Immersed in Popular Fiction

I

It was a morning in September of Tenpo 2.

At the Matsu-no-yu bathhouse in Kanda Dobomachi, customers had been crowding in since early morning, as usual. The scene Shikitei Sanba had described some years before in his comic book as “Shinto, Buddhism, love, impermanence, all jumbled together in the bathhouse of this floating world” had not changed since then. A group of women with hair tied up were singing street ballads in the bath; a Honda-style topknot was wringing out a towel in the dressing area; a broad-foreheaded man with a great ginkgo topknot was having someone wash his tattooed back; a Yubei-style servant had been washing nothing but his face for some time; a shaven-headed man sat planted before the water tank, busily pouring water over himself; and children were absorbed in playing with a bamboo pail and a ceramic goldfish. In the cramped washing area, all these assorted human beings moved vaguely through the billowing steam and the morning sunlight slanting in from the window, their wet bodies shining slickly.

Nor was the uproar ordinary. First came the sounds of people using water and moving pails. Then came voices talking and singing. Finally, from time to time, came the clack of wooden blocks from the cashier’s platform. Inside and outside the low bath entrance, everything was as noisy as a battlefield. Merchants came through the curtain. Beggars came through it. Naturally, customers were constantly going in and out. And amid that confusion...

Modestly drawn into a corner, amid all that confusion, there was an old man of a little over sixty, quietly scrubbing off his grime. He must have been past sixty. The hair at his temples had yellowed unattractively, and his eyesight also seemed somewhat poor. Yet though he was thin, his frame was solid, even rugged, and in his slack-skinned arms and legs there still remained, somewhere, an underlying strength that resisted old age. The same was true of his face: around the cheeks with their jutting jawbones and around the rather large mouth, an abundant animal vitality still flashed with an almost frightening brightness, hardly changed from his vigorous middle years.

After carefully scrubbing the upper half of his body, the old man did not pour any of the reserve hot water over himself, but began washing his lower body. Yet no matter how many times the black silk scrubbing cloth rubbed over him, scarcely any grime worth calling grime came from the dry, finely wrinkled skin. Perhaps this suddenly stirred in him a lonely autumnal feeling. Having washed only one leg, the old man abruptly stopped the hand that held the towel, as though his strength had drained away. Then he lowered his eyes to the sky outside the window, clearly reflected in the cloudy water of the pail. There, red persimmons dotted the sparse branches, with one corner of a tiled roof below them.

At that moment, the shadow of “death” fell across the old man’s heart. But that “death” contained none of the loathsome things that had once threatened him. It was, so to speak, like the sky in this pail: quiet, yet dear to him, a consciousness of peaceful extinction. If only he could cast off all worldly toil and sleep within that “death”—if only he could sleep dreamlessly, like an innocent child—what joy that would be. He was not merely tired of life. For decades, he had also been tired of the unceasing suffering of creation...

The old man raised his eyes in dejection. Around him, large numbers of naked people were still moving dizzyingly through the steam, amid lively voices and laughter. To the street ballads inside the bath entrance had been added the voices of merriyasu and yoshikono songs. Here, of course, there was not the faintest trace of the eternal thing that had just cast its shadow over his heart.

“Well now, Sensei, to think I should meet you in such a place. I never dreamed that Master Kyokutei would be taking a morning bath.”

The old man was startled by the voice suddenly addressing him. Looking around, he saw beside him a healthy-complexioned, medium-built man with a slender ginkgo topknot. The man had a pail before him, a wet towel over his shoulder, and was laughing energetically. He seemed to have just come out of the bath and been about to rinse himself.

“I am glad to see you as cheerful as ever.”

Bakin Takizawa Sakichi answered with a smile and a slight edge of irony.

II

“Not at all, sir. There is nothing especially cheerful about me. But speaking of splendid things, Sensei, Hakkenden grows stranger and more wonderful with every volume. It is splendidly done.”

As he put the towel from his shoulder into the pail, the man with the slender ginkgo topknot began speaking in a raised, declamatory tone.

“Funamushi disguises herself as a blind woman and tries to kill Kobungo. Then she is caught and tortured, only to be saved by Sosuke. That whole sequence is truly beyond words. And then, on top of that, it becomes the occasion for Sosuke and Kobungo to meet again. I am an unworthy fellow, but though I am only Omiyayama Heikichi, a dealer in small goods, when it comes to yomihon fiction I consider myself something of a connoisseur. Even I can find absolutely nothing to criticize in your Hakkenden. Truly, I am overwhelmed.”

Bakin said nothing and began washing his feet again. Naturally, he had always held an appropriate goodwill toward devoted readers of his works. But that goodwill never altered his judgment of the person before him. To a man as intelligent as he was, this was almost too obvious to need saying. Yet, strangely enough, the reverse was also almost never true: his judgment of a person scarcely affected his goodwill. Thus, depending on the case, he could feel contempt and goodwill toward the very same person at the same time. This Omiyayama Heikichi was precisely one such devoted reader.

“At any rate, to write a work of that scale cannot be any ordinary labor. In our day, Sensei, you are, in short, Japan’s Luo Guanzhong—ah, forgive me, that was terribly impertinent.”

Heikichi laughed loudly again. Perhaps startled by the sound, a small, dark-skinned, one-eyed man with a little ginkgo topknot, who had been rinsing himself nearby, turned and compared Heikichi and Bakin with an odd expression, then spat phlegm into the washing area.

“Are you still as devoted to haiku as ever?”

Bakin skillfully changed the subject. But this was not because the one-eyed man’s expression had bothered him. His eyesight, happily or unhappily, had already weakened so much that he could no longer see it clearly.

“I am most honored by your asking. Mine is nothing but a clumsy man’s foolish passion. Today a poetry gathering, tomorrow another gathering—I shamelessly poke my nose in here and there, but somehow the poems themselves never seem to come out. By the way, Sensei, how about you? Do you not particularly care for waka or haiku?”

“No, when it comes to such things I am really quite hopeless. Though I did try them for a while.”

“You must be joking.”

“No, truly. They seem not to suit my nature. Even now I am no more than a blind man peering over a fence.”

Bakin put particular emphasis on the words “not to suit my nature.” He did not believe he was incapable of composing waka or haiku. Naturally, he was confident that his understanding of those fields was not poor either. But he had long held a kind of contempt for that sort of art. Why? Because whether waka or haiku, the form was too small for him to pour his whole self into it. No matter how skillfully composed, what was expressed in one verse or one poem—whether lyric feeling or a description of scenery—had no more capacity than to fill a few lines of one of his own works. Such art, for him, was second-rate art.

III

Behind the emphasis he placed on “not to suit my nature” lay this contempt. Unfortunately, however, Omiyayama Heikichi seemed not to grasp any such meaning at all.

“Ah, so that is how it is after all. In my humble thinking, I had supposed that a great master like you could make anything freely. Well, they do say Heaven does not grant two gifts to one man.”

As Heikichi scrubbed his body with the wrung-out towel until his skin turned red, he said this in a somewhat deferential tone. But to the proud Bakin, the first source of dissatisfaction was that his humble phrase had been taken exactly at face value. On top of that, Heikichi’s deferential tone irritated him all the more. So, flinging his towel and scrubbing cloth into the washing area, he half rose and, with a bitter expression, flared up.

“Mind you, I expect I could manage as well as the poets and haiku masters of today.”

Yet as soon as he said this, he suddenly felt ashamed of his childish pride. When Heikichi had praised Hakkenden in the most extravagant terms, he had not thought himself especially pleased. If so, then now, conversely, to feel dissatisfied because he had been taken for a man unable to compose waka or haiku was plainly a contradiction. As this sudden self-reflection moved within him, he hurriedly poured the pail of hot water over his shoulder, as if to hide an inward blush.

“Of course you could. Otherwise, you could never produce such masterpieces. In that case, my eye was pretty sharp after all when I guessed that you composed both waka and haiku, Sensei. I am afraid that has turned into self-praise.”

Heikichi let out another loud laugh. The one-eyed man from before was no longer nearby. The phlegm, too, had been washed away by the water Bakin had poured over himself. But Bakin was, of course, even more embarrassed than before.

“Well, I have carelessly fallen into conversation. I think I shall go take a bath.”

Feeling an awkwardness he could not quite place, and with a kind of anger toward himself, he finally rose slowly, making this polite remark as he prepared to retreat from this good-natured devoted reader. But Heikichi seemed, if anything, to have felt his own standing as a devoted reader enlarged by Bakin’s outburst.

“Then, Sensei, one of these days I should very much like you to write a waka or haiku for me. Will you? Please don’t forget. Well then, I too shall take my leave. I know you must be busy, but if you happen to pass by, do stop in for a moment. I shall also come pay my respects again.”

Heikichi called after him as if pursuing him. Then, washing his towel once more, he watched Bakin’s back as he walked toward the low bath entrance, and began wondering in what tone he would tell his wife, when he returned home, that he had met Master Kyokutei.

IV

Inside the bath entrance it was dim as evening. The steam hung there thicker than mist. Bakin, whose eyes were poor, pushed uncertainly between the people inside, somehow felt his way to a corner of the bath, and at last sank his wrinkled body into the water.

The water was a little on the hot side. Feeling that heat soak into the tips of his nails, he took a long breath and slowly looked around the bath. There must have been seven or eight heads floating in the dimness. Around them, while they all talked or sang, the smooth surface of the water, in which human oil had dissolved, reflected the murky light coming through the bath entrance and sloshed dully back and forth. Then the sickening “bathhouse smell” struck his nose with a heavy force.

Bakin’s imagination had always possessed a romantic tendency. In the steam of this bath, without quite intending to, he imagined one scene from a novel he might write. There was a heavy awning over a boat. Outside the awning, on the sea, wind seemed to have risen with the fall of evening. The sound of waves striking the gunwale came heavily to the ear, as though oil were being shaken. Along with that sound, what fluttered the awning was probably the wingbeats of bats. One of the boatmen, as if troubled by it, quietly peered out over the gunwale. Over the mist-laden sea, a red crescent moon hung gloomily in the sky. Then...

His imagination was suddenly broken off at this point. Someone inside the same bath entrance had begun criticizing his fiction, and the words had unexpectedly entered his ears. What was more, from the voice and the manner of speaking, the man seemed to be talking loudly on purpose so that Bakin would hear him. Bakin was about to get out of the bath, but changed his mind and listened intently to the criticism.

“Master Kyokutei this, Master of Chosakudo that—however grand the names, the things Bakin writes are all warmed-over leftovers. To put it plainly, Hakkenden is nothing but a copy of Water Margin, isn’t it? Well, one might overlook that much, since there is a decent story there. After all, the original is Chinese, isn’t it? So merely having read it counts as one achievement. But when, on top of that, he serves up nothing but Kyoden reheated, it is so absurd one cannot even get angry.”

Through his clouded eyes, Bakin tried to make out the man who was speaking this abuse. The steam kept him from seeing clearly, but it seemed likely to be the small one-eyed man with the ginkgo topknot who had been nearby earlier. If so, perhaps this man had become irritated at hearing Heikichi praise Hakkenden and was deliberately lashing out at Bakin.

“To begin with, what Bakin writes is all surface trickery of the brush. There is absolutely nothing in his belly. If there is anything, it is no more than a lecture on the Four Books and Five Classics such as even a village schoolmaster might give. That is why he knows nothing at all about the present day. As proof, unless it is something from the old days, there is not a single example of his writing it. Since he cannot write Osome and Hisamatsu as Osome and Hisamatsu, there you have Matsuzome joshi aki no nanakusa instead. If I imitate the venerable Bakin’s own manner of speaking, examples of this are abundant.”

So long as one has some sense of superiority, hatred is not easily aroused even when one might wish to feel it. Though Bakin was annoyed by the other man’s remarks, he somehow could not hate him. Instead, he felt a desire to make his own contempt known. That he did not put this into action was probably because age acted as a brake.

“Compared with him, Ikku and Sanba are remarkable. In the things those men write, natural human beings appear. They are certainly not concoctions patched together with sleight of hand and half-digested learning. That is where they differ so greatly from someone like the recluse of Minokasaken.”

In Bakin’s experience, hearing ill opinions of his yomihon was not merely unpleasant; it also held no small danger. This did not mean that his courage would be disheartened by accepting such criticism. It meant that, in rejecting it, a reactionary motive might enter his later creative impulses. And if he set out from such an impure motive, he often risked creating deformed art. Authors whose only purpose was to suit the taste of the day were another matter, but any author with even a little spirit was unexpectedly prone to fall into this danger. For that reason, Bakin had made it a rule, up to this age, to avoid reading bad reviews of his yomihon as much as possible. Yet while he thought so, on the other hand he was not without the temptation to read those bad reviews. Now, in this bath, if he had ended up listening to the abuse of this small-ginkgo man, it was partly because he had yielded to that temptation.

Realizing this, he immediately reproached himself for the folly of still soaking idly in the bath. Then, letting the shrill voice of the little-ginkgo man pass over him, he stepped vigorously back out through the bath entrance. Outside, through the steam, the blue sky was visible in the window, and in that blue sky were persimmons warmly bathed in sunlight. Bakin came before the water tank and calmly rinsed himself.

“At any rate, Bakin is a fraud. Japan’s Luo Guanzhong, indeed—how very fine.”

But inside the bath, the man from before, perhaps still thinking Bakin was there, continued to unleash his fierce philippic as before. Perhaps, owing to his one eye, he had failed to see Bakin step out through the bath entrance.

V

Still, Bakin’s mood was low when he left the bathhouse. The one-eyed man’s venomous tongue had, at least within that limited range, certainly achieved the success it had anticipated. As he walked through the Edo streets under the clear autumn sky, he took each of the criticisms he had heard in the bath, submitted them to his own critical eye, and examined them minutely. He was able at once to prove that, from whatever angle they were considered, they were foolish arguments not worth a glance. Yet despite that, his once-disturbed mood showed no sign of easily settling back into its former calm.

He raised his displeased eyes and looked at the townhouses on both sides. The people of the townhouses, unconcerned with his mood, were all occupied with that day’s livelihood. Thus the persimmon-colored curtain marked “Famous Tobaccos from the Provinces,” the yellow comb-shaped sign reading “Genuine Boxwood,” the hanging lantern for “Palanquins,” the diviner’s banner with its counting rods—all these formed a meaningless row and merely passed chaotically across the bottom of his eyes.

“Why am I so troubled by criticism I despise?”

Bakin went on thinking.

“What makes me unpleasantly aware of it, first, is the fact that that one-eyed man bears malice toward me. To be the object of another person’s malice, whatever the reason, is in itself unpleasant to me, and that cannot be helped.”

Thinking this, he felt ashamed of his own weakness. In fact, just as there were few men who adopted as high-handed an attitude as he did, there were also few as sensitive as he was to the malice of others. And he had, of course, long since realized that these two results, which seemed entirely opposite in conduct, actually came from the same cause—the same nervous action.

“But there is something else that makes me uncomfortable. It is that I was placed in a position of opposition to that one-eyed man. I have never liked putting myself in such a position. That is why I do not gamble or play games of contest.”

As his mind, having analyzed this far, went one step further, an unexpected change occurred in his mood. It could be seen in the fact that his tightly compressed lips suddenly loosened at that moment.

“Finally, the fact that the person who put me in such a position was that one-eyed man is certainly also making me uncomfortable. If he had been a somewhat higher sort of opponent, I would surely have felt enough spirit of resistance to counteract this displeasure. In any case, with that one-eyed man as my opponent, even I am bound to be at a loss.”

Bakin smiled wryly and looked up at the high sky. From that sky, the clear cry of a kite fell like rain together with the sunlight. He became aware that the mood which had been weighing him down was gradually growing lighter.

“Still, whatever bad reputation that one-eyed man may spread, at most it can only make me uncomfortable. No matter how much a kite cries, it does not stop the sun in its course. My Hakkenden will surely be completed. And when it is, Japan will possess a great romance unmatched in all ages.”

Nursing his recovered confidence, he quietly turned down a narrow lane toward home.

VI

When he returned home, he saw, on the step of the dim entryway where people removed their shoes, a familiar pair of straw sandals with loose thongs. The moment Bakin saw them, the guest’s flat, featureless face came to mind. And once again he bitterly recalled the annoyance of having his time wasted.

“This morning, too, will be swallowed up.”

Thinking this, he stepped up onto the raised floor. Sugi, the maid, hurried out to greet him and, remaining with her hands on the floor, looked up at his face from below.

“Izumiya-san is waiting for you in your sitting room.”

Bakin nodded and handed the wet towel to Sugi. But somehow he did not feel like going straight to his study.

“Where is Omomo?”

“She has gone to worship at the temple.”

“And Oji with her?”

“Yes. Together with the young master.”

“And my son?”

“He has gone to Yamamoto-sama’s.”

Everyone in the household was out. For a moment he felt something like disappointment. Having no choice, he opened the fusuma of the study next to the entrance.

When he opened it, a fair-skinned man with a glossy face, somehow oddly self-possessed, was sitting formally in the middle of the room, a slender silver pipe in his mouth. In Bakin’s study there was not a single decoration worthy of the name, apart from a folding screen pasted with rubbings and a pair of hanging scrolls in the alcove showing red maples and yellow chrysanthemums. Along the walls stood more than fifty bookcases, their old paulownia wood spreading a lonely color over the room. The paper on the shoji had surely already gone through one winter since being pasted. Across its patchy white surface, mended here and there, the large shadow of a torn banana plant, lit by the autumn sun, fell diagonally in a loose, swaying shape. All the more, the visitor’s smooth, overdressed appearance seemed out of place with his surroundings.

“Well, Master, welcome home.”

As soon as the fusuma opened, the visitor said this in a sleek tone and bowed respectfully. This was Izumiya Ichibei, a bookseller who at the time had undertaken publication of Jin Ping Mei, a work whose public reputation stood second only to The Eight Dog Chronicles.

“You must have been waiting quite a while. Unusually for me, I went to the morning baths today.”

Bakin instinctively gave a slight grimace, then seated himself with his usual courtesy.

“Ah, to the morning baths. I see.”

Ichibei spoke as though greatly impressed. There are few people so ready as this man to be impressed by even the most trivial event. Or rather, there are few who so readily put on an impressed face. Bakin slowly lit his pipe and, as usual, immediately brought the conversation around to business. He particularly disliked this show of admiration from Izumiya.

“So, what brings you here today?”

“Well, sir, I have come to receive another manuscript from you.”

Ichibei gave the pipe a little twirl between his fingertips and spoke in a soft, almost womanly voice. The man had a strange character. His outward behavior and inward intention usually did not match. More than not match, they always appeared as exact opposites. Thus, when he possessed a very firm resolve, he unfailingly produced a voice that was, in inverse proportion, exceedingly gentle.

When Bakin heard that voice, he instinctively grimaced again.

“A manuscript, you say. That is impossible.”

“Ah. Is there some difficulty?”

“It is more than a difficulty. This year I have taken on a great many yomihon, and I simply cannot put my hand to a gokan as well.”

“I see. You are very busy, then.”

No sooner had he said this than Ichibei struck the ash receptacle with his pipe as though it were a signal, put on a face as if he had entirely forgotten everything said so far, and suddenly began talking about Nezumi Kozo Jirokichi.

VII

Nezumi Kozo Jirokichi was a notorious great thief who had been arrested in early May of that year and exposed at the prison gate in mid-August. Because he had broken only into daimyo mansions and was said to have given the money he stole to the poor, the strange name “righteous thief” had become, at the time, a general synonym for this burglar and was loudly celebrated everywhere.

“At any rate, Master, they say the daimyo mansions he broke into numbered seventy-six, and the money he stole came to three thousand one hundred eighty-three ryo and two bu. It is astonishing. He may have been a thief, but it is not something an ordinary man could possibly do.”

Bakin could not help having his curiosity stirred. Behind stories of this kind from Ichibei there always lurked the conceit that he was providing an author with material. Naturally, that conceit often irritated Bakin. Yet even while it irritated him, his curiosity was still stirred. Perhaps it was because, possessing an abundant share of the artist’s temperament, he was especially vulnerable to temptation on this point.

“Hmm. That is certainly remarkable. I had heard various rumors myself, but I had not imagined it went so far.”

“In short, he must be called a hero among thieves. Apparently he once served as a retainer or something of Lord Arao Tajima, which is why he knew his way around mansions so well. From what I hear from people who saw him paraded through the streets, he was a plump, amiable man. At the time, they say he wore an indigo Echigo crepe katabira, and beneath it a white silk unlined robe. Does he not seem exactly the sort who might appear in one of your writings?”

Bakin gave a halfhearted reply and took another puff. But Ichibei was certainly not a man to be discouraged by a mere halfhearted reply.

“What do you think? Might there be some way to bring this Jirokichi into Jin Ping Mei and have you write him in? Of course, I am fully aware how busy you are. But if you could somehow bend a little and agree to it.”

At this point Nezumi Kozo had suddenly circled back to the original demand for a manuscript. But Bakin, accustomed to this habitual tactic, still would not consent. Not only that, his mood became worse than before. This was because he now found it ridiculous that he himself had fallen, even briefly, into Ichibei’s scheme and allowed his curiosity to be stirred. Smoking his tobacco with distaste, he finally began to argue like this:

“First of all, even if I forced myself to write it, nothing worthwhile would come of it. Needless to say, that would affect sales, so it would hardly be pleasant for you either. In that case, I think letting me have my way in this matter would ultimately benefit both sides.”

“That may be so, but I would still ask you to make a special effort. What do you say?”

As he said this, Ichibei “stroked over” Bakin’s face with his gaze. This was Bakin’s own phrase for a certain look in Izumiya’s eyes. Then he let tobacco smoke issue from his nose in broken streams.

“I simply cannot write it. Even if I wanted to, I have no time, so there is nothing to be done.”

“That puts me in a difficult position.”

So he said, but this time he suddenly began talking about the circle of writers of the day, still holding the thin silver pipe between his pale lips.

VIII

“I hear Tanehiko is bringing out something new again. No doubt it will be graceful above all, with a touch of pathos. There is something in what that man writes that only Tanehiko could write.”

For whatever reason, Ichibei had the habit of referring to all authors by name without honorifics. Whenever Bakin heard it, he thought that in his absence he too must be spoken of as “Bakin.” What need was there to write manuscripts for a frivolous man who regarded authors as craftsmen in his own employ, even to the point of speaking of them without respect? When his irritation ran high, he had often thought this and grown angry. Today too, when he heard the name Tanehiko, he could not help making his bitter expression still more bitter. But Ichibei seemed not to notice in the least.

“And then we too are thinking of publishing Shunsui. You dislike him, Master, but for common people that sort of thing seems to suit them after all.”

“Ah, is that so?”

In Bakin’s memory there floated up, vulgarly exaggerated, the face of Shunsui, which he had seen at some point. “I am not an author. I am a hired hand who writes amorous works to show the customers according to their wishes.” Bakin had long since heard the rumor that Shunsui described himself in this way. Naturally, he despised from the bottom of his heart this author who was no author. Yet even so, hearing Ichibei now refer to him without respect, he still could not suppress his displeasure.

“At any rate, when it comes to writing amorous things, he is skillful. And famously prolific.”

As he said this, Ichibei glanced briefly at Bakin’s face, then immediately turned his eyes back to the silver pipe in his mouth. In that instant’s expression there was something dreadfully low. At least, so Bakin felt.

“They say that when he writes that sort of thing, his brush runs along so smoothly that for two or three installments it hardly leaves the paper. By the way, Master, are you also a fast writer?”

Along with displeasure, Bakin felt as if he had been threatened. To have the speed of his brush compared with that of Shunsui or Tanehiko was, for a man of his abundant pride, naturally unwelcome. Moreover, he was a slow writer. He had often felt lonely, as though this fact endorsed his own incompetence. Yet on the other hand, he had also often wished to prize it as a measure of his artistic conscience. But to leave that matter to the prying of a vulgarian was something he would never permit, whatever his own feelings might be. So, turning his eyes toward the red maples and yellow chrysanthemums in the alcove, he said as if spitting the words out:

“It depends on the time and circumstances. Sometimes I am fast, and sometimes I am slow.”

“Ah, on the time and circumstances. I see.”

Ichibei was impressed for the third time. But needless to say, this was not an admiration that ended in admiration itself. Immediately afterward, he pressed in again.

“That may be so, but about the manuscript I have mentioned several times, could you not agree to it? Shunsui, for instance...”

“Tamenaga and I are different.”

When Bakin grew angry, he had a habit of twisting his lower lip to the left. At this moment it twisted leftward with dreadful force.

“Now, I must decline. Sugi, Sugi, have you set Izumiya’s footwear straight?”

IX

After driving Izumiya Ichibei away, Bakin leaned alone against a pillar of the veranda and looked out over the narrow garden, struggling to settle the anger that still would not subside.

In the garden, bathed fully in sunlight, the banana plant with its split leaves and the nearly bare paulownia tree, together with the green of the maki and bamboo, warmly possessed a few tsubo of autumn. The rose mallow beside the washbasin nearby had already grown sparse in flowers, but the fragrant olive planted beyond the sleeve fence on the far side had not yet lost its sweet scent. Into this, the familiar cry of the kite sometimes came falling like a flute from beyond the distant blue sky.

Contrasting himself with this nature, he once again recalled the baseness of the world. The misfortune of people who live in a base world lies in being troubled by that baseness and forced themselves into base words and deeds. Just now, in fact, he had driven Izumiya Ichibei away. Driving someone away was, of course, nothing noble. But by the other man’s baseness, he himself had been pushed to the point where he too had to do that base thing. And he had done it. The fact that he had done it meant nothing other than that he had lowered himself to the same level as Ichibei. In short, he had been made to fall that much.

When he had thought this far, he found in recent memory an event of the same kind. It had happened the previous spring, with a man named Nagashima Seibei from some place called Kuchiki Kaminitta in Sagami Province, who had sent a letter saying he wished to become Bakin’s disciple. According to the letter, the man had become deaf at the age of twenty-one, and from then until the present age of twenty-four had devoted himself wholly to writing yomihon, determined to become known throughout the land through literature. Needless to say, he was an avid reader of The Eight Dog Chronicles and Records of the Island Tour. Being in such a rural place, however, hindered his training in all sorts of ways. Therefore, could Bakin not take him into his household as a dependent? Furthermore, he had a six-volume yomihon manuscript. He wanted this too to receive Bakin’s corrections and be published by a suitable bookseller. Broadly speaking, this was what he had written. The requests from the other side were, of course, all far too self-serving for Bakin. Yet the fact that the man was hard of hearing may have formed some wedge of sympathy in Bakin, who suffered over his own poor eyesight. His reply, saying that regrettably he could not comply with the request, was, for him, extremely courteous. Then the letter that came back in return contained nothing from beginning to end but violently abusive phrases.

I patiently read those long-winded, clumsy yomihon of yours, The Eight Dog Chronicles and Records of the Island Tour, yet you refuse even to look over my single six-volume yomihon. Does that not show the baseness of your character? The letter began in this vein and barely concluded with an attack saying that for a senior not to keep a junior as a dependent was an act of stinginess. Bakin was angry, so he wrote an answer at once. In it, he included a sentence saying that for his yomihon to be read by a frivolous fellow like him was the disgrace of a lifetime. Since then he had heard absolutely nothing. Was the man still, even now, drafting yomihon? Was he dreaming that someday they would be read by people all over Japan?...

In this memory, Bakin could not help feeling at once a pitying wretchedness toward Nagashima Seibei and a wretchedness toward himself. And that again led him into an inexpressible loneliness. But the sun innocently dissolved the fragrance of the fragrant olive. The banana plant and paulownia too stood silently without moving a leaf. Even the kite’s cry was as bright as before. This nature and those human beings. Until, ten minutes later, the maid Sugi came to tell him that lunch was ready, he went on leaning vaguely against the veranda pillar as if he were dreaming.

X

After finishing a lonely lunch by himself, he at last withdrew to the study and, to calm the unpleasant restlessness that had come over him for no clear reason, opened Shuihu Zhuan for the first time in a long while. The place he happened to open to was the episode in which Lin Chong, the Panther-Head, on a night of wind and snow, looks out from the Mountain God’s shrine and sees the fodder depot burning. He was able to feel his usual excitement at that dramatic scene. But when it continued to a certain point, it instead made him strangely uneasy.

The family members who had gone to worship at the temple had still not returned. The house was silent. With a gloomy face, he set Shuihu Zhuan aside before him and smoked tobacco that did not taste good. And in the smoke, a certain question that had long been in his mind took vague shape.

It was a question that always clung between himself as moralist and himself as artist. He had never doubted the “Way of the Former Kings.” His novels were, as he himself publicly declared, indeed the artistic expression of the “Way of the Former Kings.” Thus, there was no contradiction there. Yet between the value that the “Way of the Former Kings” gave to art and the value that his own feelings wished to give to art, there was an unexpectedly large gap. Consequently, while the moralist within him affirmed the former, the artist within him naturally affirmed the latter. Of course, there existed cheap compromising ideas by which one might slip through this contradiction. In fact, he had sometimes tried, before the public, to hide his ambiguous attitude toward art behind this halfhearted theory of harmony.

But even if the public could be deceived, he himself could not. While denying the value of gesaku and calling it “an instrument of encouragement and chastisement,” whenever he encountered the artistic excitement that surged constantly within him, he immediately began to feel uneasy. In truth, this was why a passage from Shuihu Zhuan had happened to have an unexpected effect on his mood.

On this point, Bakin, who was intellectually timid, silently puffed his pipe and tried to force his thoughts toward his absent family. But Shuihu Zhuan lay before him. His uneasiness centered on it and would not easily leave his mind. Just then, at an opportune moment, Kazan Watanabe Noboru came to visit for the first time in some while. From the fact that he wore hakama and haori and carried a purple furoshiki bundle under one arm, he had probably come to return books he had borrowed.

Delighted, Bakin went all the way to the entrance to welcome this close friend.

“Today I have come both to return the books I borrowed and to show you something.”

When Kazan was shown into the study, he indeed said this. Looking at him, Bakin saw that in addition to the furoshiki bundle he was carrying something wrapped in paper that seemed to be painting silk.

“If you have time, perhaps you would take a look.”

“Yes, of course. Let me see it at once.”

As if concealing a feeling resembling excitement, Kazan smiled somewhat deliberately and unrolled the painting silk from its paper. The picture showed bare, desolate trees drawn sparsely in foreground and background, and among them two men standing, clapping their hands and laughing together. Yellow leaves scattered through the grove, a disorderly flock of crows gathered in the treetops; wherever one looked on the picture’s surface, there was no place where the chill air of autumn did not stir.

When Bakin’s eyes fell upon this lightly colored painting of Kanzan and Jittoku, they gradually began to shine with a gentle moisture.

“As always, it is finely done. It reminds me of Wang Mojie. ‘Food follows the sounding chime, and nesting crows descend; walking through the empty woods, one treads upon the sound of falling leaves’--that sort of feeling.”

XI

“I finished painting this yesterday, and because I liked it, I brought it thinking I would give it to you, if it pleased you.”

Kazan said this with satisfaction, stroking the blue-shadowed chin where his beard had been shaved.

“Of course, when I say I liked it, I mean only among the things I have painted so far. No matter when, I can never paint it as I wish.”

“I am grateful. I feel embarrassed to be receiving things from you all the time.”

Still looking at the picture, Bakin murmured his thanks. For at that moment, for some reason, the thought of his own unfinished work had suddenly flashed deep in his heart. But Kazan, for his part, seemed still to be thinking about his painting.

“Whenever I look at paintings by the ancients, I always wonder how they managed to paint like that. Whether trees, stones, or people, each has become fully that tree, that stone, that person, and yet within it the feeling of the ancient who painted it lives on at ease. That alone is truly a great thing. Compared with that, I myself cannot do even as much as a child.”

“The ancients said that those who come after are to be feared.”

Bakin, watching Kazan think only about his own painting with a feeling almost like envy, made this unusually playful remark.

“Indeed, those who come after are frightening too. So we can only be caught between the ancients and those who come after, unable to move freely, pushed and pushed forward. Though I suppose this is not true only of us. It must have been true of the ancients as well, and it will be true of those who come after.”

“If one does not advance, one is immediately pushed down. In that case, it seems the essential thing is to devise a way to move forward even one step.”

“Yes, that is the most essential thing of all.”

Host and guest, moved by their own words, closed their mouths for a while. Then both listened closely to the quiet sounds of the autumn day.

“Is The Eight Dog Chronicles progressing as usual?”

Before long, Kazan opened the conversation in another direction.

“No, it is not progressing at all, and I am at a loss. In this too, it seems I cannot match the ancients.”

“If you say such things, old master, that puts the rest of us in difficulty.”

“If it is difficult, I am the one most troubled by it. But in any case, there is nothing to do but go as far as I can go with it. Thinking so, I have lately resolved to die in battle with The Eight Dog Chronicles.”

Saying this, Bakin gave a bitter smile, as though ashamed of himself.

“Even if one thinks it is merely gesaku, there are many times when things do not go so simply.”

“It is the same with my painting. Since I have begun it, I too want to go as far as I can possibly go.”

“Then we are both to die in battle?”

The two laughed aloud. But through that laughter flowed a certain loneliness that only the two of them could understand. At the same time, host and guest alike felt, from that loneliness, a kind of powerful exhilaration.

"Still, I envy painters, in a way. It is a great blessing above all that they need not fear reprimand from the authorities."

This time Bakin changed the subject abruptly.

12

"No, they need not fear that. But surely the things you write, venerable sir, give you no such anxiety either."

"Oh, they give me a great deal."

As an example of the extreme pettiness of the town elders' censorship of books, Bakin cited the fact that he had once been ordered to rewrite a passage in one of his own novels because it contained a section about officials taking bribes. Then he added this comment:

"The more these town elders raise objections, the more amusingly they show their tails, don't they? Because they themselves take bribes, they hate seeing bribery written about and make the author revise it. And because they themselves are prone to vulgar thoughts, if a book so much as mentions the feelings between men and women, they immediately declare it an obscene work. Then they go around imagining that their moral sense is superior to the author's. It is painful to watch. One might say they are like monkeys looking in a mirror and baring their teeth. They are getting angry at their own baseness."

Kazan, struck by the fervor of Bakin's comparison, could not help laughing.

"There must be a great deal of truth in that. But even if you are made to revise something, surely that is no disgrace to you. Whatever such town elders may say, if a work is truly fine, it will surely stand as such."

"Even so, they are often far too tyrannical. Yes, yes, once I wrote about sending food and clothing to a prison, and even then they cut five or six lines."

As Bakin said this, he too began chuckling along with Kazan.

"But after another fifty or hundred years, the town elders will be gone, and only the Eight Dog Chronicles will remain."

"Whether the Eight Dog Chronicles remains or not, I have a feeling that the town elders, surprisingly enough, will always be with us."

"Do you think so? I cannot quite believe that."

"Yes. Even if the town elders disappear, people like town elders have never vanished from any age. It is a great mistake to think that book burnings and burying scholars alive happened only in ancient times."

"You have been saying nothing but disheartening things lately, venerable sir."

"It is not I who am disheartened. It is the world in which those town elders flourish that is disheartening."

"Then you ought to work all the harder."

"At any rate, there seems to be nothing else to do."

"And so, like me, you will die in battle again?"

This time neither of them laughed. Not only did they not laugh; Bakin's face stiffened slightly as he looked at Kazan. There was a strange sharpness in these joking words of Kazan's.

"But first, young men should think about surviving. One can die in battle at any time."

After a pause, Bakin said this. Perhaps because he knew Kazan's political views, he had suddenly felt a kind of uneasiness. But Kazan merely smiled and did not try to answer.

13

After Kazan had gone home, Bakin, carried along by the excitement still left in him, sat down at his desk as usual to continue the manuscript of the Eight Dog Chronicles. Before writing on, it had long been his habit to reread the part he had written the day before. So today, too, he carefully and slowly reread several sheets of manuscript, their narrow lines covered all over with corrections in red.

But for some reason, what was written there did not fit his present state of mind. Between the characters lurked impure noise, and everywhere it broke the harmony of the whole. At first he explained this to himself as the result of his own nerves being overwrought.

"It is my present mood that is bad. What is written here ought to have been written as fully as it could be."

Thinking this, he read it over once more. But the discord in its tone had not changed at all. Inwardly, he began to panic with an agitation hardly to be expected of an old man.

"What about the section before this one?"

He looked over the part he had written previously. There, too, nothing but futile, crude phrases lay scattered in confusion. He read further back. Then he read the part before that.

But the more he read, the more its clumsy arrangement and disordered prose unfolded before his eyes. There were descriptions of scenery that gave no image whatever. There were exclamations that contained no emotion whatever. There were arguments that followed no logic whatever. The manuscript of several installments, which he had spent days completing, now seemed to him nothing but useless chatter. Suddenly he felt a pain as if his heart had been stabbed.

"There is nothing for it but to rewrite it from the beginning."

Crying this out in his mind, he shoved the manuscript away in irritation, propped himself on one elbow, and lay down. Yet perhaps it still troubled him, for his eyes did not leave the desk. At this desk he had written Crescent Moon, had written The Dream of Nanka, and now was writing the Eight Dog Chronicles. The Duanxi inkstone upon it, the crouching-paperweight, the bronze water dropper shaped like a toad, the celadon inkstone screen with lions and peonies in relief, the brush stand made of moso bamboo root carved with orchids: all these writing implements had long been intimate with the sufferings of his creation. Even as he looked at them, he could not suppress the hateful anxiety that his present failure cast a dark shadow over the labor of his whole life, that his own true ability might be doubtful at its very root.

"Until a little while ago, I intended to write a great work unequaled in our country. But perhaps that, too, was only one more ordinary instance of self-conceit."

This anxiety brought upon him a bleak loneliness more unbearable than anything else. Before the Japanese and Chinese geniuses he revered, he never forgot to be humble. Precisely for that reason, toward the petty writers of his own age he was arrogant, and to the end, insolent. How could he easily admit that in the end he possessed only the same abilities as they did, and further, that he was himself that detestable pig of Liaodong? Moreover, his powerful ego was too full of passion to take refuge in "enlightenment" or "resignation."

Still lying before his desk, he gazed at the failed manuscript with the eyes of a shipwrecked captain watching his mother ship sink, and quietly continued his struggle against the power of despair. If at that moment the sliding door behind him had not been noisily flung open, and if, together with a voice saying, "Grandfather, I'm home," a soft little hand had not thrown itself around his neck, he would probably have remained locked forever in this melancholy mood. But the moment his grandson Taro opened the sliding door, with the boldness and frankness only children possess, he leaped straight onto Bakin's lap.

"Grandfather, I'm home."

"Ah, you have come back early. Good boy."

With these words, joy shone over the wrinkled face of the author of the Eight Dog Chronicles as if he had become another person.

14

From the tea room came the lively sounds of his shrill-voiced wife Ohyaku and his timid-sounding daughter-in-law Omichi. Since a deep male voice joined in from time to time, it seemed that his son Sohaku had also just returned. Taro, straddling his grandfather's knees, deliberately put on a solemn face and gazed up at the ceiling, as though he were listening closely to them. His cheeks, exposed to the outside air, were red, and the area around his small nostrils moved each time he breathed.

"You know, Grandfather..."

Taro, wearing a small crested kimono of chestnut-plum color, suddenly began to speak. From his effort to think and his effort to keep from laughing, dimples appeared and vanished again and again. This naturally brought a smile to Bakin's face.

"Every day, very well..."

"Mm, every day, very well?"

"You must study hard."

Bakin finally burst out laughing. But through his laughter he immediately continued:

"And then?"

"And then... um... you mustn't lose your temper."

"Dear me. Is that all?"

"There's more."

Taro said this, tilted back his head with its sidelocks tied in the style of a little boy, and began laughing himself. Seeing him laugh with narrowed eyes, white teeth showing, and tiny dimples gathered in his cheeks, Bakin could not imagine that this child would grow up and acquire the pitiful face of ordinary people in the world. Drowning in the awareness of happiness, Bakin thought this, and the thought tickled his heart all the more.

"Is there still something else?"

"Yes. There are all sorts of things."

"What sort of things?"

"Um... Grandfather, you see. Someday you will become even greater."

"I will become greater?"

"So, you see. You must be very patient."

"I am being patient," Bakin said, involuntarily speaking in a serious voice.

"Much, much more patient."

"Who said such a thing?"

"That was..."

Taro looked up at his face with a mischievous expression. Then he laughed.

"Who was it?"

"Let me see. Since you went to worship today, you must have heard it from a priest at the temple."

"No."

Taro shook his head decisively, half lifting himself from Bakin's knees and thrusting his chin slightly forward.

"You know..."

"Yes?"

"The Kannon of Asakusa said so."

As he said this, the child, laughing happily in a voice that seemed loud enough for the whole household to hear, quickly jumped away from Bakin's side as though afraid of being caught by him. Then, clapping his little hands in delight at having neatly tricked his grandfather, he fled tumbling toward the tea room.

It was then that something solemn flashed for an instant through Bakin's heart. A happy smile rose to his lips. At the same time, before he knew it, his eyes were full of tears. Whether this joke had been invented by Taro, or whether his mother had taught it to him, was not the question. What was strange was that at this moment he had heard such words from the mouth of this grandson.

"So Kannon said that. Study. Do not lose your temper. And be more patient."

The old artist of more than sixty years nodded like a child, laughing through his tears.

15

It was that night.

Under the dim light of the round paper lamp, Bakin began to continue the manuscript of the Eight Dog Chronicles. While he was writing, no one in the household came into this study. In the quiet room, the sound of the lamp wick drinking oil, together with the voices of crickets, told vainly of the loneliness of the long autumn night.

When he first set brush to paper, something like a faint light was moving inside his head. But as his brush advanced through ten lines, twenty lines, that light gradually grew larger. Knowing from experience what it was, Bakin moved his brush with the utmost care. Divine inspiration is no different from fire. If one does not know how to raise it, then even once it has caught, it will soon go out again...

"Do not hurry. And think as deeply as you can."

As he restrained the brush that was always on the verge of running ahead, Bakin whispered this to himself again and again. But inside his head, what had earlier seemed like shattered stars was already flowing faster than a river. Moment by moment it gained strength, and whether he wished it or not, it pushed him onward.

At some point the voices of the crickets had ceased to reach his ears. Nor did the faint light of the round lamp now trouble his eyes in the least. His brush took on force of its own and began to glide over the paper in a single rush. With the attitude of one wrestling with a god, he went on writing almost desperately.

The current inside his head, just like the Milky Way racing through the sky, poured forth in torrents from somewhere. While fearing its tremendous force, he worried that his bodily strength might, by some chance, become unable to endure it. And as he gripped the brush tightly, he called out to himself again and again:

"Keep writing with all your strength. What I am writing now may be something I can write only now."

But the current, like a mist of light, did not slacken its speed in the least. Rather, amid dizzying leaps, drowning all things within it, it surged upon him in great waves. At last he became completely its captive. And, forgetting everything, he drove his brush in the direction of that current with the force of a storm.

What was reflected at that moment in his kingly eyes was neither profit and loss nor love and hate. Still less was there any mind troubled by praise or blame; that had long since been swept from his eyes and vanished. There was only a mysterious joy. Or else an ecstatic, tragic emotion. How could anyone who does not know this emotion ever savor the state of mind of one immersed in popular fiction? How could such a person understand the solemn soul of a writer of fiction? Here, surely, "life," washed clean of all its dregs, shines beautifully before the author like a newly mined ore...

X X X

Meanwhile, around the lamp in the tea room, the mother-in-law Ohyaku and the daughter-in-law Omichi sat facing each other, continuing their sewing. Taro had probably already been put to bed. A little distance away, the frail-looking Sohaku had been busy for some time rolling pills.

"I wonder if Father still isn't going to bed."

Presently Ohyaku muttered this discontentedly as she rubbed hair oil onto her needle.

"I am sure he is absorbed in his writing again."

Omichi answered without taking her eyes from her needle.

"What a troublesome man. It hardly brings in any money."

Saying this, Ohyaku looked at her son and daughter-in-law. Sohaku pretended not to hear and did not answer. Omichi too silently went on moving her needle. The crickets, here as in the study, continued to sing out the autumn without change.

(November 1917)