To the Spring Equinox and Beyond (2 page)

Morimoto proceeded still further with his odd tales. What might almost be called a mystery emerged in full detail from those lips under the drooping moustache. He had once visited Yabakei Valley and Rakanji Temple there. It was already dark when he had come down from the temple along a road lined with huge cedar trees.

Suddenly a woman went by—a woman dressed in a long-sleeved kimono and a rich sash, her face powdered and rouged, her hair done up as if for a wedding ceremony. She was walking all alone in sandals toward the temple. It was hardly possible that she had any business there, since the gate of the temple would have already been closed by that time. Yet the woman in full dress, Morimoto had said, was going up that dark way all by herself.

Whenever Keitaro heard such stories, he could not help smiling with incredulity and saying, "Really!" Nevertheless, he was eager to give a willing ear to Morimoto's eloquent narratives.

That day too it was with just such an expectation that Keitaro had accompanied him from the bathhouse, even taking a roundabout way back. Morimoto was not much older than the other, but to Keitaro, fresh out of school, the experiences of a man who seemed to have gone through all sorts of barriers in the world were not only interesting but, if properly considered, profitable.

Moreover, Keitaro was a youth with a romantic cast to his personality and a hatred of mediocrity. When tales of a certain Otomatsu Kodama appeared serially in the
Asahi
newspaper, he read them each morning with the zeal of a middle school boy. He was especially interested in those passages describing Otomatsu's fight with an octopus monster that had leaped from its den. Keitaro had enthusiastically repeated the story to a student in his department—how the hero had fired his revolver at the huge octopus head, all to no avail because it was so slippery that the bullets merely slid away. Eventually small octopuses that had come out after their leader formed a ring around the man. The hero wondered what they were going to do; it turned out that they were spectators eager to see which party would win. The friend to whom Keitaro had told the story said half in jest, "You're quite a character! I suppose you'll never be content to take the higher civil service exams and pursue a steady career. When you graduate, you'd be better off heading for the South Seas to hunt octopuses, since you seem to like them so much!" Among Keitaro's friends the phrase "Tagawa's octopus-hunting" became fashionable. Whenever they met him in his search for entrance into the world, walking himself lame since his graduation that summer, they asked him, "Well, have you been successful on your octopus hunt?"

To hunt octopuses in the South Seas was too fanciful an occupation even for Keitaro to attempt seriously. But in his student days he had contemplated cultivating rubber plantations in Singapore. At that time he had never tired of imagining himself the superintendent of a plantation, his bungalow built in the midst of a limitless plain filled with millions of well-kept rubber trees. According to his plan, the bungalow would have its bare floor covered with a huge tiger skin. One wall would hold a pair of buffalo horns cradling a gun, and underneath would be a Japanese sword protected in a brocaded bag. He himself, a white turban round his head, would magnanimously be smoking a strong-smelling Havana cigar as he rested on a rattan lounge chair set on a spacious veranda. Moreover, under his feet with its back raised like a hill would crouch a mysterious Sumatran black cat with a coat of fur smooth as velvet, eyes of pure gold, and a tail far longer than its body.

With everything thus furnished to his imagined satisfaction, Keitaro had set about calculating the necessary expenses. To his disappointment he found that renting the plantation grounds would be troublesome and would take a long time. And even with the ground finally secured, there came the great difficulty of cultivation. Expenses for breaking ground and planting were far more than he had anticipated. Besides these complexities, he learned he would have to employ men to weed all year round, and then, with arms folded like a fool, he would have to wait six years for the saplings to grow. All of this resulted in his beginning to regard these as sufficient reasons for withdrawing his plan. At this point, the expert in the business who had given him this information warned him that the supply of rubber produced in the region would soon exceed the world demand and that it was certain the cultivators would be in a panic a few years hence. After Keitaro heard about all these circumstances, never again did he speak of rubber.

Though thus thwarted once, Keitaro's passion for the extraordinary was not to be cooled down by such a trifle. Living in a large city, he took delight not only in dreaming of distant countries and their peoples, but the mere contemplation of commonplace women who happened to be on the same streetcar with him or matter-of-fact men going past him on his walks raised in him the suspicion that each of them might be concealing under his mantle or in the sleeve of her overcoat something out of the ordinary. And it was his wish to turn that mantle or overcoat inside out to catch a glimpse of that uncommonness, and then, having viewed it, to resume an air of indifference.

This bent in Keitaro seemed to have started to assert itself forcibly during his high school days. A teacher of English at his school used Stevenson's
New Arabian Nights
as the class text. Until then Keitaro had a strong dislike of English, but the book so interested him that he never failed to prepare his lessons, and each time the teacher called on him, he stood and translated the assigned passage. Once he was so excited by the story that, forgetting the distinction between fiction and reality, he asked the teacher quite seriously, "Did such things really happen in nineteenth-century London?"

A recent returnee from England, the teacher drew a linen handkerchief from a hip pocket under his black melton morning coat and, patting his nose, replied, "Possibly, and not only in the nineteenth century, but at present as well. London is really the strangest city."

This reply caused Keitaro's eyes to sparkle.

"But," the teacher went on, rising from his chair, "our writer is, as you know, noted for his original observations, and naturally his view of events is different from that of ordinary men, which might be why he came up with such stories. He was the type who even found romance in a hansom moving along the street."

Keitaro could not understand how a hansom and romance could be linked, so he ventured to ask. The teacher's explanation satisfied him.

Since that time, whenever he saw a rickshaw—that most commonplace vehicle in the most commonplace city of Tokyo—waiting for hire, he thought that perhaps this same one the night before had had in it a man carrying a kitchen knife to be used in committing a murder, or that it might have transported a beautiful woman under its hood, bringing her to some station to catch a train that would take her in the opposite direction from the one in which her pursuers thought she was going. In this way Keitaro often amused himself with imaginary terrors and delights.

As he indulged in such fantasies, there arose in him the idea that in so complicated a world something ought to happen to him that would send a fresh stimulus through his nerves, something unusual, even though it might not be exactly what he anticipated. Ever since he had left school, however, his life consisted of merely going about on streetcars and visiting strangers with letters of introduction, so there was nothing in it particularly like a novel. He was bored to death each day to see the same face of the boardinghouse maid and to eat the meals she served him. If a possibility to work for the Manchurian Railway or the Governor General of Korea had been realized, it would have at least relieved him of boredom, providing stimulus of a sort as well as a livelihood. But a few days ago it had become quite evident that he had little chance for such a job, so he had fallen into a listlessness which made him feel that the common-placeness around him was closely related to his own incompetence. He even lost the courage to make one of his desultory explorations of human lives on streetcars, which could be done as easily as walking in search of small coins fallen on the road. Still less could he bring himself to run about looking for some means of earning a living. And so in spite of having no real desire to, he had consumed a large volume of beer the previous night and had gone to bed early.

On such occasions it was a kind of stimulation for Keitaro to look at the face of a Morimoto, who could only be described as a commonplace type with an abundance of uncommon experiences. It was for this reason that Keitaro had invited Morimoto into his room, even going so far as to accompany him to a shop merely to buy a roll of writing paper.

Sitting at the window, Morimoto gazed outside for some time. "A fine view you get any season of the year," he said, "but especially on a day like today. It certainly makes a picture, doesn't it? That red brick house there among the trees, the warm-colored leaves under a sky as clean as though it's just been washed."

"Yes, perhaps," said Keitaro, not knowing how to respond.

Morimoto turned his eyes to the boards projecting about a foot outside the windowsill on which he was resting an elbow. "This could only look right if it had a bonsai or two on it," he said.

Keitaro thought that might be true, but lacking the courage to repeat the same "Yes, perhaps," he asked instead, "Do you even have a taste for things like paintings and bonsai?"

"Have a taste for? That's a good question—they certainly don't seem to fit my character, do they? But believe me, though I'm telling you myself, I've dabbled in bonsai and kept goldfish, and at one time I drew for the fun of it."

"You seem capable of anything."

"A jack-of-all-trades has ultimately become a master of none, as I am now." At these words no sharp lines of grief for his past or despair over his present appeared on his face. In fact, he showed no change of expression as he looked at Keitaro.

"But," Keitaro began seriously, "I'm always wanting, no matter how small a share, the varied kind of career you've had—"

Morimoto hurried to interrupt, holding out his right hand in front of his face and waving it back and forth as a drunken man might. "That's about the worst idea that can exist," he said. "Young men—though I may not be much older than you—anyway, young men want to do something strange and new. But when you've done all those things which are supposed to be strange and new and when you look back on them, you think, 'How meaningless all that was! How much better it would have been if I hadn't done them, if it's only come to this.' You're a young man with the world before you. Just be what you are and you'll gain as much prosperity as you wish. To risk your life on such things as speculation or adventure at this important time, well, it deserves the name of disloyalty to your loving parents. But, I've been thinking for some time about asking you but couldn't because I was too busy—have you found a good job?"

Honest by nature, Keitaro told the truth without disguising his dejection, adding that he was resting a few days because for the time being he had little prospect of success.

"Really?" exclaimed Morimoto with a surprised look. "I didn't know there was even the slightest difficulty for university graduates in finding jobs. A very bad time indeed. I guess it must be, seeing that we're well into the forties of Meiji." He spoke with his head inclined, as though he were ruminating on the truth behind his own reasoning.