Otogizoshi: The Fairy Tale Book of Dazai Osamu (Translated) (3 page)

Someone once explained to me a lame-brained theory to the effect that since the Chinese character “wizard” consists of the elements “person” and “mountain,” anyone who lives in a remote mountainous area deserves to be called a wizard. If we stretch a point and accept this hypothesis, then perhaps these hermit Oni of Mount Tsurugi, however deficient they might be in intellect, are worthy of being called wizards as well. In any case, such a term seems a good deal more appropriate than “ogres” for this particular group of scarlet giants drinking mindlessly in the moonlight.

I have described them as simpletons, and now they are justifying that description by celebrating in ways that display an appalling lack of artistic talent or sensibility—screeching and howling meaninglessly, slapping their knees and roaring with laughter, or rising to their feet and leaping and spinning around and around. One of them even curls into a ball and rolls about, bouncing back and forth from one edge of the circle to the other. Surely such exhibitions constitute proof that phrases like “Ogre-like Genius” and “Oni of the Literary World” make no sense whatsoever. One simply cannot credit the notion that these talentless goofballs are somehow divinely inspired.

Ojii-san too can only shake his head at the pathetic level of Oni dancing skills.

“That is some very bad dancing indeed! Mind if I teach you a few moves?”

Ojii-san loved to dance.

He couldn’t help himself.

He ran into the circle and started dancing.

His wen bounced up and down.

It was fun to watch, and funny too!

Ojii-san is full of liquid courage. And because he also feels a certain bond with these Oni, he’s not the least bit afraid as he springs into the center of the circle and begins performing the traditional Awa festival dance and singing in a fine, clear voice:

Young ones wear Shimada hairdos,

old ones wear their wigs!

Who can see those red, red ribbons

and not lose his mind?

Married ladies, don your hats,

come along and dance, dance!

The Oni are absolutely delighted. They make a cacophony of strange noises—
Kya, kya
!
Keta
,
keta
!—and laugh till tears roll down their cheeks and drool drips from their chins. Encouraged by their reaction, Ojii-san tries another verse.

Once we got beyond the valley

all we saw was rocks!

Once we got past Sasa Mountain,

only bamboo grass, oh!

Really belting out the final lines, he finishes his comical, light-footed dance with a flourish.

The Oni were overjoyed.

“He must dance for us again,

at the next moonlight bash!”

“Let’s keep something valuable of his,

to make sure he comes back!”

So says one of them, and they all put their heads together for a grunt-filled discussion. They seem to come, in their stupidity, to the conclusion that Ojii-san’s bright, shiny wen is a rare treasure, and they decide that if they keep it, he’s sure to return. They’re ignorant, yes, but after living deep in the mountain forest for so long, perhaps they have indeed learned some of the wizardly arts: they pluck the wen clean from Ojii-san’s cheek, leaving not so much as a scar, or any other trace.

Ojii-san is stunned.

“Wait! You can’t take that! It’s my grandchild!” he cries, but the only response is a triumphant cheer.

Morning came.

Dew glistened on the mountain path.

Ojii-san walked homeward,

rubbing his smooth, flat cheek.

Ojii-san’s wen has been his only confidant, and he’s conscious of a certain loneliness without it. But the early morning breeze doesn’t feel so bad tickling his suddenly unencumbered cheek.
Guess I came out more or less even. Something lost, something gained. What’s on the plus side here? Well, I danced and sang my heart out for the first time in ages
.... Such are his generally optimistic thoughts as he makes his way home. Along the path he bumps into his son, the Saint, who’s just heading out to the fields.

“
Ohayo gozarimasu
.” The Saint removes the kerchief that covers his mouth to solemnly intone his somewhat countrified morning greeting.

“Well, well,” is all Ojii-san manages to say. He’s thoroughly flustered, and the two of them part ways with no further exchanges. Seeing that his father’s wen has disappeared overnight, the Saint is inwardly somewhat puzzled, but since he believes that to offer any manner of critique of one’s own parent’s features is to stray from the true path, he pretends not to notice.

When Ojii-san reaches home, his wife calmly and rotely welcomes him back, without even touching upon the question of where he’s been all night. “The miso soup is cold,” she mutters under her breath as she sets the table for his breakfast.

“That’s all right. I’ll eat it cold. No need to warm it up.” Ojii-san shrinks guiltily into himself as he sits down. He’s dying to tell his wife about all the marvelous things that happened last night, but in the stern and austere atmosphere of her presence he finds the words sticking in his throat. He eats with head bowed, feeling perfectly wretched.

“It looks like your wen has dried up,” she says, in her matter-of-fact way.

“Mm.” Ojii-san has lost the will to speak.

“It must have broken open,” she says indifferently. “Water came out, I suppose?”

“Mm.”

“It’ll probably fill up again,” she says.

“I guess.”

In the end, Ojii-san’s wen is not a matter of much concern to his family. There lives in the same neighborhood, however, another old man with a similarly large and bothersome wen. This old man’s wen is on his left cheek, and he considers it an unspeakable nuisance and firmly believes that it has held him back in life. He looks in the mirror several times each day and bitterly thinks of all the laughter and scorn he has had to endure since youth, just because of this wen. He once grew a beard in an attempt at camouflage, but, sadly, the red dome of the protuberance peeked out from his new white whiskers like the sun rising amidst the foamy waves of the sea, creating an even more spectacular prospect.

Let us note, however, that aside from the wen there is nothing repellent or questionable about this old man’s appearance or bearing. He is powerfully built, with a prominent nose and piercing eyes. He speaks and comports himself in a grave and dignified manner and always gives the impression of being sensible and discriminating. He dresses meticulously and is said to be well educated and to possess a fortune far beyond anything the drunken Ojii-san, for example, could ever dream of; and everyone in the neighborhood holds him in the highest regard, referring to him as “Sir” or even “Sensei.”

In short, the old gentleman is blessed in many ways, but that large, jiggly wen on his left cheek makes it impossible for him to enjoy his good fortune. Because of the wen, in fact, he suffers from a chronic melancholia. His wife is surprisingly young—just thirty-six. She is not especially pretty but fair-skinned and plump, and she’s always laughing in a cheerful if somewhat crass way. They have a daughter of twelve or thirteen, a lovely but rather impertinent child. The mother and daughter are very close and forever giggling together, so that in spite of the husband’s perpetual scowl, the household impresses one as being full of sweetness and light.

“Mother, why is Father’s wen so red?” The impertinent daughter expresses herself frankly and freely, as always. “It looks like the head of an octopus.”

“Ho, ho, ho, ho!” Far from scolding her daughter, the mother just laughs. “It does! That, or a polished coconut shell.”

“Shut up!” the old gentleman shouts. He leaps to his feet, glaring at his wife and child, then retreats to a dimly lit chamber in the rear of the house, where he peers into the mirror.

“Damn this thing,” he mutters.

He’s begun to consider slicing the wen off with a knife—so what if it kills him?—when he catches wind of the news that the old drunk from down the street has been mysteriously relieved of the same affliction. That evening he slips out to visit the drunken Ojii-san’s thatched hut, where he hears the whole story of that mysterious moonlight drinking-party.

“This is wonderful news!” he said.

“I’ll have them take
my
wen too!”

The old gentleman is thoroughly braced. Fortunately, there’s a moon tonight as well. He sets out with a glint in his eye and his lips tightly pursed in an inverted V, like a samurai scurrying to the front.
Tonight I shall demonstrate for those foul ogres a dance that will leave them gasping in stunned admiration. And if by any chance they aren’t stunned, I shall lay them all low with this iron-ribbed fan! What are they, after all, but drunken, dimwitted Oni?

Such are his ardor and enthusiasm as he makes his way deep into the mountain forest with shoulders squared, clutching his fan in his right hand, that it’s difficult to tell whether he wants to dance for the ogres or exterminate them. When an artist is pumped up with the intention of creating a masterpiece, however, the work generally comes out poorly, and this is to be the case with the old gentleman’s performance. He’s so frightfully inflated that it’s destined to be an utter disaster. He steps solemnly and reverently into the circle of wine-guzzling Oni and clears his throat.

“Inexperienced though I may be at this sort of thing...” Saying only this much to introduce his art, he flips open his iron-ribbed fan with a flourish and strikes a pose, glaring unflinchingly up at the moon. After several long moments of this, he lightly taps the ground with one foot and slowly begins to moan his song:

I am a monk, passing the summer

at Naruto in Awa....

With that, he turns ever so slowly, then once again freezes in position, glaring up at the moon.

The Oni were puzzled and frightened.

One by one they jumped up and fled

back into the forest.

“Wait a moment!” the old gentleman shrieks, and chases after them. “You can’t leave me now!”

“Run! Run! It’s Shoki, Queller of Demons!”

“No, no! That’s not who I am!” The old gentleman finally catches up to and prostrates himself before one of the Oni, clinging to its leg. “Please, I beg of you! My wen!”

“What? The wen?” The ogre, confused by all the excitement, misunderstands him. “That’s a treasure we were holding for the other old man, but—all right, you can have it. But no more dancing like that, please! You ruined a perfectly good drunk, and now we’ve got to find a new spot and start all over. Let go of me! Hey, somebody give this crazy old man that wen from the other night! He says he wants it!”

The Oni attached the other wen

to his right cheek.

Now the old man had two wens,

one dangling from each side of his face.

How heavy they looked as he

trudged back to the village!

What a sad ending. You have to feel sorry for the second old man. Most of our children’s stories end with the perpetrators of evil deeds getting what’s coming to them, but this old gentleman did nothing wrong. He tried to perform a dance that, owing to a case of nerves, turned out rather disturbingly weird, but that’s the extent of his crime. Nor was anyone in his family particularly evil. And the same can be said for the sake-loving Ojii-san and his family, and for the Oni of Mount Tsurugi as well. None of them did anything wrong. And yet, although not a single instance of wrongdoing occurs in the story, people end up unhappy.

It’s difficult, therefore, to extract from this tale of the stolen wen a moral lesson for daily life. But were an indignant reader to demand to know why, in that case, I even bothered to write the damn thing, I would have no choice but to reply as follows: It’s a tragicomedy of character. At issue here is an undercurrent that winds through the very heart of human existence.

Urashima-san

Apparently a man named Urashima Taro actually lived once, long ago, in a place called Mizunoe, on the Tango Peninsula in what is now northern Kyoto Prefecture. They tell me you can still find a shrine dedicated to Taro there, in a poor little village on the coast. I’ve never visited the place myself, although I understand it’s about as desolate a stretch of beach as you’re likely to find.

At any rate, that’s where our Urashima Taro resides. He doesn’t live alone, of course, but with his mother and father. Also a younger brother and sister. Not to mention a large number of servants. He is, you see, the eldest son of an old and highly respected family. Now, eldest sons of respected families have had, from ancient times to our own, a certain characteristic in common: namely, a sense of style. Some might describe this stylishness favorably, as refinement, and others less favorably, as prodigality. But in Taro’s case the prodigality, if it can be so called, was of a sort entirely distinct from that associated with wine and women and what have you. Among second and third sons one often finds that variety of prodigal who overindulges in liquor and pursues women of lowly birth, muddying his own family’s name in the process, but the number one son is generally quite innocent of such abominable behavior. Because he is responsible for the wealth and property accumulated by his ancestors, the first-born male comes naturally to acquire a certain steadfast stodginess and to conduct himself in an impeccably proper and genteel manner. Rather than the intense floozies-and-booze version favored by his younger brothers, therefore, the eldest son’s prodigality is more of a sideline, a series of frivolous diversions. All he asks of these diversions, furthermore, is that they cement his reputation for possessing the taste and gentility that befit his station in life.