The Story of a Head Falling Off

Part One

The moment He Xiao’er flung away his cavalry saber, he clung desperately to his horse’s neck. He was sure his neck had been cut. Or perhaps that was what he thought after he had already seized the horse’s neck. All he knew was that something had gone into his neck with a heavy thud, and at the same instant he had clung on. The horse, too, must have been wounded. No sooner had He Xiao’er pitched forward against the pommel of the saddle than the animal gave a shrill neigh, threw its muzzle suddenly toward the sky, and burst straight through the confused mass of friend and foe, galloping headlong into the sorghum fields that filled the view. He thought he heard two or three rifle shots behind him, but even those reached his ears only as if in a dream.

The sorghum, taller than a man, was trampled down by the horse’s frantic charge and rose and fell like waves. From right and left it brushed his queue, struck his uniform, and wiped the dark blood streaming from his neck. But he had no room in his mind to notice each of these things. Only the simple fact that he had been cut burned itself painfully and unmistakably into his brain. Cut. Cut. Repeating this to himself, he mechanically kicked again and again with the heels of his boots into the belly of the horse, which was drenched in sweat.

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About ten minutes earlier, He Xiao’er had been on his way with his fellow cavalrymen to scout a small village across a river from their own position, when, in a field of sorghum just beginning to yellow, they had suddenly encountered a detachment of Japanese cavalry. It happened so abruptly that neither side had time to fire their rifles. At least on his side, the moment they saw caps striped with red and uniforms also ribbed in red, all of them, as if by a single impulse, drew their sabers and instantly turned their horses’ heads toward the enemy. Of course, at that moment it did not occur to any of them that he himself might be killed. There was only the enemy. Or rather, there was only the killing of the enemy. So, once they had turned their horses, every one of them bared his teeth like a dog and charged furiously toward the Japanese cavalry. The enemy, too, must have been ruled by the same impulse. A moment later, faces like reflections of their own, also baring their teeth, began to appear and vanish on either side of them. Along with those faces, several sabers began busily whistling through the air around them.

After that, his sense of time became unclear. He remembered with strange vividness the tall sorghum shaking as if in a storm, and above the tips of its trembling ears a sun like bronze hanging in the sky. But how long the uproar lasted, and what happened in what order during it, he could hardly say. In any case, all that time He Xiao’er was shouting at the top of his lungs, like a madman, words that meant nothing even to himself, while wildly swinging his saber. Once, he thought, the blade turned red, though he did not seem to have felt any real resistance. Meanwhile the hilt of the saber he was waving grew slicker and slicker with cold sweat. At the same time his mouth became strangely dry. Then the face of a Japanese cavalryman, his expression changed by fear or fury, his eyes opened so wide they seemed about to leap from their sockets, suddenly sprang out before He Xiao’er’s horse with its mouth gaping. From a half-torn cap striped in red, a close-cropped head showed through. The instant He Xiao’er saw it, he lifted his saber and brought it down with all his strength on that cap. But what his saber struck was neither the man’s cap nor the head beneath it. It was the steel of the other man’s saber, which had leapt up from below to meet it. The sound rang out with a terrible clarity in the boiling tumult all around, and sent at once into his nostrils the cold smell of polished iron. At the same time, the enemy’s broad saber, dazzling as it reflected the sun, came above his head and drew a great circle. Then, just as he thought this, something indescribably cold entered the base of He Xiao’er’s neck with a heavy thud.

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The horse galloped madly through the sorghum fields, carrying He Xiao’er, who groaned from the pain of his wound. No matter how far it ran, the sorghum showed no sign of ending. The voices of men and horses, and the sound of sabers clashing, had at some point disappeared. In autumn, even the sunlight was no different in Liaodong than in Japan.

To repeat: as He Xiao’er was jolted on the horse’s back, he groaned from the pain of his wound. But the voice that escaped between his clenched teeth had a meaning more complex than a mere groan. He was not moaning only from physical pain. He was crying and wailing from mental anguish as well, from the dizzying changes of feeling that centered on his fear of death.

It was unbearably sad to him that he would have to part from this world forever. Then he resented every person and every event that had caused him to part from it. Then he grew angry at himself, because he was the one who, whatever happened, had to part from it. Then all these various emotions, linked one to the next, came endlessly to torment him. So as they passed through him, he tried crying, ‘I’m dying, I’m dying,’ tried calling out the names of his father and mother, and tried cursing the Japanese cavalryman. But unfortunately, the moment any of it left his mouth, it changed into a hoarse groan with no meaning at all. He must already have been that weak.

‘There is no one as unfortunate as I am. At this young age I have come all the way here to war, only to be killed for no reason, like a dog. First, I hate the Japanese man who cut me. Next, I hate the officer of my unit who sent us out scouting. Last, I hate Japan and Qing China for starting this war. No, there are still other things I hate. Everyone who had even the slightest connection with the circumstances that made me a soldier is no different from my enemy. Because of all those people, I am now about to leave this world, where there are still so many things I wanted to do. Ah, what a fool I was to let myself be carried along by such people and circumstances.’

With this meaning contained in his groans, He Xiao’er clung to the horse’s neck and went on running through the sorghum. Startled by the force of their passage, flocks of quail sometimes rose in a panic here and there, but the horse, of course, paid no attention. It kept galloping, foaming at the mouth, heedless even when the master on its back nearly slipped off now and then.

So, if fate had allowed it, He Xiao’er would surely have spent the whole day being jolted on the horse, protesting his misfortune to Heaven through that unbroken groaning until the bronze sun slanted down into the western sky. But as the plain gradually formed a gentle slope, and a narrow muddy river flowing between the sorghum stalks opened ahead of them, fate took the form of two or three poplars standing sternly on the riverbank, their low branches gathering the leaves that were already about to fall. The instant He Xiao’er’s horse passed between them, those thick branches suddenly scooped up his body and hurled him headfirst onto the soft mud at the water’s edge.

At that moment, through some chain of association, He Xiao’er saw vivid yellow flames burning in the air. They were the vivid yellow flames he had seen as a child in the kitchen of his house, burning beneath the great stove. ‘Ah, the fire is burning,’ he thought. In the next instant, before he knew it, he had lost consciousness...

Part Two

Had He Xiao’er, thrown from the horse, lost consciousness completely? It is true that the throbbing of his wound had somehow almost ceased. Yet he remembered lying by the deserted riverbank, smeared with earth and blood, and looking up at the high blue sky stroked by the leaves of the poplars. That sky looked deeper and bluer than any sky he had ever seen. It felt exactly as if a great indigo jar had been turned upside down and he were peering into it from below. And at the bottom of that jar, clouds like clusters of foam were born from somewhere and then silently vanished somewhere else. They seemed to be blotted out by the poplar leaves, which were constantly moving.

Then had He Xiao’er not entirely lost consciousness? But between his eyes and the blue sky, many things that were not actually there came and went like shadows. The first to appear was his mother’s dingy skirt. When he was a child, whether he was happy or sad, he had clung to that skirt more times than he could count. But before he could involuntarily stretch out his hand and try to grasp it, it vanished from his field of vision. As it disappeared, he saw that the skirt had grown as thin as gauze, letting him see through it, like mica, the mass of clouds beyond.

After it came the wide sesame field behind the house where he had been born, flowing in as if sliding across the sky. It was a midsummer sesame field, where lonely flowers bloomed as if waiting for dusk. He Xiao’er tried to find himself and his brothers standing among the sesame plants. But there was not a single shadow that looked human. Only pale flowers and leaves quietly merged together, bathed in thin sunlight. This crossed space diagonally and then disappeared as if it had been hoisted upward.

Then a strange thing writhed into the sky. Looking closely, he saw it was one of those great dragon lanterns carried through the streets on the night of the lantern festival. It must have been about seven or eight yards long. Paper had been pasted over a bamboo frame and brilliantly painted with blue and red pigments. Its shape was exactly like the dragons seen in pictures. Though it was daytime, something like candlelight shone inside it, and it appeared dimly against the blue sky. Stranger still, the dragon lantern somehow felt alive; in fact, its long whiskers seemed to move left and right by themselves. While he was thinking this, it gradually swam out of his field of vision as well, and suddenly vanished from there.

When that could no longer be seen, the delicate foot of a woman suddenly appeared in the sky. Since it was a bound foot, it was barely more than three inches long. At the tips of the gracefully bent toes, pale nails softly separated themselves from the color of flesh. The memory of the time he had seen that foot brought to Xiao’er’s heart a vague, distant sadness, like the bite of a flea suffered in a dream. If only he could touch that foot once more. But of course that was surely no longer possible. Between this place and the place where he had seen that foot lay a road of hundreds of li. As he thought this, the foot grew transparent before his eyes and was naturally absorbed into the shadow of a cloud.

It was when that foot disappeared that He Xiao’er was struck, from the bottom of his heart, by a mysterious loneliness he had never felt before. Above his head, the great blue sky covered him soundlessly. Whether people liked it or not, they had to go on with their wretched existence under this sky, blown by the wind that fell from it. What loneliness this was. And how strange it was that until now he had never known it. He Xiao’er involuntarily gave a long sigh.

At that moment, between his eyes and the sky, a detachment of Japanese cavalry wearing caps striped with red came hurrying along at a speed faster than anything he had seen before. Then, at the same speed, they hurriedly vanished somewhere. Ah, those cavalrymen too must be just as lonely as he was. If they were not illusions, he would have liked to comfort them and be comforted by them, if only to forget this loneliness for a little while. But by now it was too late.

Tears overflowed endlessly from He Xiao’er’s eyes. When he looked back with those tear-wet eyes, there is no need to say now how full of ugliness his life until then appeared to him. He wanted to apologize to everyone. And he wanted to forgive everyone.

‘If I survive here, whatever it takes, I will atone for this past.’

Weeping, he murmured this in the depths of his heart. But the infinitely deep, infinitely blue sky, as if the words never entered its ears, slowly descended toward his chest, by a foot or by an inch at a time. In that blue air, the faint points that glittered here and there were probably stars visible by day. Now not even those shadowlike things crossed the depths of his eyes again. He Xiao’er sighed once more, then suddenly his lips trembled, and at last his eyes gradually closed.

Part Three

It was a morning in early spring, about a year after peace had been concluded between Japan and Qing China. In a room of the Japanese legation in Beijing, Army Major Kimura, the military attaché attached to the legation, and Yamakawa, a Bachelor of Science and engineer from the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce who had come from Japan on official orders to inspect conditions, were seated around a table, forgetting their duties for a while over a bowl of coffee and a cigar, absorbed in leisurely conversation. Though it was early spring, a fire was burning in the large fireplace, so the room was warm enough that one might almost break into a sweat. From time to time, a potted red plum on the table sent out a fragrance that seemed Chinese.

For some time their conversation was taken up entirely with the Empress Dowager Cixi. Before long, however, it shifted to memories of the Sino-Japanese War, and Major Kimura, for some reason, suddenly stood up and brought over to the table a bound file of the Shenzhou Daily that had been placed in the corner of the room. Opening one of its pages before Engineer Yamakawa’s eyes, he pointed with his finger to a certain place and gave him a look that said, Read this. Since it was so abrupt, the engineer was a little surprised. But he had long known that the major, despite being a soldier, was a man of easy wit and polish. So, immediately expecting some eccentric anecdote connected with the war, he looked down at the page. Sure enough, there, in a solemn display of square Chinese characters, was an article which, if rendered into the style of a Japanese newspaper, would read something like this:

The owner of a barbershop in the city, a man named He Xiao’er, was a brave soldier who went to the front in the Sino-Japanese War and repeatedly distinguished himself. After his triumphant return, however, his conduct became increasingly dissolute, and he ruined himself with drink and women. On the ___ day of last month, at a certain restaurant, he quarreled with several drinking companions, and after the dispute finally turned into a scuffle, he suffered a grave wound to the neck and died on the spot. What is especially strange is the wound on the man’s neck: it was not inflicted by a weapon at the time, but was wholly the reopening of a wound he had received on the battlefield during the Sino-Japanese War. According to eyewitnesses, the moment the man fell over together with a table during the struggle, his head suddenly dropped onto the floor with a gush of fresh blood, leaving only a single strip of skin at the throat. The authorities, however, doubt the true circumstances and are now making a strict search for the culprit. Still, since the case of a certain man of Zhucheng whose head fell off is recorded even in Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, it cannot be said that such a thing could not have happened to this He Xiao’er. And so on.

As soon as Engineer Yamakawa finished reading, he looked astonished and said, ‘What is this?’

Major Kimura slowly exhaled cigar smoke and, smiling with composure, replied, ‘Interesting, isn’t it? Things like this happen only in China.’

‘One would hate for them to happen just anywhere.’

Yamakawa, too, grinned as he tapped the lengthened ash of his cigar into the ashtray.

‘And what makes it still more interesting is...’

The major, with a strangely serious face, paused for a moment.

‘I know this fellow He Xiao’er.’

‘You know him? Now that is surprising. Surely, attaché or not, you haven’t joined forces with a newspaperman to fabricate some outrageous lie?’

‘Who would do such a pointless thing? Back then, when I was wounded in the battle of Haicheng, this He Xiao’er fellow was also taken into one of our field hospitals, and I spoke with him two or three times while practicing my Chinese. Since the article says he had a wound on his neck, I am almost certain it was the same man. He said that when he had gone out scouting or something of the sort, he ran into our cavalry and was treated to a slash from a Japanese sword across the neck.’

‘Well, that is a strange connection. But according to this newspaper, the man was a scoundrel. Someone like that would probably have done the world a great deal more good if he had died back then.’

‘But at the time he was an extremely honest, good-natured man. Even among the prisoners, it was rare to find anyone so docile. The army doctors and everyone else seemed oddly fond of him, and apparently treated him with special care. When he talked about his life, he said some rather interesting things. I still remember quite clearly how he told me what he felt when he had suffered that grave wound to the neck and fallen from his horse. He said that while he was lying in the mud beside a river and looking up through some poplar trees at the sky, he could see clearly in that sky his mother’s skirt, a woman’s bare foot, a sesame field in flower, and things like that.’

Major Kimura threw away his cigar and lifted his coffee cup to his lips. Looking at the red plum on the table, he continued as if speaking to himself.

‘He said that when he saw those things, he felt deeply ashamed of the life he had lived until then.’

‘And as soon as the war ended, he became a scoundrel? That is why human beings cannot be trusted.’

Engineer Yamakawa leaned his head against the back of his chair, stretched out his legs, and sarcastically blew cigar smoke toward the ceiling.

‘When you say he could not be trusted, do you mean he had been pretending to be virtuous?’

‘Exactly.’

‘No, I do not think so. At least at that time, I think he truly felt what he said. Probably this time too, at the very moment his head fell off, to use the newspaper’s own words, he felt the same thing again. I imagine it like this. In the middle of the quarrel, because he was drunk, he was easily thrown down together with the table. At that moment the wound opened, and the head, with its long queue dangling, rolled heavily onto the floor. The things he had seen before, his mother’s skirt, the woman’s bare foot, or the sesame field in flower, must again have passed dimly before his eyes at the same time. Perhaps, despite the roof overhead, he saw a deep blue sky far in the distance. Then he felt, with all his heart, ashamed once more of the life he had lived until then. But this time it was too late. Before, Japanese orderlies found him where he had lost consciousness and cared for him. Now the man he had been fighting took advantage of the moment and beat and kicked him. So, repenting and repenting again, he breathed his last.’

Engineer Yamakawa shook his shoulders with laughter.

‘You are a splendid dreamer. But if that is so, why did the man become a scoundrel after going through such an experience once before?’

‘Because, in a different sense from the one you mean, human beings cannot be trusted.’

Major Kimura lit a new cigar, and then, in a tone so bright it was almost triumphant, said with a smile:

‘We need to know, painfully and clearly, how little we can trust ourselves. In fact, only those who know this are at all trustworthy. Otherwise, just as He Xiao’er’s head fell off, there is no telling when or where the head may fall off our character as well. That is how all Chinese newspapers ought to be read.’

December 1917