A Bundle of Miscellaneous Letters

I. European Hankou

How vividly the Union Jack is reflected in this puddle—whoa! I nearly collided with a rickshaw.

II. Chinese Hankou

A gravel lane reddened by the western sun, amid lottery tickets and mahjong sets. Walking there alone, I suddenly felt the summer of Hankou beneath the brim of my pith helmet—

A basketful of heat— / the almonds blaze / in the sun.

III. Yellow Crane Tower

The Gantang Wine and Tea House, a red-brick teahouse; the Weijing Xianzhen Tower, a red-brick photographic studio as well—and nothing else worth seeing. To be sure, beyond the tiled roofs spread below, the ocher Yangtze flashes only the white of its waves. Across the great river lies Mount Dabie; on its summit stand two or three trees, and then a small, white-walled Temple of Yu…

I: And Parrot Isle?

Mr. Utsunomiya: That is it, over there to the left. Nowadays, though, it has become a bleak lumberyard.

IV. The Ancient Lute Terrace

A young singsong girl with bangs stands before the railing overlooking Moon Lake, holding up a pink fan and gazing at the water beneath the cloudy sky—the darkly gleaming water beyond sparse reeds and lotus leaves.

V. Dongting Lake

Though Dongting is called a lake, it does not always hold water. Outside summer, there is merely a single river running through a muddy plain. As if to prove the point, one black pine, thick with dead branches, rises some three feet above the water.

VI. Changsha

A town where executions take place in the street; a town where typhus and malaria rage; a town where the sound of water can be heard; a town where, even after nightfall, the heat still pants above the paving stones; a town where even the chickens seem to threaten me, raising the battle cry, “Akutagawa-saan!”…

VII. A School

I visited the Changsha First Tianxin Women’s Normal School and its affiliated higher elementary school. A young teacher wearing a scowl rare in any age showed me around. Because the female students, in their boycott of Japan, refused to use pencils and the like, they kept brushes and inkstones on their desks even while studying geometry and algebra. I also wished to see the dormitory and had the boy interpreter ask on my behalf. The teacher’s scowl deepened. “I must refuse,” he said. “Only recently five or six soldiers forced their way into the dormitory and caused a rape incident!”

VIII. The Beijing–Hankou Railway

Merely locking the door of this sleeping compartment does not feel safe. I had better lean my trunk against it too. There—now, even if we run into bandits—wait. If we do meet bandits, does that mean I need not give them a tip?

IX. Zhengzhou

Two queues hang from the branch of a great roadside willow. Both are strung with countless bluebottle flies, as though threaded with Nanjing beads. Perhaps dogs have already eaten the criminals’ heads after they rotted and fell away.

X. Luoyang

Through the old swastika-patterned lattice of the window at a Muslim inn, a lemon-colored sky can be seen—a dusk settling beneath clouds of wheat dust.

Wheat dust settles— / a child / asleep.

XI. Longmen

Upon the black, gleaming walls, how graceful are the men and women of the Tang dynasty, still reverently worshipping the Buddha!

XII. The Yellow River

To list what I consumed while the train crossed the Yellow River: two bowls of tea, six jujubes, three Qianmen cigarettes, two and a half pages of Carlyle’s The French Revolution—and then I killed eleven flies!

XIII. Beijing

A vast forest of silk trees and scholar trees encircling the Forbidden City with its yellow roof tiles—who dares call this forest a city?

XIV. Qianmen

I: Look, an airplane is flying. You are more modern than I expected, aren’t you?

Beijing: Not at all. Just take a look at this Qianmen Gate.

XV. A Prison

I visited the Second Capital Prison. One prisoner serving a life sentence was making a toy rickshaw.

XVI. The Great Wall

After seeing Juyong Pass, the Playing-the-Lute Gorge, and other sights, we climbed the Great Wall. A beggar boy followed behind us, pointing toward the boundless mountain ranges and crying, “Mongolia! Mongolia!” Yet no map was needed to reveal the falsehood of his claim. To gain a single copper coin, he exploited our romantic notions of Chinese history; in this he proved himself truly worthy of being a beggar of this ancient nation, and I could not but admire him greatly. Edelweiss and other flowers could also be seen between the walls, however, and these at least gave us the feeling that we had indeed ventured beyond the frontier.

XVII. The Stone Buddha Temple

From a flood of artistic energy, stone lotuses send up peal after peal of joy. Merely listening to their voices is—good heavens, this is a matter of life and death. Please, let me catch my breath.

XVIII. Tianjin

I: Walking through a Western-style town like this gives me a strange feeling of homesickness.

Mr. Nishimura: Do you still have only one child?

I: No, I do not mean that I long to return to Japan. I find myself wanting to go back to Beijing.

XIX. Mukden

When I saw forty or fifty Japanese people walking about the station just at sunset, I came very close to agreeing with the Yellow Peril theory.

XX. The South Manchuria Railway

A single centipede crawling among the roots of the sorghum.