Miscellaneous Writings

Takeda

Takeda was a good man. If one applies the standards of appraisal used by Romain Rolland and others, he was more than merely a good painter. Of all the painters of the past whom I should have liked to know, he is the one—Taiga alone excepted. Although they were friends, Sanyo, with all his display of cleverness, was far beneath Takeda in refinement. When Sanyo traveled to Nagasaki and was suspected of having enjoyed the pleasure quarters, he composed lines such as, “At home a wife in striped robes awaits my return; her solitary quilt has been cold as water these three years.” That is the sort of claim at which one may well moisten a finger and hold it to one’s eyebrow. But when Takeda, also writing from Nagasaki, sent home the words, “I did not climb the wine tower—

Nor buy a singing girl to repay me—

Zhou Wen’s paintings—

Water at the point of the brush—

Mountains left by the ink,” he was probably giving voice to his true feelings. Takeda was celebrated for the three perfections of poetry, calligraphy, and painting, but he was no master of waka. Whatever enlightenment he had attained in painting seems to have had no effect at all when he came to the thirty-one syllables. He was also said to understand incense and tea, but I know nothing of those arts and am unable to pass judgment. An amusing story tells how, when Takeda painted mushrooms, the man who had commissioned the picture looked dissatisfied. “See how hard I have labored,” Takeda said, and showed him a great basket filled with shiitake soaking in water. The man was finally impressed. Takeda’s earnest application is admirable in itself, yet nothing works so well as this when one wishes to impress a common fellow. Among the tales told of the pains taken by great masters, there must be more than a few invented by ill-natured virtuosi merely to make fools of the vulgar. Sanyo, in particular, seems capable of it. In Takeda, however, even a trace of such mischief is unimaginable. Again and again I return to the thought that Takeda was a good man. Reading a book called Tanomura Takeda made me like him better than before. The author is Mr. Shiro Oshima, and it is sold by Chubundo, a bookseller in Oita, Bungo Province. (July 20)

Strange Reports

A young girl from a lunch shop used to make deliveries to a certain factory in Osaka. One of the workers licked her cheek and, it is said, immediately went mad.

Somewhere on the American coast, a woman preparing to bathe in the sea had her clothes stolen and was unable to leave the changing room for almost a day. The thief was later caught and charged, it is said, with unlawful confinement achieved by taking advantage of a woman’s modesty.

A man whose foot was stepped on by an elderly woman in a streetcar became annoyed and deliberately stepped on hers. The old lady at once began a speech: “Ladies and gentlemen, I accidentally stepped on this man’s foot just now, and he has deliberately stepped on mine in return,” and so forth. The man was finally silenced and apologized. The lady must have been a disciple of Mrs. Kajiko Yajima or someone of that kind.

The world contains a surprising number of tales that sound like lies. I heard all of these from Oana Ichiyutei. (July 23)

Basho

I am reading Sarumino again. In the linked verse composed by Basho, Kyorai, and Boncho, there are many passages of mature and masterly modulation. Above all, the following leaves me with a feeling beyond words.

Warped, the lid no longer fits the half-chest.

—Boncho

Stay in the grass hut a while, then knock it down. —Basho

How glad to be alive: talk of a new anthology. —Kyorai

The way Basho answers with “Stay in the grass hut a while, then knock it down” is like Tokusan’s staff flashing through empty air: it nearly stops one’s breath. Where could he have plucked such a verse from? There is nothing to say but that it is terrifying. Before such sharpness, even Boncho can hardly have held up his head.

Speaking of Boncho, there is also this passage.

How noble the form of the blue heron sleeping at noon. —Basho

Softly, softly, the rushes must be stirring in the water. —Boncho

Boncho’s linking here still seems immature. Yet Basho’s verse is certainly one to which an ordinary man of talent could never have supplied an answer, though he turned a hundred somersaults trying.

It is only seventeen syllables, a matter of giving life or death to a verse, yet Basho’s freedom and mastery leave me awestruck. Perhaps it is because I am Japanese and cannot fully understand them, but no poem by a Western poet has ever made me feel such greatness. At most I have admired one with a “Yes, I see.” Conversely, however much we explained Basho’s greatness, whether a Westerner could understand it remains the greatest of questions. (July 11)

Dragonfly

I watched a dragonfly perched on a branch. Its four wings did not lie in one level plane; the front pair were raised by about thirty degrees. When the wind came, it used those wings to keep its balance. The branch moved, but the dragonfly did not leave; it swayed upon it with perfect ease. Looking more closely, I saw that the angle of the front wings changed considerably with the strength of the wind. It was a pale red dragonfly, and the branch was dead. I saw it on the edge of a cliff. (August 18, at Aone Hot Springs)

Children

There are many novels about childhood, but few are written exactly as a child felt things. Most have the tone of an adult looking back upon the days of childhood. In this respect, James Joyce may be said to have opened a new path.

Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man truly does seem written as a child experienced the world. Perhaps there is at times a slight air of “I humbly submit that this is how I felt,” but it is a rarity all the same. There can hardly be another person who writes prose like this. I am glad to have read it. (August 20)

The Diary of Jussenmando

In the entry for January 25 in Jussenmando’s Diary, Koyo and his disciples try making entries in a book of aspirations. Fuyo gives “One inch taller” as his wish; Shunyo, “To live to forty”; and Koyo, “To erect on the European continent a marble monument bearing one of my haiku.” Asked to name books, Shunyo chooses Journey to the West, Fuyo “dictionaries of every kind,” and Koyo an encyclopedia. Compared with his disciples, Koyo’s tastes show a distinctly Westernized tendency. Yet it is precisely in that disagreeable quality that I feel the magnitude of his capacity revealed.

Then, in the entry for the twenty-third, there is this: “Tonight I worked on chapter eight until dawn. Still not finished. Precious indeed is charcoal on a cold night.” For some reason it is a delightful passage. The “eight” means chapter eight of The Golden Demon. (August 21)

The Next Room

“Sis, what is this?”

“A fern shoot.”

“So this is what they make ‘fern-shoot coffee’ from?”

“Don’t be silly. Do be quiet. You’ll embarrass me, saying a thing like that. It’s brown-rice coffee.”

The elder sister was fourteen or fifteen, the younger twelve, I was told. Both girls carried sketchbooks when they went out drawing. On rainy days they drew each other’s faces. Their father was a refined-looking man of about fifty. He too appeared to have some skill in painting. (August 22, at Aone Hot Springs)

Youth

Mokubei, it is said, always dressed entirely in black habutae silk. Someone told me that although this sounds extravagant, it is in fact economical. But the same man added: “We young people understand perfectly well the good sense of Mokubei’s taste; nevertheless, before dressing in nothing but black habutae, we want to try many other things.” Those words seem to apply exactly to the writing of fiction. I understand, however vaguely, what sort of work deserves our gratitude; yet before advancing single-mindedly along that road, I have no small desire to try other ways as well. This is perhaps less an inclination to idle comfort than a confidence in one’s youth. To settle comfortably into that feeling may not be very good; perhaps it makes one a prodigal in art. (August 23)

Carnal Passion

To portray fully the foolish passions of men and women, one cannot avoid matters of the bedchamber. But officials forbid them. The novelist must therefore resort to the most roundabout and oblique strokes, and with difficulty depict eight or nine tenths of the truth. One reason The Plum in the Golden Vase is an unrivaled novel of passion in any age is surely that on this point its brush moved without restraint. Even without going so far, if officials were only a little less troublesome, novels several degrees more profound than those we have now might be born.

Does the West in fact possess a novel equal to The Plum in the Golden Vase? Pierre Louÿs’s Aphrodite, beside it, is no more than a child’s toy. Admittedly, as its preface declares, the latter carries the banner of hedonism, so it may be unfair to compare them without qualification. (August 23)

Bamboo

Seen from a distance, the bamboo grove on the hill behind us rises in luxuriant green before the dark cedars and cypresses. It looks exactly like the plumage of a bird. It does not suggest some mentally fabricated notion of a “secluded bamboo glade” or anything of that sort. The Chinese are said to call bamboo blown by the wind “bamboo laughter.” I watched it on a windy day, but felt nothing at all resembling laughter. I went out again one evening in deep mist; the whole grove looked dim and black, like a commonplace Southern School painting, and was uninteresting. More striking was to enter the grove and see the shed bamboo sheaths, their inner surfaces alone shining according to the fall of the light. They gave me a strange, uncanny feeling, as though slugs must be crawling everywhere. (August 25, at Aone Hot Springs)

Aristocrats

Aristocrats, or believers in aristocracy, cannot become utterly conceited because they too, like the rest of us, must go to the privy. Were it not for that, the nobility of every country might wear the faces of gods as their ancestors. On their journeys of alternate attendance, the great daimyo of the Tokugawa period, when staying at an inn, are said to have made sure that their excrement was put into barrels packed with sand so that none remained behind. Hearing this tale gave me the feeling that they too were conscious of this weakness. Put more elegantly, it would become much the same as Nietzsche’s aphorism beginning, “Why does man not think himself a god? Because…” (August 26)

Seigetsu

In Ina, Shinshu, there was a beggar and haiku poet named Seigetsu, whose free and wandering devotion was no less than Ryokan’s. Mr. Shimajima Kukoku has lately been collecting his verses: “Morning glories—the meal in no haste for the guest who stayed”; “Whispering, whispering—what are they cooking by the light of the hearthwood?”; “First autumn: careful stores of miso and soy sauce”; “How they treasure the horse’s tufted tail—the autumn wind”; “A fallen chestnut settles its seat in a hollow” (on first coming to Ina); and “The field rope slackens in the color of the winter cherries.” For a man of around the Tempo era, his verses are unexpectedly good. His death poem is said to have been, “Somewhere, the cry of a crane in the haze.” Regrettably, the details of his life are unknown. We are told only that he disliked dogs. (September 10)

Crape Myrtle

So far as I know, no leaves begin to yellow earlier than the cherry’s; the pagoda tree comes next. On the other hand, no tree finishes shedding its leaves sooner than the crape myrtle. Sparse leaves may still cling to the tips of cherry and pagoda branches while the crape myrtle is already bald. The paulownia, banana plant, and willow, whose falling leaves are so often sung in poems and haiku, all shed surprisingly late. Indeed, even when spring has filled the garden with the color of new green, the crape myrtle is slow to put out its red shoots. Setsu Nagatsuka has a poem: “In the garden made sensuous by spring rain, how foolish stands the paulownia tree”; but I think the paulownia buds earlier than the crape myrtle. A tree so fond both of sleeping late and of going early to bed is rarely found. At times I become as angry at this tree’s laziness as I would at a person’s. (September 13)

Large Works

In Mr. Kameo’s translation of Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe, there is a passage in which Goethe repeatedly warns young men that undertaking a large work brings much labor and little reward. No doubt Goethe himself had learned the lesson painfully in attempting to write Faust. Tolstoy, too, may have become unable to understand the art of Europe in the eighteen-nineties because he had immersed himself in completing War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Of course, if one possesses an art as imposing and entirely one’s own as Tolstoy’s, it matters not in the least that one cannot understand the art of others. Yet, judged simply by what he could and could not understand, there is no denying that the Tolstoy who wrote What Is Art? possessed a pitiable eye for appreciation. How much more certain is it that lesser beings like ourselves, spurred by ill-proportioned ambition, will undertake some great work beyond our measure and end by catching neither gadfly nor bee. For all that, if ever I felt the moment ripe to attempt a major work, I suspect I would suddenly grow excited and become deaf even to Goethe’s advice. (September 26)

Water Monsters

The documentation of the kappa is exhausted in Mr. Kunio Yanagita’s Collection of Tales from Mountains and Islands. Before the Restoration, kappa lived even in the river by Daikon Quay. A picture-mounter from Kanze Shinmichi was washing shoji there when something suddenly embraced him from behind and began tickling him furiously. At his wits’ end, the mounter rolled backward onto the road; a kappa dropped from his back and plunged into the river. I heard this from my mother when I was a child. Later there was a rumor of a huge scarlet carp in the depths beneath Mannen Bridge, though I do not know what became of it. An acquaintance of my father’s said that while night fishing a little upstream of Azuma Bridge, he saw an enormous soft-shelled turtle clamber onto the stern of the boat. Its neck, he said, was as thick as an iron kettle. Even Tokyo’s rivers contain many such water monsters. In the countryside all the more, perhaps kappa are still wrestling among the reeds. I happened to see Ichiyutei’s picture Kappa Drinking Alone, and have written down what it brought back to mind. (September 30)

Capacity

One clear morning after snow, Gasan of Tenryuji looked up at the sky and is said to have remarked, “Yesterday the sky sent down all that snow, and this morning the sun shines like this. Without such spirit, a man cannot accomplish a great task.” Reading it tonight, I felt unequal to him. It is infinitely pathetic that the writing of a short story of fewer than a hundred manuscript pages should carry me through every turn of joy and grief. The other day, while in the bath, I found it strange that taking a bath itself is extremely simple, whereas writing about taking one is anything but easy. At the same time, I found it unpleasant. Yet having been born among beings of inferior capacity, I suppose there is nothing for it but to endure and labor single-mindedly. (October 3)

An Error

It is all very well to translate Ars longa, vita brevis as “Art is long, life is short.” But when ordinary people use the phrase, they take it to mean that although a man dies, his work becomes manifest. That is a private interpretation peculiar to the Japanese, or perhaps to Japanese men of letters. The first aphorism of Hippocrates contains no such meaning, nor do Westerners today employ the phrase in that sense. “Art is long, life is short” means that because life is short, even repeated hardship and diligent effort cannot easily bring mastery of a single art. Explaining such a thing may be the duty of a middle-school teacher. Yet lately even some critics who assume an instructive air toward us are unaware of this confusion, which seems rather unfortunate for the literary world. If they wish to use that meaning, they need not borrow the words of a Greek sage: Sun Guoting has left the celebrated phrase “the man perishes, the work shines forth.” Let me add, while I am at it, that critics from now on must not swagger and spout random nonsense about “Landor’s and Leopardi’s Imaginary Conversations.” However grandly they strut, that sort of thing does not deserve even the name of pedantry. Instead of forever wanting to teach others, they would do better first to go and teach themselves. (October 5)

Imperishability

That human life is limited does not mean one may treat it carelessly. It is each person’s sensible choice to try to live as long as possible. Works of art, too, must perish someday. Wang Shizhen already said that the power of painting lasts five hundred years and that of calligraphy eight hundred. Yet it is equally within our discretion to try to make works that will endure as long as possible. Seen in this way, refusing to believe in the immortality of art and wishing to leave one’s work to posterity are not particularly contradictory ideas. What sort of work, then, does not grow old? I know nothing of calligraphy or painting, but in literature it is a fact that a concise style endures. Since style is not identical with the work, it cannot be said that the work will always remain fresh merely because its style is concise. Still, insofar as style affects a work’s merit, there seems almost no doubt that a style dazzling in its splendor ages surprisingly fast. Gautier cannot be read today, while Mérimée grows new each day. In our own literature, too, the short stories of Professor Ogai, compared with works published at the same time such as A Cold Smile and The Whirlpool, remain so fresh that one could almost say their proofs were corrected yesterday. Zola is said once to have lamented that in learning style he had followed Rousseau’s luxuriance rather than Voltaire’s simplicity, and to have predicted that his own novels would soon grow old. He knew himself well. Yet as I have already written, style is not the whole work. If we seek a work’s permanence beyond the question of style, we must finally arrive at its depth. “Whatever can descend into eternity must possess a body of urgent truth” (Akishu’s Treatise on Painting) seems to me a sound conclusion in literature as well. (October 6)

The Common Fashion

It seems to me that the common fashion is always characterized by clinging stubbornly to truths that were useful in an earlier age. There are naturally many varieties of commonness, depending on whether the truth is one, two, or three ages old. How long is an age? That depends on time and place and cannot be fixed uniformly in years; in Japan, perhaps one age may be put at roughly ten years. The degree to which ordinary fashion harms scholarship and art is generally in inverse proportion to the age of the truth to which it clings. The fact that advocates of bushido today impede the progress of the age no more than children’s mischief is a good example of this law. Thus in the present literary world, the rank and file of humanitarianism are naturally a greater nuisance than the rank and file of naturalism. (October 7)

Fragrant Olive

Walking through a district of Ushigome, I came upon a long black wall enclosing some residence whose owner I did not know. It was terribly old and looked ready to fall at any moment. Inside, banana plants and pines grew thickly, seeming to lean upon one another. As I walked there alone, the cool fragrance of fragrant olive drifted out. Somehow it seemed to soak even through the banana leaves and pines. A woman, also alone, came walking straight toward me. When she drew near, her face seemed familiar. Even after we passed, I tried to remember her but could not. Still, the encounter felt somehow elegant. When I reached a busy street, a few drops of rain began to fall. Suddenly I remembered where I had met the woman before, and at once the feeling became vulgar. Four or five days later, while talking with Orishiba, I heard how he had planted a fairground fragrant olive in an earthenware brazier with a hole knocked in its bottom, and how it had flowered. Again I remembered the woman from Ushigome; this time there was not the slightest vulgarity in the feeling. (October 10)

Butler’s Theory

Samuel Butler says: “When Molière read his own plays to an ignorant old woman, it was not because he held the old woman’s criticism to be correct. It was only so that, while reading aloud, he might discover the defects of the play himself. For a listener in such a case, no one serves better than an ignorant old woman.” There is indeed reason in this theory. When Bai Juyi is said to have read his poems to old women, he may have had something of the same intention. Yet I find Butler’s theory interesting not merely because it is reasonable. It is the sort of observation that could hardly be stated so decisively by anyone without Butler’s experience of creation. Ordinary scholars and critics may, of course, understand Molière’s comedies. But that alone would never enable them to utter Butler’s theory on the spot. To be familiar with such inner circumstances, one must feel Molière himself within oneself. That is what I value. Rodin’s notes are precious for the same reason in many places. If one wishes to see the face of a dead man two thousand leagues away, one must suffer for oneself. (October 19)

Tonight

Tonight my heart is calm. Sitting cross-legged before my desk and sipping broth dissolved in hot water, I feel like a citizen in an age of peace. At such a time, writing novels can seem contemptible. Would it not be far better for my health to practice haiku than to write such things? Practicing calligraphy instead of haiku might be more than sufficient. No—perhaps I should simply recognize how precious it is to sit here feeling exactly as I do. I have read neither Taoist nor Buddhist books, yet it seems that an inheritance of nothingness lies hidden at the bottom of my heart. Just as Westerners, however much they struggle, ultimately return to the Catholic faith, I may come to desire seclusion or something like it as I grow older. But while I still fall in love with women and want money as I do now, I could never manage so decisive an act. To be sure, among immortals there are wealthy men like the Old Man Who Raised Chickens—

and womanizers like Guo Pu. I could become that sort of immortal at once. But if I am to become one at all, I do not want to be a vulgar immortal. A young retiree who can read European languages is even more repugnant to me. Better to be a novelist than such a creature; it seems, at least, a little nearer the Way. “Seeking immortals, I have not gone to the emerald hills; dwelling among men is enough to cherish the Way”—is that it? Somehow tonight I have written nothing but the soliloquies of a half-educated dabbler. (October 20)

Dreams

The dreams that appear in novels seldom feel like dreams. Usually the author’s contrivance is transparent. Even the dream of the tormented horse in Crime and Punishment is, in this sense, unconvincing. We speak of a “dreamlike tale,” but to render a dream as a dream requires more scrupulous preparation than a tolerable description of reality. Events in dreams have relations of time, space, and cause utterly different from those of waking life, yet the manner of their difference can never be fitted into a pattern. Unless one transcribes a dream actually dreamed, it is almost impossible to write one that feels true. But when a dream is used as a device in fiction, the device must serve its purpose; unless one happens to dream something remarkably convenient, one cannot simply record an actual dream. For this reason, the dreams in novels, at their best, scarcely rise above Dostoevsky’s dream of the tormented horse. When a story is created in the opposite direction—from an actual dream—the feeling of dream may appear even if the dream is not presented as one, and a mysterious work is often produced. Stevenson is said to have conceived the famous tale of the Suicide Club from someone’s account of a dream. Anyone wishing to write such fiction should therefore keep a record of occasional dreams. I myself neglect even that, though Daudet, I believe, kept notes of his dreams. In our country, Mr. Naoya Shiga has a fine short piece called The Izuku River. (October 25)

Realism in Japanese Painting

There is something strange, however one thinks of it, in the Japanese painter’s fixation on realism. Pursuing realism may bring success to a certain degree, but however successful it becomes, it can never achieve the realism of Western painting. If one wants to express light, air, and mass, why not take up the palette in the first place? Moreover, striving for those effects is quite different in spirit from the Impressionists’ attempt to render outdoor light. The French stepped one pace forward; the Japanese painter is trying to step one pace sideways. Before a picture such as Mr. Gyoshu Hayami’s Dancing Girl, I always feel sorry for Japanese painting. The so-called photographic pictures once drawn by Yoshiiku were of the same kind, but because their aims were more frankly vulgar, they were not nearly so disagreeable. This may be most discourteous, yet it is hard to shake the thought that the motives from which Mr. Hayami and others make their pictures are often surprisingly ungrounded. (November 1)

Understanding

There once were people conceited enough to think that a little dissipation gave them a proper understanding of art. These days there are people who, merely by discoursing on morality and religion, look as though they had swallowed Basho and Leonardo da Vinci whole. Whatever may be true of Leonardo, even to understand Basho’s greatness in an ordinary way requires a fair amount of hardship. For us in this latter age, there may remain aspects of Basho’s greatness that cannot be grasped even after risking our lives in contemplation. In Jean-Christophe there is a passage about a philistine who thinks he understands Beethoven exactly as Christophe does. Understanding is not achieved as casually as the world supposes. Once we have devoted ourselves to an art, what matters is the determination to understand still more after we think we understand. Otherwise we fall into the state of the wild fox. I happened to find one or two reckless and careless assertions in several writers’ essays on Basho published in Electricity and Literature, and have recorded this out of vexation. (November 4)

Kettle-Lid Rests

Today, while visiting Mr. Hotsuma Katori, he showed me three rests for the lid of a tea kettle. They were like tiny iron trivets, and all three differed in shape. Since each was essentially a trivet, the differences amounted only to slight variations in the balance between the three legs and the ring. Yet the three were unmistakably different, and the longer I looked, the greater their differences became. One had a solemn feeling. Another was clever and elegant. The last was unbearable to look at. When I realized how greatly the quality could differ even among things so simple, the practice of every art seemed terrifying. I felt that the spirit of carving with one stroke and bowing once belongs not only to the carving of a Buddha. Compared with a master’s work, it would be no loss if everything we have written were burned. The more I consider it, the more I see that art alone of all things under heaven has a depth whose bottom can never be known. (November 10)

Westerners

When tea is served in a bowl, a Japanese person looks at the bowl before drinking. We see this every day, but Westerners apparently seldom do it. A phrase such as “What a splendid coffee cup” seems not to appear even in Western novels. Perhaps the Japanese are artistic to that extent; perhaps Japanese art reaches into such small details. Bernard Leach is an excellent potter, but when I look at his plates and bowls, the reverse sides seem to have no heart in them. This would be easy enough to remedy if someone merely pointed it out, yet I feel in it an unmistakable Westerner. (November 10)

Broad and Fine; Pure and Mixed

Broadness and fineness arise from differences of temperament. Whether one dislikes the broad and favors the fine may be left to each person’s taste. But broad and fine are different again from pure and mixed. Purity and mixture are not merely differences of temperament; rooted deeper in character, they are a great lifelong concern for us. Esteeming the pure and despising the mixed must pass beyond taste into judgment. Tonight I happened to take out Paradise by Kan Kikuchi. His fiction may be called broad, but from beginning to end it is unstained by any mixed vulgarity. The proof is that every word in the work, for better or worse, is full. Not every word is utterly unique, but neither are there rows of phrases meant to intimidate fools. It is a finished novel in its own fashion, unlike any other. On this point, the works of one or two eminent masters give off a far stronger stench of mixed vulgarity. As I wrote above, broadness and fineness depend on temperament. In matters of appreciation, anyone may therefore declare at will whether he likes Kikuchi’s fiction. But if, in judging its artistic value, he condemns it merely for being broad, he cannot escape the reproach of bias toward his own taste. In creation, too, Kikuchi’s fiction cannot be separated from Kikuchi’s temperament: its broadness is by no means the result of careless writing. If another author—especially one whose nature favors fineness—were rashly to imitate Kikuchi’s method, he would inevitably fall into the disease of mixed vulgarity. In temperament I myself am quite far from Kikuchi; our preferences for broadness and fineness may differ at many points. But when it comes to purity and mixture, we are not necessarily strangers. (November 12)

(1920)