Mandarins (28 page)

I arrived at my wife's family home and sat in a rattan chair—in the garden, next to the veranda. Inside a wire netting situated in a corner at the other end, leghorn chickens were quietly walking about. A black dog lay at my feet. Even as I painfully endeavored to resolve questions comprehensible to no one, I chatted with my wife's mother and younger brother in a strictly superficial tone of sobriety.

“Ah, coming here . . . It is so quiet!”

“Yes, as compared to T
ō
ky
ō
. . .”

“Is it sometimes noisy here too?”

“Well, after all, we still inhabit the same human world!”

My mother-in-law said this with a laugh. In fact, even this refuge from the summer heat was indisputably situated within that “human world.” I knew all too well just how many crimes and tragedies had taken place here within the last year: the physician who had attempted to subject a patient to slow poisoning; the old woman who had set fire to the house of an adopted couple; the lawyer who had sought to deprive his younger sister of her assets . . . The mere sight of their homes was for me none other than a vision of the hell that lies at the heart of human existence.

“You have a local madman, don't you?”

“Do you mean young H?” asked my mother-in-law. “He's not insane; he's merely become imbecilic.”

“
Dementia praecox
, as they say. Whenever I see him, I feel horror. I saw him recently bowing—for whatever reason—in front of the statue of Bat
ō
Kannon.

“‘Horror' you say? You need to be of stronger disposition.”

“Well, my brother-in-law is of much stronger than the likes of me.”

He was sitting up in his bed, his face unshaven, entering into the conversation with his usual sense of reserve.

“But in strength there is also weakness,” I replied.

“Well, well, whatever are we to say to
that
?”

I looked at my mother-in-law as she said this and could not help a wry smile. My brother-in-law too smiled, and continued to speak as though in a trance, gazing at the distant pine forest beyond the
hedge. (The young convalescent sometimes seemed to me to be a pure, disembodied spirit.)

“Oddly enough, it is just when we think we have cast off our mere humanity that our all too human desires become all the more intense . . .”

“A man thought virtuous may also be a man of vice.”

“No, an opposition more striking than that between good and evil . . .”

“Well then, the child found in the adult.”

“That's not it either. I cannot express the idea clearly . . . Perhaps it is like two electric poles. They are antipodes that form a whole.”

At that moment we were startled by the rumbling of an airplane. Without thinking, I glanced at the sky and saw the machine as it barely cleared the tops of the pine trees. It was an unusual mono-plane, with yellow wings. The chickens and the dog, alarmed at the sound, ran about in all directions, the dog in particular, its tail between its legs, baying and barking, before crawling beneath the veranda.

“Won't the airplane crash?”

“No . . . By the way, do you know what ‘flying sickness' is?”

Instead of responding with a verbal “no,” I shook my head, as I lit a cigarette.

“It seems,” he explained, “that those who fly such airplanes become so accustomed to breathing the air at high altitudes that gradually they find themselves unable to tolerate ordinary terrestrial air . . .”

I had put the house of my wife's mother behind me and now walked through the pine forest. Not a branch was stirring, as I went on, steadily falling into depression. Why had the airplane flown above my head rather than elsewhere? Why was only the Air Ship brand of
cigarette on sale at the hotel? Tormented by such questions, I wandered the least trodden paths.

Beyond a low dune lay the sea, covered by a gray sheet of fog. Atop the dune was the frame of a children's swing, with neither seat nor ropes. I looked at it and immediately thought of a gallows. And indeed several crows were perched on it. They stared at me, with no sign of flight. The one in the middle, its beak pointed to the sky, cawed—I am certain—four times.

I had been walking along an embankment of withered grass and sand but now turned down a narrow street lined with villas. On the right, I expected to see, despite the tall pines in front of it, a whitish, two-storied wooden structure of Occidental style. (A close friend had called it “The House of Spring.”) But when I came to where it was supposed to be, there was only a bathtub, sitting on the cement foundation.
Fire!
was my immediate thought. I walked on, averting my eyes. A man on a bicycle was coming directly toward me. He was wearing a burnt umber fowling cap and had a strangely fixed expression, his body bent over the handlebars. I sensed that the face resembled that of my elder sister's husband and so took another small side street before we came eye to eye. But there I encountered, right in the middle of the road, lying belly up, the decaying body of a mole.

In the knowledge that something was stalking me, I felt renewed anxiety with each step I took. One by one, semitransparent cogwheels were beginning to block my vision. I walked stiff-necked, fearing that my last hour might well be nigh. The cogwheels were turning ever more rapidly, even as their number was increasing. At the same time, I was seeing the intertwining branches to my right as if through finely cut glass. I felt the palpitations of my heart growing more intense. Again and again I tried to stop along the way, but even that was no easy task, as I felt myself being pushed forward . . .

Thirty minutes later I was home again, lying on my back upstairs, my eyes tightly closed, as I endeavored to endure my throbbing headache. Behind my eyelids I began to see a wing, its silver feathers enfolded like fish scales. The image was clearly printed on my retinas. I opened my eyes and looked up to the ceiling, and having ascertained that, of course, nothing of the kind could be there, I closed them again, only to find the silver wing still there in the dark. I suddenly remembered that I had seen a wing on the radiator cap of a taxi I had recently taken . . .

I thought I heard hurried footsteps coming up the stairs and then clattering back down again. I knew them to be those of my wife. Startled, I got up and went down into the semidarkness of the sitting room directly below the stairs. She was lying prostrate, taking short, shallow breaths, it seemed, her shoulders constantly shaking.

“What is it?”

“Oh, nothing, my dear.” she replied. Raising her head and giving me a forced smile, she continued. “It was really nothing at all—only that I had the feeling that you were about to die . . .”

This was the most terrifying experience of my life . . . I have no strength to go on writing. To go on living in this frame of mind would be unspeakable torment. Oh, if only someone would gently and kindly strangle me in my sleep.

Mandarins (
Mikan
)

The Japanese
mikan
(
Citrus unshui
) is a small, easy-to-peel citrus fruit. Enormous quantities of
mikan
are eaten in Japan, particularly during the winter months. Also known as the Satsuma orange or mandarin, it has been variously translated as “mandarin orange” and “tangerine”; strictly speaking, it is neither. So representative is it of Japanese daily life, at least when in season, that English-speaking residents of Japan have come to refer to T
ō
ky
ō
as the Big Mikan.

Akutagawa published this story in the May 1919 edition of
Shinch
ō
[New Tide], two months after resigning from his position as an English teacher at the Naval Engineering School in Yokosuka, four months after the opening of the Paris Peace Conference, to which the story alludes. The electrically powered trains that today travel to and from this coastal city in hilly southeastern Kanagawa Prefecture still pass through tunnels.

At the Seashore (
Umi no Hotori
)

Although the story was published in September 1925 (
Ch
Å«
ō
-k
ō
ron, The Central Review
), well after the beginning of Akutagawa's struggles with mental illness and depression, it is set in the years of the writer's happier youth, with scarcely a trace of the gloomily misanthropic musings so apparent elsewhere. Here we catch a glimpse of seemingly carefree, relatively privileged,
but hardly affluent, youths, balancing literary ambition with awareness of economic realities, boastfully, aggressively “male” toward one another, awkward in the presence of females, who, quite literally, swim away from them, apparently quite immune to the stinging jellyfish.

The setting of the story is Chiba Prefecture, occupying the entire B
ō
s
ō
Peninsula across the bay from T
ō
ky
ō
-Yokohama. In American terms, Chiba might be seen as standing in relation to T
ō
ky
ō
as New Jersey does to New York City. Today, the communities that lie immediately to the east of the Edo River, including Chiba City, are culturally almost entirely indistinguishable from the capital. Yet journeying farther east, north, or south brings one at least to a landscape, if not to a way of life, that is no longer metropolitan. Needless to say, this would have been all the more so in Akutagawa's day.

Until the end of the Edo period, the B
ō
s
ō
Peninsula was divided into three provinces: roughly, Shim
ō
sa to the north, Awa to the south, and Kazusa between them. It is the last of these that appears in Akutagawa's autobiographical story: In the late summer of 1916, he and his friend Kume Masao (1891–1952), himself a novelist-to-be, lodged in Ichinomiya, on the eastern coast of Kazusa. In his description of the attraction felt by “M” (Kume) for the girl in the scarlet bathing suit, Akutagawa may well have been thinking of his friend's unrequited love for the daughter of Natsume S
ō
seki, their common mentor, who was to die in December of that same year. (The cigarette description at the beginning of the story appears to echo a passage in S
ō
seki's last—and unfinished—novel,
Meian
, tr.
Light and Darkness
). It was also in their seaside cottage that Akutagawa wrote his first love letter to his future wife, Tsukamoto Fumi.

1
The Sino-Japanese term in the original (
enzen
) suggests the beguiling smile of a woman.

2
‘Sensual face'; in Japanese universities, German was the second most commonly studied foreign language after English.

3
A better-known cicada (
semi
) hs come to be associated in Japanese culture with the summer, while the evening cicada (
higurashi
) remains a symbol of early autumn. The literal meaning is “day-darkening.”

An Evening Conversation (
Issekiwa
)

Though the geisha is a perennially—and perhaps excessively—popular topic in Occidental descriptions and discussions of Japan, “An Evening Conversation,” which appeared in the July 1922 edition of
Sandee
[Sunday]
Mainichi
, is less about the female entertainer Koen, ‘Little Penny,' (and even less about the plight of such women in Akutagawa's time) than about what Dr. Wada calls
ts
Å«
jin
(‘sophisticates, men of the world'). The story follows in a long Japanese literary tradition of rambling conversations among males concerning life, love, and art. In a famous passage in the
The Tale of Genji
, four young aristocrats while away a rainy summer's night in the Imperial Palace, waxing philosophical as they comment on their various amorous adventures. Like Wakatsuki, the consummate
ts
Å«
jin
, they put great store on the proper artistic training of their ideal lovers.

With its flashes of humor and cheerful rather than melancholic irony, the story may seem somewhat atypical of Akutagawa, and indeed it has been suggested that it was intended as a parody of
Ame-sh
ō
sh
ō
(1922, tr.
Quiet Rain
, 1964) by Nagai Kaf
Å«
(1879–1959), whose work lovingly focuses on the demimonde.

Wakatsuki may be seen as embodying social and cultural contradictions very much on the mind of the author. On the one hand, he is the sort of “modern man” who wears a jumper. (In the original, Akutagawa adds an exotic air by rendering the word
chanpa
with the same characters as those for the ancient Southeast Asian kingdom. Though
janp
ā
, ‘jumper,' is a familiar word today, the garment would have been unknown to the great majority of Dr. Wada's contemporaries.) On the other hand, Watasuki lives in an artistic milieu that could just as well have been that of the Edo period. Mentioned in this story are Ike no Taiga (1723–76), an Edo-period artist and calligrapher, and Kat
ō
Chikage (1735–1808), an Edo-period scholar and poet. Mushanok
ō
ji Saneatsu (1885–1976) was a writer and artist who at the time Akutagawa wrote the story had recently founded a utopian village à la Tolstoy.

1
“Seigai's Collected Poems”;
Seigai
literally means “blue lid.”