Mandarins (16 page)
Authors: Ryunosuke Akutagawa
This story is an adaptation of Chapter Two in the second volume. In all probability, it is the faithful rendition of events that took place at a church in Nagasaki, but of the great fire it describes there is no other record, not even in the
Chronicles of Port Nagasaki
. Thus, it is quite impossible to assign a precise date.
The exigencies of publication have obliged me to embellish the text here and there. I trust that in so doing I have not marred the simple elegance of the original.
Summoning J
Å
s
Å
and Kyorai, he said to them: “Last night, as I lay sleepless, I suddenly thought of this and had Donsh
Å«
write it down. Each one of you should read it.”
It was the seventh year of the Genroku era, on the twelfth day of the tenth month. The merchants of
Å
saka had awakened to the fleeting hues of a rosy dawn, fretfully seeing in this a sign, as they gazed far beyond the tiled roofs of the city, that yesterday's rain would return. Happily, however, not even the tops of the leafless willow trees were obscured by rain, so that now it was a pale early winter's day, cloudy but calm. Even the water of the river, flowing absentmindedly
between the rows of houses, was somehow lusterless, and the discarded leek leaves floating on its surface seemedâor was this merely an impression?âto be a tepid green. The passersby along its banks, some hooded, others shod in split-toed leather socks, likewise appeared, without exception, to be quite lost to the world, oblivious to the bitter wind that blew. The color of the curtains hanging outside of the shops, the carriages going to and fro, the distant sound of a
shamisen
playing for a puppet theaterâall conspired to guard the pallor and tranquillity of this wintry afternoon, not so much as disturbing the urban dust on the decorative knobs of the bridge posts.
It was there, at this same time, in the rear annex of Hanaya Nizaemon's residence in Mid
Å
mae-Minami-ky
Å«
tar
Å
-machi, that the revered
haikai
master Matsuo T
Å
sei of the Banana Plant Hermitage, then in his fifty-first year, was quietly drawing his last breaths, “like the slowly fading warmth of buried embers.” Tending to him were disciples from the four corners of the land. As for the time, the Hour of the Monkey
2
may have half elapsed.
The sliding doors in the middle had been removed to form a single immense room; from a stick of burning incense placed at the bedside rose a wisp of smoke, casting a thin, bone-chilling shadow on the bright, new paper of the door, beyond which lay the veranda, the garden, and the all-embracing winter. Bash
Å
lay serenely with his head toward the door. Prominent among those around him was his physician, Mokusetsu, frowning as he held a hand under the bedclothes to check his patient's sluggish pulse. Sitting hunched behind him was the unmistakable figure of the master's old servant Jir
Å
bei, who had come with him from Iga. For some time he had been reciting in a low, unceasing voice the holy invocation of the Amida Buddha.
Next to Mokusetsu sat another whom all would recognize: Shinshi Kikaku, massive and obese, his breast generously inflating his square-sleeved
pongee half coat. He was intensely observing their master's condition, as was the dignified Kyorai, wearing a finely patterned, deep-brown, square-shouldered garment. Sitting quietly upright behind Kikaku was J
Å
s
Å
; the bodhi prayer beads dangling from his wrist conveyed the air of a priest. The place beside him was occupied by Otsush
Å«
, whose constant sniffling was no doubt a sign of the unendurable grief that had seized him. Glaring at this spectacle, his cantankerous chin jutting out, was a diminutive monk, arranging and rearranging the sleeves of his old clothes. This was Inenb
Å
, who sat facing Mokusetsu. To his side was the dark-complexioned Shik
Å
, an air of obstinacy about him. The others were apprentices, most maintaining so strict a silence that they scarcely seemed to be breathing. They sat at all sides of his bed, lamenting unceasingly the cruelty of death in separating them from their master. Among them there was one who had thrown himself prostrate into a corner, his body flattened against the straw mats. This was probably Seish
Å«
, who was wailing uncontrollably, though the sound was swallowed up in the frigid silence of the room and did not distract from the faint scent of incense that rose from the bedside of the invalid.
A few moments before, in a voice rendered uncertain by phlegm, Bash
Å
had expressed his last wishes and then appeared to fall into a comatose state, his eyes half-open. Only the cheekbones of his terribly emaciated face, marked by slight traces of smallpox, stood out; his lips, swallowed up in wrinkles, were drained of all color. Most pitiful of all was the expression in his eyes, in which floated a vague light, as though they were vainly searching for a distant place far beyond the roofâin cold, infinite space.
Ill on a journey
,
Wandering in fevered dreams
O'er a withered moor.
Perhaps drifting dreamlike in that moment of delirium, as in his death verse of several days before, was the vision of a vast desolate field in a moonless twilight. At length Mokusetsu turned toward Jir
Å
bei sitting behind him and murmured:
“Water . . .”
The old servant had already prepared a bowl and a small plumed stick. These he timidly pushed toward his master; then, as though the thought had suddenly occurred to him, he began to move his mouth rapidly in a single-minded recitation of the mantra: “Namu Amida Butsu.” Deeply ingrained in the simple soul of Jir
Å
bei, a man reared in the mountains, was the belief that to be reborn in the Pure Land, whether Bash
Å
or any other, one must cling to the mercy of Amit
Ä
bha.
At the very moment that he called for water, Mokusetsu found himself wondering anxiously, as was his wont, whether he had done all that he could as a physician. Bolstering his courage, he turned to Kikaku beside him and gave a wordless nod. All those gathered around Bash
Å
's bed were immediately seized by the tense premonition that the moment of death was at hand. It is also undeniable that mixed with this taut emotion was a fleeting sense of relief, indeed, something akin to serenity in the thought that the inevitable moment had now arrived.
It was, however, so subtle a sentiment that none was conscious of it. Not even Kikaku, the most realistic of them all, could help shuddering when he happened to catch the eyes of Mokusetsu and see in them a fleeting hint of that same thought. He hastily turned away and took up the plumed stick with an air of unconcern and said to Kyorai beside him: “Allow me to be the first.”
He dipped the plume into the water, edged forward on his thick knees, and glanced surreptitiously at the face of the dying master.
Previously he had, to be sure, imagined with what sadness he would one day bid farewell to him, but now that the moment had arrived and he was making the last offering of water,
3
his actual emotions quite betrayed his somewhat theatrical expectations: they were of cold and cloudless indifference. Moreover, to his surprise, the eerie appearance of the moribund Bash
Å
, who quite literally had wasted away until he was no more than skin-covered bones, filled him with such violent revulsion that he nearly turned his face away. Indeed, “violent” is hardly a sufficient expression. It was a most unbearable repugnance, quite invisible to the eye but so strong as to produce in him a physiological reaction, as though from a vile poison. Had this happenstance encounter with the sick body of the master caused him to give vent to his horror of all that is ugly? Or did this emblem of Death's reality emanate as an ominous threat from Nature, upon which he, a hedonistic proponent of Life, was wont above all else to pronounce his curse? . . . Whichever it may have been, Kikaku, with no more than the slightest feeling of sadness, had no sooner moistened the thin, purplish lips with the brush, the face of the dying man filling him with inexpressible loathing, than he grimaced and drew away. In that instant, he felt a vague twinge of conscience, but so intense was his sense of disgust that it appeared to preclude any such moral considerations.
Kikaku was followed by Kyorai, who since Mokusetsu's signal appeared to have lost his composure. True to his reputation as a consistently modest man, he nodded slightly to all assembled as he slid his way to Bash
Å
's side, but as soon as he saw the disease-ravaged face of the old poet stretched out before him, he felt despite himself a strange mixture of satisfaction and remorse. These emotions, as inextricably linked as darkness and light, had indeed been troubling the mind of the timid man over the course of the last four or five
days. Learning of Bash
Å
's serious illness, Kyorai had immediately set out by ship from Fushimi and, having rapped on Hanaya Nizaemon's door in the dead of night, watched over his master day in and day out. Moreover, by prevailing upon Shid
Å
to arrange for an assistant, sending someone to Sumiyoshi Shrine to pray for their ailing master, and consulting with Hanaya for the purchase of various personal effects, he had, more than anyone, endeavored zealously and relentlessly to provide whatever was required. Needless to say, he had done all of this quite on his own, never intending to impose a debt of gratitude on anyone.
The intense awareness of having immersed himself in the care of his master had naturally planted within him the seeds of enormous satisfaction. Hardly knowing his own mind in this, he felt rather untroubled in allowing the emotion to warm his carefree heart as he went about his daily tasks.
Had this been otherwise, he might well have conducted himself differently with Shik
Å
, as one evening they kept their vigil under the light of an oil lamp. Rather than holding forth on the subject of filial piety and dwelling endlessly on his desire to serve Bash
Å
as a son would a father, he would have conversed of mundane matters. Though basked in such complacency, he had caught in the spiteful face of Shik
Å
the flicker of a sarcastic smile and now felt his tranquil state of mind disturbed. The cause was the dismal realization, as brought home to him by his own self-critical eye, of a hitherto unconscious sense of self-approval. Even as he nursed his master, so gravely ill that there was no knowing what the next day would bring, he was far from anxious or concerned for him; rather he was vainly and smugly observing the pains that he was taking on his behalf. For a man of such honesty, such a revelation would surely have aroused in him terrible pangs of conscience.
Since then, in whatever he sought to undertake, he had naturally felt constricted, trapped between the conflicting emotions of pride
and contrition. Of the former, he became all the more aware whenever he glimpsed, if only by chance, the hint of a smirk in Shik
Å
's eyes, a frequent and ever more painful reminder of his lowliness.
Thus the days had passed, and now here he was at the master's bedside, taking his turn to offer him these last drops of water. That this man, so morally upright and, at the same time, so strangely over-wrought, should have lost complete control in the face of such a contradiction was a cause for pity but hardly surprise. As he grasped the feathered stick and with its wetted white point caressed the lips of Bash
Å
, his body oddly stiffened, and his hand trembled unceasingly with the abnormal agitation that had seized him. Fortunately, it was just then that his eyelashes were flooded with pearl-like tears, so that all of Bash
Å
's disciples gathered there, even including the caustic Shik
Å
, could no doubt grasp that his outward appearance reflected a profound sadness.
The shoulders of his kimono rising again, Kyorai now timidly resumed his place, and the plumed stick passed to the hand of J
Å
s
Å
, who sat directly behind him. This ever-faithful disciple murmured a chant with respectfully lowered eyes as he dampened the lips of the master, his solemn demeanor doubtlessly noticed by all. But now amidst the solemnity there was heard from a corner of the room an eerie peel of laughterâor at least so it seemed. It could well have been taken to be the sound of a chortle coming from the intestinal depths and, though held back by the throat and lips, issuing in bursts from the nostrils under the irrepressible pressure of a droll event or comment. Needless to say, from that assembly came no such sound. It was merely that Seish
Å«
, his eyes already dim with tears, was at last unable, despite heroic efforts, to hold back a great cry of lament; it gushed forth as though his very heart had broken. It was, of course, the expression of sorrow at its most extreme. Among the disciples there must have been many who remembered their master's celebrated verse:
Shake, O grave mound, shake
,
For the sound of my wailing
Is the autumn wind.
4
Though he too was choked with dark grief, Otsush
Å«
could not but feel unease at what seemed amidst it all to be an excessive display or, at the very least, to put it more cautiously, a certain lack of self-restraint. Yet such may well have been no more than a purely rational judgment, for now, whatever his reason might say, his heart was suddenly moved by Seish
Å«
's lamentation, and his eyes were filled with tears. His discomfort at the other's outburstâand, in turn, shame at his ownâremained unchanged. But still he gave way to the full flood of emotion. His hands resting on his knees, he sobbed in spite of himself. In this, he was not alone: the very air of that hitherto cold and grimly silent room quivered, as in near unison even those disciples who had sat demurely at the foot of Bash
Å
's bed broke out in fitful sniffling.