A Dark Night's Passing Read online

  A maid brought in a brazier and said to Kensaku, who was standing on the verandah, “Do come in and get warm.” Kensaku came in, shutting the door behind him, and sat down beside the brazier. The maid pushed the tray of tea and cookies toward him. “Is it too late to call a masseur?” he asked. “Oh no, not for a guest like you,” she said rather familiarly, and hurried out. Made uneasy by the friendliness of the maid, Kensaku began to wonder if the inn was quite respectable.

  The masseur turned out to be a talkative fellow. He went through an endless list of places Kensaku might visit: in Onomichi itself there were the temples of Saikokuji, Senkōji, Jōdoji, not to mention the one associated with the priest Motsugai, nicknamed “Fisticuff” for his martial skills; not far away was the beautiful island of Sensuito near Tomonotsu, then there was the statue of Kannon in Abuto; and on the island of Shikoku there were the hot springs of Dōgo, Kotohira Shrine in Sanuki, the castle town of Takamatsu, Yashima, Shidoji Temple of the puppet play, etc., etc. Kensaku began to think that it might not be a bad idea to take a trip for a week or so. After all, it would take that long for the rest of his things to arrive from Tokyo.

  The masseur, distracted by his own eloquence, had eased up considerably on his pressure. “Would you mind,” said Kensaku, “doing it a bit harder?” Immediately the masseur started grinding his elbow with all his might into Kensaku’s shoulder. A rice pounder on a water-wheel would have been no more merciless.

  “What school of massage do you belong to?” Kensaku was able to say.

  “I belong to the Ogata School, sir.”

  Kensaku thought of Ogata standing elegantly on the platform at Shinbashi Station, and could not help smiling at the incongruous association of his stylish friend with this shabby masseur.

  A lovely sound, like the plover’s song reproduced on the kabuki stage, reached them from the sea. Hearing this sound breaking the stillness of the night moved Kensaku deeply. It made him poignantly aware of the loneliness of his own journey; yet in that awareness there was contentment.

  “What was that sound?” he asked.

  “Oh, that was just a boat’s tackle creaking.”

  Next morning at about ten Kensaku walked out of the inn, intending to go to Senkōji, a temple in the mountains. He was told that the temple was just above the center of Onomichi, and that from there one could see the whole of the town. It would be a suitable vantage point, he thought, for picking a likely place to live.

  He crossed the railroad and came to some stone steps leading up to a temple gate. Over the gate hung an enormous paper lantern. On it were written in vigorous calligraphy the words, “the lion roars.” He walked through the grounds and came out of a gate on the other side. He followed several small, winding paths at random up the mountain. Finally he paused at one of the forks and sat down, deciding that he was lost. Then he heard a boy’s voice singing to a bugle tune, “Kill them all, shoot them down.” A boy of twelve or thirteen came rushing down, swinging a thin bamboo stick. Kensaku stopped him and asked, “Is this the right way to Senkōji?” The boy looked up the mountainside in the direction Kensaku was pointing. He thought hard for a while, then gave up. “I don’t know how to tell you. Just follow me.” Without waiting for an answer he started climbing the steep path he had just come down, his little body bent forward and his arms swinging energetically. They went up the mountain diagonally to the right. Soon a field of barley, grown two or three inches, came into view just above them to their left. Overlooking the field was a row of three houses. The end house on the left had a “for rent” sign on it. Kensaku thanked the boy, and went to have a look at the house. There was a housewife outside one of the other houses, hanging out clothes to dry. She was kind and friendly, and told him about the house for rent.

  He climbed on for another hundred yards or so, and saw another row of three houses. This time the one on the right was for rent. The view from here was better. He found an old woman who was also very helpful. How good these people are, Kensaku thought—the boy, the housewife, and now this old woman. And though he knew it would be too simple-minded to allow these few encounters to form his opinion of Onomichi, he could not help feeling already drawn to the place.

  He at last reached the stone steps that led up to Senkōji. They were narrow, and went up an extraordinarily long way. Somewhere in the middle of the climb there were a few teashops, all displaying souvenir postcards neatly framed. But their doors were closed. He reached the top of the steps, turned left, then began climbing another flight of somewhat wider stone steps. At the top was a rustic-looking teashop, draped with reed curtains. Beside it was a great pine tree, spreading its branches over the roof. He sat down on the bench in front of the shop.

  Over the island right ahead of him, he could see in the distance the snow-capped mountains of Shikoku. Scattered around for miles over the Inland Sea were innumerable islands, large and small. He had rarely seen a view of such magnitude, and he sat happily gazing at it. Against the backdrop of the quiet shores of the near island, a ship with the mark of the Osaka Steamship Company painted white on her chimney was sailing calmly into port. From time to time she would emit some steam, then a deep-throated sound—boh, boh—would reach Kensaku’s ears. A small boat, carried by the tide, passed the ship with surprising speed. A clumsy, wide-bottomed ferryboat was moving diagonally against the tide with an undaunted air. But as he watched with fascination this novel scene, he began to wonder if he would not soon tire of such obvious beauty.

  Kensaku ordered a boiled egg; and as he ate it the owner of the teashop told him that the island opposite was called Mukaijima, and the strip of sea this side of it, Tamanoura. Years ago, he said, the great rock standing in Senkōji had an enormous, luminous gem embedded in it. It gave off such light that the citizens of Onomichi needed no lanterns when going out at night. One day, a foreigner saw this gem from a ship. He came ashore and asked if he might buy the rock. The citizens, thinking that no man could possibly take such a large rock away with him, agreed. To their chagrin, the foreigner went up the rock and merely cut out the gem, and took that away with him. Ever since then, on moonless nights, the citizens of Onomichi have had to carry lanterns like anyone else. “If you go to the top of the rock,” he said to Kensaku, “you’ll find a huge hole the size of two soy sauce barrels. I’m told that the gem was a diamond or something like that.”

  Kensaku liked the story. Normally, natives weren’t quite so ready to tell legends in which their ancestors figured as idiots.

  The owner told him of an empty house near the temple, built by a retired merchant who had recently died. Kensaku walked along a narrow, damp lane covered with rotting leaves and found a small cottage standing in the shadow of a large rock. It was far too sedate, gloomy in fact, the sort of place where one might hold solemn tea ceremonies. Besides, it was badly in need of repair. He returned to the teashop and from there began climbing the very last flight of stone steps. All around him were large rocks, pine trees that looked as if they had been there for centuries, stones with epitaphs and poems carved on them. He thought of distant temples he had visited long ago, such as Yamadera in Yamagata, Nipponji on Mt. Nokogiri. Senkōji undoubtedly had a different air about it. Having been founded by the Chinese priest K’ai-shan who had come there from Nagasaki, everything about it was more Chinese—the arrangement of the rocks and the trees, the style of the gate, the belfry.

  The Jewel Rock stood near the belfry. It was about the size of a small two-storied house, and sure enough, the entire rock did resemble a stylized ball of fire. From the belfry Kensaku could see almost the entire city. Hemmed in by the mountains and the sea, it was disproportionately long and narrow. Housetops were packed together tight, and immediately below him were numerous stubby chimneys of vinegar makers’ houses. Toward the end of the town the houses thinned out, and the shore looked more attractive. He wished he could find a house there.

  He began his long descent down the stone steps firmly and unflaggingly. By the time he reached t
own, the straps on his new clogs—he had sent someone at the inn out that morning to buy him a pair—were quite loose.

  He came out of a shabby alley onto a busy street. The street was narrow, but the general appearance of it was substantial, with a surprising number of prosperous-looking merchants’ houses. The people he saw walking about seemed energetic and purposeful, not at all the sort that would let a foreigner trick them out of a giant gem.

  He noticed a peculiar smell hovering over the town. At first he was not sure what it was, but when the smell got stronger as he approached a vinegar shop, he knew. Another peculiarity of the town was the dirtiness of the alleys. Then there were the dried gourds. It seemed that every kind of merchant had them hanging outside his shop—antique dealer, grocer, watchmaker, seal engraver, confectioner, ironmonger, foreign goods importer, and, of course, dried gourd seller. When he returned to the inn, one of the maids told him that the innkeeper himself had a trunkful of them.

  He went to bed early that night. He was awakened at dawn. Accompanied by the head clerk he walked to the nearby harbor. The street looked as if it had just been swept, and the lamps were still on. It was a cold, frosty morning.

  The Inland Sea did not look quite as beautiful as he had expected. The tide was rising, and it was strange to see the water flowing rapidly like a river, making rippling waves, toward the east.

  He got off the ship at Takahama, and from there went by train to Dōgo. He spent two days there. Then he returned to Takahama, and sailed to Ujina. From Hiroshima he went to Itsukushima. If he had liked any of these places better than Onomichi, he would have stayed. But in four days he was back in Onomichi.

  The journey had been somewhat wearying, and he was ready to settle down. The rest of his luggage had not yet arrived from Tokyo, but the day after his return he arranged to rent one of that second row of houses he had seen on his way up to Senkōji. He got in touch with a mat maker and a paperer, and had them go up to the house to make new floor mats and put new paper on the door screens.

  3

  Kensaku’s new residence was the last of a row of three modest, attached houses. In the middle lived a nice old couple, and the woman agreed to cook and wash for him. In the other end house lived a lazy good-for-nothing named Yamashita, a man in his early forties. He did no work himself and depended for his daily pocket money on his wife, whom he sent out to work as a maid at an inn downtown. What money he could squeeze out of her he spent on saké.

  The view from Kensaku’s house was pleasing. Lying on the floor of the small front room he could see all kinds of interesting things. On the island opposite—Mukaijima—was a small shipyard. From early morning he could hear the sound of hammering softened by its passing over the water and the town. Halfway up the mountain to the left of the same island was a stone quarry surrounded by pine woods. The singing of the stonecutters as they worked carried over the rooftops of the town and reached Kensaku directly.

  On his first evening in the house he sat on the narrow verandah, enjoying the view. On the porch beside the roof of a merchant’s house in the distance the tiny figure of a boy faced the setting sun, shaking a stick. Flying around busily over the boy were five or six white pigeons. Their flapping wings shone pink against the red sky.

  At six the great bell of Senkōji above him began to strike slowly. With each strike one deep echo, then another would reach him from far away. Beyond Mukaijima was another island, Hyakkanjima. On this island was a lighthouse. During the day Kensaku had seen the top of it showing over a dip between the mountains of Mukaijima. Now the light came on, only to go out again in a moment. At regular, short intervals the light would appear between the mountains and then disappear. From the shipyard, lights the color of molten copper flowed over the darkening sea.

  At ten the ferryboat that sailed daily to Tadotsu returned, blowing her whistle. As she sailed slowly into port her various lights—the red and green ones on her bow, the yellow ones on deck—were reflected on the water like flickering colored chains. The town had gone quiet, and he could hear with incredible clarity the raucous voices of the seamen.

  His house was very simple—a six-mat front room, a three-mat rear room, and an earthen-floor kitchen. The mats and the paper screens were new, but the walls were full of cracks. He bought pieces of pretty printed cotton in town and with these he covered the worst ones. Over the smaller cracks he pinned satin leaves used in making artificial flowers. It was a cheaply made house, and though because of its smallness one could get it warm enough by lighting both the gas heater and the gas cooker, once they were out it became cold immediately. On cold, windy nights he would hang a double blanket over the screen doors to keep out the draft. Outside the screen doors were wooden storm doors, but even with these shut the draft would blow in with such force that the blanket stirred constantly. The floorboards under the mats were so warped that once when he carelessly put an open jar of pickled scallions down, it fell over. Also, because of the unevenness of the floorboards the mats did not fit, so that there was a bad draft blowing in from below. He crumpled up the pages of a magazine he was reading and shoved these down the gaps between the mats with a poker.

  This spartan life, so different from the life he had led in Tokyo, he rather enjoyed. At last he felt relaxed enough to start on a long-range project he had been planning. This was to be a work based on his life from childhood to the present.

  He was born while his father was abroad studying. When it was that his father returned, he could not remember, but he could remember the small, slightly decrepit house in Myōgadani where he lived while his father was away. Living with him were his grandmother, mother, elder brother and younger sister.

  One went up the narrow, creaky stairs and came to an attic-like room with a low ceiling. His grandmother was often sitting there before a loom. In the evenings she and his mother would sit under a hanging lamp, drawing thread out of silk floss. They would then lay the pieces of thread out neatly on a large bean paste strainer, which they had converted into a tray by covering the bottom with paper.

  He remembered how angry they had been when once out of curiosity he touched the threads. And he could remember, too, the deep humming sound of the spinning wheel. These fleeting memories seemed to him to be of another life.

  One day he saw a fox—he knew it was a fox only because his grandmother who was sitting with him on the verandah told him so—walk across their garden nonchalantly, giving them an occasional watchful look, and disappear through the hedge. There was that other time when he saw a monster beetle on a branch high up on a persimmon tree and thought it an enormous cicada. He also remembered having an argument with a local boy of about the same age: each had insisted that he was called “sonny” by the neighbors. The argument had taken place under a tree. Might it have been that persimmon tree?

  It was soon after his father’s return that they moved to the house in Tatsuokachō in Hongō. Once when the maid was sent out to Yamashita in Ueno to buy some bread for his father she took him with her, carrying him on her back. On their way home they had stopped by the pond to look at the baby turtles. He was holding the package with the bread in it. A pretty young housewife came by, snatched the package from his hand and walked off with it.

  When the family’s former domainal lord died, he heard his elders talking about the lord having “hidden himself.” He imagined therefore that the farewell ceremony at the lord’s mansion was some elaborate, adult version of hide-and-seek. There was a gold screen placed behind the coffin. He had surreptitiously gone behind this screen, certain that the great man was hiding somewhere there. And later, at the funeral service in Denzūin Temple, he had been quite shaken when the priest started hammering the bell. For some reason it struck Kensaku as a cruel, hateful thing to do.

  These insignificant, pointless, and fragmented memories kept on emerging from somewhere deep in his mind like bubbles that rise out of the bottom of a marsh. But there was one incident he remembered that was different from these. It happ
ened when they were still living in Myōgadani. He was in bed with his mother. Thinking that she was fast asleep, he crept under the bedding toward the lower part of her body. Suddenly his mother’s hand reached down, pinched his hand hard, then dragged him up. She said not a word, and her eyes were closed as if she were asleep. He understood enough to know that what he had just done was shameful. His shame was perhaps no less than an adult’s would have been.

  He felt shame still as he remembered the incident. He was also puzzled by the memory. What had made him do such a thing? Was it curiosity or was it some kind of urge? If it had been mere curiosity, why would he have felt such shame at the time? And if it was an urge, did it appear in everyone so early in childhood? He did not know. At any rate, one thing was clear, and that was that it was not an entirely innocent act. Yet toward that child who was at most four years old at the time, Kensaku could hardly feel moral indignation. Perhaps, he thought wretchedly, he had inherited such an inclination; perhaps even with such things, one may be cursed by the sins of one’s forefathers.

  It was with childhood reminiscences like these, then, that he began his writing. Mostly he worked during the night hours until daybreak. For about a month his work progressed at a steady pace, and both his daily life and his health seemed satisfactory. Then gradually everything began to deteriorate.

  He deliberately did not write often to Oei. Once reason was that he wanted to rid his mind of all those fantasies about her; another was that he was trying to resist his own growing sense of loneliness. He wrote fairly regularly to Nobuyuki; but out of pride he was careful to explain that he wrote to him only during those hours which in Tokyo he might have spent at home casually chatting with a friend. Oei wrote him long letters. It seemed that Nobuyuki was letting her read most of his letters to him.

  As his work faltered he began to suffer from the monotony of his life. Every day was the same. The only thing that changed was the weather. He had made a calendar out of one of his lined writing sheets and had stuck it on the wall. At the end of each day he would cross out the date on his calendar. So long as his work was progressing satisfactorily this daily routine gave him no discomfort. But with the onset of his general feeling of malaise, the act of crossing out the date began to seem too symbolic of another day truly wasted. Having come away to be alone, he was now finding his isolation unbearable.