At Kinosaki, by Shiga Naoya

 

I had been hit by a train on the Tokyo loop line and I went alone to Kinosaki hot spring to convalesce. if I developed tuberculosis of the spine it could be fatal, but the doctor did not think I would. I would be out of danger in two or three years, he said, and the important thing was to take care of myself; and so I made the trip. I thought I would stay three weeks and more – five weeks if I could stand it.

My head was still not clear. I had taken to forgetting things at an alarming rate. but I had a pleasant feeling of quiet and repose as I had not had in recent years. The weather was beautiful as the time came to begin harvesting the rice.

I was quite alone. I had no one to talk to. I could read or write, I could sit in the chair on the veranda and look out absently at the mountains or the street, and beyond that I could go for walks. A road that followed a little stream gradually up from the town was good for walking. Where the stream skirted the base of the mountain it formed a little pool, which was full of brook salmon. Sometimes, when I looked carefully, I could find a big river crab with hair on its claws, still as a stone. I liked to walk up the road just before dinner in the evening. More often than not I would be sunk in thought as I followed the blue little stream up that lonely mountain valley in the evening chill. My thoughts were melancholy ones. And yet I felt a pleasant repose. I thought often of my accident. But a little more and I would be lying face up under the ground in Aoyama cemetery. My face would be green and cold and hard, and the wounds on my face and my back would be as they were that day. The bodies of my grandfather and my mother would be beside me. Nothing would pass between us. – Those were the things I thought. Gloomy thoughts, but they held little terror. All this would come sometime. When would it be? – Much the same thoughts had come to me before, but that “when” had seemed distant then and beyond knowing. Now, however, I felt I really could not tell when it might be here. I had been saved this time, something had failed to kill me, there were things I must do. – I remembered reading in middle school how Lord Clive was stirred to new efforts by thoughts like these. I wanted to react so to the crisis I had been through. I even did. But my heart was strangely quiet. Something had made it friendly to death.

My room was on the second floor, a rather quiet room with no neighbors. Often when I was tired I would go out and sit on the veranda. The roof of the entranceway was to one side below me, and it joined the main building at a boarded wall. There seemed to be a beehive under the boards. When the weather was good the big tiger-striped bees would work from morning to dark. Pushing their way out from between the boards they would pause on the roof of the entranceway. Some would walk around for a moment after they had arranged their wings and feelers with their front and hind legs, and immediately they too would spread their slender wings taut and take off with a heavy droning. Once in the air they moved quickly away. They gathered around the late shrubs in the garden, just then coming into bloom. I would hang over the railing when I was bored and watch them come and go.

One morning I saw a dead bee on the roof. Its legs were doubled tight under it, its feelers dropped untidily over its head. The other bees seemed indifferent to it, quite untroubled as they crawled busily around it on their way in and out. The industrious living bees gave so completely a sense of life. The other beside them, rolled over with its legs under it, still in the same spot whenever I looked at it, morning, noon, night – how completely it gave a sense of death. For three days it lay there. It gave me a feeling of utter quietness. Of loneliness. It was lonely to see the dead body left there on the cold tile in the evening when the rest had gone inside. And at the same time it was tranquil, soothing.

In the night a fierce rain fell. The next morning it was clear, and the leaves of the trees, the ground, the roof were all washed clean. The body of the dead bee was gone. The others were busy again, but that one had probably washed down the eaves trough to the ground. It was likely somewhere covered with mud, unmoving, its legs still tight beneath it, its feelers still flat against its head. Probably it was lying quiet until a change in the world outside would move it again. Or perhaps ants were pulling it off. Even so, how quiet it must be – before only working and working, no longer moving now. I felt a certain nearness to that quiet. I had written a short story not long before called “Han’s Crime.” A Chinese named Han murdered his wife in his jealousy over her relations with a friend of his before they were married, the jealousy abetted by physical pressures in Han himself. I had written from the point of view of Han, but now I thought I wanted to write of the wife, to describe her murdered and quiet in her grave.

I thought of writing “The Murdered Wife of Han.” I never did, but the urge was there. I was much disturbed that my way of thinking had become so different from that of the hero of a long novel I was writing.

It was shortly after the bee was washed away. I left the inn for a walk out to a park where I could look down on the Maruyama River and the Japan Sea into which it flows. From in front of the large bathhouse a little stream ran gently down the middle of the street and into the river. A noisy crowd was looking down into the water from one spot along its banks and from a bridge. A large rat had been thrown in and was swimming desperately to get away. A skewer some eight or ten inches long was thrust through the skin of its neck, so that it projected about three or four inches above the head and three or four below the throat. The rat tried to climb up the stone wall. Two or three children and rickshawman forty years old or so were throwing stones at it. They were having trouble hitting their mark. The stones struck against the wall and bounced off. The spectators laughed loudly. The rat finally brought its front paws up into a hole in the wall. When it tried to climb in, the skewer caught on the rocks. The rat fell back into the stream, trying still to save itself somehow. One could tell nothing from its face, but from its actions one could see how desperate it was. It seemed to think that if it could find shelter somewhere it would be safe, and with the skewer still in its neck it turned off again into the stream. The children and the rickshawman, more and more taken with the sport, continued to throw stones. Two or three ducks bobbing for food in front of the laundry place stretched their necks out in surprise. The stones splashed into the water. The ducks looked alarmed and paddled off upstream, their necks still astretch.

I did not want to see the end. The sight of the rat, doomed to die and yet putting its whole strength into the search for an escape, lingered stubbornly in my mind. I felt lonely and unhappy. Here was the truth, I told myself. It was terrible to think that this suffering lay before the quiet I was after. Even if I did feel a certain nearness to that quiet after death, still the struggle on the way was terrible. Beasts that do not know suicide must continue the struggle until it is finally cut short by death. What would I do if what was happening to the rat were happening to me now? Would I not, after all, struggle as the rat was struggling? I could not help remembering how near I was to doing very much that at the time of my accident. I wanted to do what could be done. I decided on a hospital for myself. I told how I was to be taken there. I asked someone to telephone in advance because I was afraid the doctor might be out and they would not be ready to operate immediately. Even when I was but half-conscious my mind worked so well on what was most important that I was surprised at it afterward myself. The question of whether I would die or not was moreover very much mine, and yet, while I did consider the possibility that I might, I was surprised afterward too at how little I was troubled by fear of death. “Is it fatal? What did the doctor say?” I asked a friend who was at my side. “He says it isn’t,” I was told. With that my spirits rose. I became most animated in my excitement. What would I have done if I had been told it would be fatal? I had trouble imagining. I would have been upset. But I thought I would not have been assailed by the intense fear I had always imagined. And I thought that even then I would have gone on struggling, looking for a way out. I would have behaved but little differently indeed from the rat. Even now, I decided, it would be much the same – let it be. My mood at the moment, it was clear, could have little immediate effect. And the truth lay on both sides. It was very good if there was such an effect, and it was very good if there was none. That was all.

One evening, some time later, I started out alone from the town, climbing gradually up along the little river. The road grew narrow and steep after it crossed the railroad at the mouth of a tunnel, the stream grew rapid, the last houses disappeared. I kept thinking I would go back, but each time I went on to see what was around the next corner. Everything was a pale green, the touch of the air was chilly against the skin. The quiet made me strangely restless. There was a large mulberry tree beside the road. A leaf on one branch that protruded out over the road from the far side fluttered rhythmically back and forth. There was no wind, everything except the stream was sunk in silence, only that one leaf fluttered on. I thought it odd. I was a little afraid even, but I was curious. I went down and looked at it for a time. A breeze came up. The leaf stopped moving. I saw what was happening, and it came to me that I had known all this before.

It began to get dark. No matter how far I went there were still corners ahead. I decided to go back. I looked down at the stream. On a rock that sloped up perhaps a yard square from the water at the far bank there was a small dark object. A water lizard. It was still wet, a good color. It was quite still, its head facing down the incline as it looked into the stream. The water from its body ran dark an inch or two down the dry rock. I squatted down and looked at it absent-mindedly. I no longer disliked water lizards. I was rather fond of land lizards. I loathed the horny wall lizard more than anything else of its sort. Some ten years before, when I was staying in the mountains not far from Tokyo, I had seen water lizards gathered around a drain from the inn, and I had thought how I would hate to be a water lizard, what it would be like to be reborn one. I did not like to come on water lizards because they always brought back the same thought. But now I was no longer bothered by it. I wanted to startle the lizard into the water. I could see in my mind how it would run, clumsily twisting its body. Still crouched by the stream, I took up a stone the size of a small ball and threw it. I was not especially aiming at the lizard. My aim is so bad that I could not have hit it had I tried, and it never occurred to me that I might. The stone slapped against the rock and fell into the water. As it hit, the lizard seemed to jump five inches or so to the side. Its tail curled high in the air. I wondered what had happened. I did not think at first that the rock had struck home. The curved tail began quietly to fall back down of its own weight. The toes of the projecting front feet, braced against the slope with knee joints cut, turned under and the lizard fell forward, its strength gone. Its tail lay flat against the rock. It did not move. It was dead.

What had I done, I thought. I often enough kill lizards and such, but the thought I had killed one without intending to filled me with a strange revulsion. I had done it, but from the beginning entirely by chance. For the lizard it was a completely unexpected death. I continued to squat there. I felt as if there were only the lizard and I, as if I had become the lizard and knew its feelings. I was filled with a sadness for the lizard, with a sense of the loneliness of the living creature. Quite by accident I had lived. Quite by accident the lizard had died. I was lonely, and presently I started back toward the inn down the road still visible at my feet. The lights at the outskirts of the town came into view. What had happened to the dead bee? Probably it was carried underground by that rain. And the rat? Swept off to sea, probably, and its body, bloated from the water, would be washing up now with the rubbish on a beach. And I who had not died was walking here. I knew I should be grateful. But the proper feeling of happiness refused to come. To be alive and to be dead were not two opposite extremes. There did not seem to be much difference between them. It was now fairly dark. My sense of sight took in only the distant lights, and the feel of my feet against the ground, cut off from my sight, seemed uncertain in the extreme. Only my head worked on as it would. It led me deeper and deeper into these fancies.

I left after about three weeks. It is more than three years now. I did not get spinal tuberculosis – that much I escaped.

Translated by Edward Seidensticker