself, once the critical moment arrived, no matter how I lashed myself onward, the courage to go through with it simply would not come. Again and again I reproached my own wretched weakness. But I only reproached myself in vain, taking no proper action at all, and before I knew it the lingering summer heat had given way to chilly mornings, and the day of what people call the wedding ceremony had at last drawn close before my eyes.

By then I had become so utterly despondent that I scarcely spoke to anyone at all. More than one colleague advised me to postpone the marriage. As for the suggestion that I see a doctor, even the principal urged it on me as many as three times. But at that time I no longer had even the strength to take care of my health outwardly, despite such kindly words. At the same time, to make use of other people's concern and delay the marriage under the pretext of illness now seemed to me nothing but a cowardly and shabby expedient. Meanwhile, the master of the N family appears to have mistaken the cause of my depression for the effects of bachelor life. He insisted repeatedly that I should marry as soon as possible, and so, though not on the same day, in October, the very month in which that great earthquake had occurred two years earlier, I was at last to hold the wedding ceremony at the N family's main residence. When I, worn to skin and bone by the strain of so many days, was dressed in the crested formal wear of a bridegroom and shown into a grand hall surrounded by imposing gold screens, how deeply ashamed I was of what I was that day. I felt exactly like a villain stealing past the eyes of others in order to commit some monstrous crime. No, not merely like one. In truth, I was a wretch concealing the crime of murder and plotting for the moment to steal both the daughter and the fortune of the N family. My face grew hot. My chest tightened. If possible, I wanted, right there on the spot, to confess in full every detail of how I had killed my wife. Such thoughts began raging through my head like a storm.

Then at that moment, upon the tatami before where I sat, a pair of white silk tabi socks appeared as if in a dream. Then I saw the hem of a robe patterned faintly with pines and cranes fading into something like waves and sky. Then, in order, came a brocade sash, the silver chain of a hakoseko, a white collar, and finally a high bridal coiffure with tortoiseshell combs and ornaments gleaming heavily in it. At that sight, I was overwhelmed by an absolute terror, as though all hope were gone; before I knew it, I had thrown both hands down upon the tatami and cried out in a desperate voice, "I am a murderer. A criminal guilty of the gravest of sins." ...

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When Nakamura Gendo had finished telling his story, he gazed fixedly at my face for a while. Then, forcing a smile to his lips, he said:

"There is hardly any need to tell what happened after that. But there is one thing I would like you to know: from that very day forward I was branded a madman, and have had to live out a pitiable remainder of my life. Whether I am in fact mad or not, I leave entirely to your judgment, sir. But even if I am mad, is not the thing that made me so that very monster lurking in the depths of the human heart? So long as that monster remains there, even those who laugh at me today as a madman may themselves become madmen like me tomorrow. That, at least, is how I think of it. What do you make of it?"

As always, the lamp stirred its cold spring flame between me and this sinister visitor. With the image of Willow Kannon behind me, I had not even the strength to question him about the missing finger on one of his hands. I could do nothing but sit there in silence.

(June, Taisho 8 [1919])