Early Light Read online

  EARLY LIGHT

  STORYBOOK ND

  CURATED BY GINI ALHADEFF

  César Aira, The Famous Magician

  Osamu Dazai, Early Light

  Helen DeWitt, The English Understand Wool

  László Krasznahorkai, Spadework for a Palace

  Clarice Lispector, The Woman Who Killed the Fish

  Yoko Tawada, Three Streets

  FORTHCOMING

  Natalia Ginzburg, The Road to the City

  Rachel Ingalls, In the Act

  Copyright © 2022 by New Directions Publishing Corporation

  Translation copyright © 1991, 2022 by Ralph McCarthy (“One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji,” “Early Light”)

  Translation copyright © 1955 by Donald Keene (“Villon’s Wife”)

  All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

  Publisher’s Note: “Early Light” (Hakumei) and “One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji” (Fugaku hyakkei) are selected from Self Portraits, first published in 1993 by Kodansha USA, and are published by arrangement with Ralph McCarthy. “Villon’s Wife” (Viyon no tsuma) originally appeared in New Directions in Prose and Poetry 15 (New Directions, 1955) and is published by arrangement with the estate of Donald Keene.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  First published clothbound by New Directions in 2022

  Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data

  Names: Dazai, Osamu, 1909–1948, author. | McCarthy, Ralph F., translator. | Keene, Donald, translator. | Dazai, Osamu, 1909–1948. Hakumei. English. | Dazai, Osamu, 1909–1948. Fugaku hyakkei. English. | Dazai, Osamu, 1909–1948. Viyon no tsuma. English.

  Title: Early light / Osamu Dazai ; translated by Ralph McCarthy & Donald Keene.

  Other titles: Early light (Compilation)

  Description: New York : New Directions Publishing Corporation, 2022. | Series: A storybook ND

  Identifiers: LCCN 2022005823 | ISBN 9780811231985 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780811232319 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Dazai, Osamu, 1909–1948—Translations into English. | LCGFT: Short stories.

  Classification: LCC PL825.A8 E1713 2022 | DDC 895.63/44—dc23/eng/20220209

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022005823

  New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin

  by New Directions Publishing Corporation

  80 Eighth Avenue, NY 10011

  EARLY LIGHT

  When our house in Mitaka, Tokyo, was damaged in the bombings, we moved to Kōfu, my wife’s hometown. Her younger sister had been living alone in the family house there.

  This was in early April of 1945. Allied planes passed frequently enough through the skies over Kōfu but hardly ever dropped any bombs. Nor was the war zone atmosphere as intense as it was in Tokyo. We were able to sleep without our air raid gear for the first time in months. I was thirty-seven. My wife was thirty-four, my daughter five, and my son two, technically, though he’d just been born in August of the previous year. Our life up to that point had not been easy by any means, but we had at least remained alive and free of serious illnesses or injuries. Having survived so much adversity, even I felt a desire to go on living a bit longer, if only to see how things would turn out with the world. Stronger than that, however, was the fear that my wife and children would be killed before I was, leaving me alone. Just to think about that possibility was unendurable. I had to see to it that they survived, and that meant adopting the most prudent measures. I had no money, however. Whenever I did get my hands on a fair sum, I would promptly drink it away. I have the serious defect known as a drinking habit. Liquor at that time was an expensive indulgence, but whenever friends or acquaintances visited me, I was unable to stop myself from whisking them off to guzzle great quantities of the stuff, just as I had in the old days.

  So much for prudent measures. Even as I envied those who’d long since evacuated their families to the distant countryside, I, for lack of means and out of sheer indolence, remained forever dillydallying in Mitaka, until at last we were visited by a bomb and I lost all desire to stick it out any longer and moved the family to Kōfu. Now, sleeping without my air raid gear for the first time in nearly a hundred days, I was able to breathe a small sigh of relief, reflecting that, though further hardships undoubtedly lay ahead, for the time being at least there’d be no need to bundle up the children in the middle of a cold night and scramble into the bomb shelter.

  We were now, however, a family who’d lost their own home, and this put us in an awkward position. I felt as though I’d been through my share of tribulations in life, but moving into someone else’s house with two small children in tow allowed me a taste of various distinctive new ones. My wife’s mother and father had both passed away, her elder sisters had married and left, and though the youngest of the siblings, a boy, was officially the head of the household, he had entered the navy right after graduating from university two or three years before, leaving the youngest sister, a girl of twenty-six or twenty-seven, alone in the house in Kōfu. She corresponded regularly with her brother, apparently consulting with him in minute detail about all the household affairs. I, of course, was the elder brother-in-law of these two, but, elder or not, I obviously had no voice in managing those affairs. Far from being in a position of authority, in fact, I’d been nothing but a burden to this family ever since my wife and I had married. I was not, in other words, a man to be relied upon. It was only natural, therefore, that I be excluded from consultation, and since I, for my part, had not the slightest interest in the family “assets” or whatever, this was a mutually satisfactory arrangement. But, being older than both the navy boy and his twenty-six or twenty-seven-year-old sister (twenty-eight, maybe—I never really checked), I was worried that we might unintentionally trample on their pride, or that they might be leery of my trying to outsmart them and get my hands on those assets—though surely no one would be that distrustful—and the truth is that I felt constantly on guard, as if I were moving through a lush, moss-covered garden, hopping gingerly from one stepping-stone to the next. I even thought how much easier it would be on all of us if only there were a still older man in the house, one who’d accumulated more experience in the real world.

  This negative sort of concern for the feelings of others can wear a man out. I borrowed the six-mat room facing the rear garden to work and sleep in and arranged for my wife and children to sleep in the room that housed the Buddhist altar. I paid a fair rent for the rooms and made sure that I contributed our share to the purchase of food and what not, and when I had visitors I took care not to use the parlor, but showed them into my workroom. I am a drinker, however, and visitors from Tokyo were not infrequent, the upshot of which was that, even as I maintained every intention of honoring the privileges due the actual owners of the house, I in fact ended up taking any number of inexcusable liberties. My sister-in-law actually treated us with considerable diffidence and was a great help with the children, but, though there was never an unpleasant, head-on confrontation, we were a family that had lost its home, and while oversensitivity to that fact may have been the true cause of my discomfort, there was, nonetheless, the feeling of forever walking on thin ice. What this all added up to was that, thanks to our evacuation to the country, both the sister and ourselves were put under a debilitating strain. Still, our situation was better than most, it would seem; one can only guess what it was like
for those evacuees in even worse circumstances.

  “Don’t evacuate. Stick it out in Tokyo till your house is burned to the ground: you’ll be better off.”

  I wrote this advice in a letter to a close friend who remained with his family in Tokyo.

  We’d come to Kōfu in early April, when it was still chilly and the cherry blossoms, considerably later than those in Tokyo, had just begun to open. We were there throughout May and June, when the heat unique to the Kōfu basin began to make itself felt. The deep green leaves of the pomegranate trees took on an oily sheen in the intense sunlight, and soon their bright red flowers burst into bloom, and the little green grapes grew plumper each day, gradually forming long, rangy bunches that hung heavily from the trellises; and it was just at about that time that a commotion began to sweep through the city of Kōfu. The entire town was abuzz with the rumor that the bombings were to be directed at small and medium-sized cities, and that Kōfu, too, would burn. Everyone began making preparations to flee, loading their carts with household goods and dragging their families off into the mountains; you heard the sounds of footsteps and carts incessantly, even late at night. I had from the beginning been resigned to the fact that Kōfu too would eventually be hit, but to load our belongings on a cart and evacuate to the mountains with my wife and children to beg lodging from strangers when I’d scarcely had time to enjoy the relief of sleeping without air raid gear—that was asking too much.

  I thought we should stay where we were. If the incendiary bombs started dropping, my wife, carrying the baby on her back and leading the five-year-old by the hand, could flee to the fields on the outskirts of town while my sister-in-law and I stayed behind and protected the house, fighting the flames as best we could. If it burned down, it burned down; working together, we could build a little shack on the ruins and make our stand.

  This was the plan I suggested, and everyone agreed to it. We dug a pit to bury food, a set of kitchen utensils, umbrellas, shoes, toiletries, a mirror, needles and thread—all the barest necessities, to avoid being reduced to utter wretchedness should the house be destroyed.

  “Bury these, too.” My five-year-old daughter held out a pair of red geta clogs.

  “Ah, yes. In they go,” I said, taking the clogs and stuffing them into one corner of the pit. I felt for a moment as if I were burying a person.

  “At least now we’re all together,” my sister-in-law said. She was, perhaps, experiencing the faint glow of happiness one is said to feel on the eve of annihilation. No more than four or five days later, in fact, the house went up in flames. It came a good month earlier than I’d expected.

  For the previous ten days or so, the two children had been going to a doctor for eye problems, namely epidemic conjunctivitis, or “pinkeye.” The boy’s condition wasn’t all that bad, but his sister’s grew steadily worse. Within about a week—two or three days before the bombing—she had temporarily lost all use of her eyes. Her eyelids were so swollen it distorted her features, and when you forcibly pried the lids apart, you saw an inflamed, festering mess that resembled the eye of a dead fish. Thinking that perhaps this was no mere pinkeye but a virulent bacterial infection of some sort that had already done permanent damage, I took her to a different doctor, but again it was diagnosed as conjunctivitis. It would take quite a while to clear up entirely, we were told, but it would clear up. Doctors frequently make mistakes, however. In fact, they’re mistaken more often than not. I’ve never been one to put undue faith in anything doctors say.

  I just hoped she’d regain her eyesight soon. I drank heavily, but couldn’t get drunk. One night I even vomited on the way home from a place I’d been drinking at, and I’m not joking when I say that as I squatted there by the roadside I pressed my palms together in prayer. Please let her eyes be open when I get home. When I reached the house I heard her singing innocently. Thank God, I thought, dashing inside, only to find her standing there alone with her head bowed in the dimly lit room, singing to herself.

  I couldn’t bear to watch her. My child went blind because I’m a penniless drunk. If I had led the life of a proper, upstanding citizen, perhaps this calamity would never have occurred. The sins of the father are visited on the child. It was divine retribution. I went so far as to tell myself that if this child’s eyes remained closed for the rest of her life, I would give up all thoughts of literature and personal glory to be permanently at her side.

  “Where are your footsies, baby? Where are your handsies?” When she was feeling happy she’d play with her baby brother like this, groping for him blindly. What if there were an air raid now, with her in this condition? The thought made me shudder. We’d have no choice but to run for it, with the baby on my wife’s back and this child on mine. But it would be impossible for my sister-in-law to protect the house all by herself. She, too, then, would have to flee with us. Judging by what the Allied planes had done to Tokyo, one had to assume that the city of Kōfu would be completely destroyed, including, surely, the doctor’s office we were taking the girl to. And the other clinics as well; there wouldn’t be a single doctor left in town. Then where would we be?

  “I don’t care what they do to us. It just seems to me they might be so kind as to wait another month or so before they do it.”

  Later on the very night I’d smilingly announced this opinion at the dinner table, we heard the air raid sirens for the first time, simultaneous with the familiar thundering explosions and a lighting up of the sky all around us. They’d begun dropping the incendiary bombs. I heard a series of splashes: my sister-in-law was throwing tableware into the small pond near the veranda.

  It was the worst possible time for the attack to come. I boosted my blind child up on my back. My wife did likewise with the baby boy, and we each ran outside clutching a futon. We ran about ten blocks, taking shelter in ditches two or three times along the way, before we came to open fields. No sooner had we spread both futons out on a field of freshly mown barley and sat down to catch our breath than a shower of fire fell from the sky directly overhead.

  “Get under the futon!” I shouted to my wife and threw my own futon over me, lying face down with my daughter still clinging to my back. I thought how painful a direct hit would probably be.

  We were spared that, but when I threw off the futon and sat up for a look, I saw that we were surrounded by a sea of fire.

  “Get up and put out the fire! Put out the fire!” I yelled, not only to my wife but in a voice loud enough for all the others lying on the ground around us to hear, and we began smothering the flames with our mats and blankets. It was almost amusing how easily they went out. Though my daughter could see nothing, she must have sensed that something extraordinary was going on; she clung silently to my shoulders, without uttering so much as a whimper.

  “Are you all right?” I asked my wife, walking up to her once the flames were pretty much under control.

  “Yes,” she said quietly. “Let’s hope this is as bad as it gets.” For her, apparently, incendiary bombs were nothing compared to the explosive variety.

  We moved to another spot in the field to rest, and no sooner had we done so than it began to rain fire again. This may sound strange, but it occurred to me that perhaps there is a splinter of divinity in each of us after all. Not only our family but everyone who’d taken refuge in that field escaped injury. We all busied ourselves snuffing out the sticky, greasy, flaming globs with futons or blankets or dirt, then sat back down to rest.

  My sister-in-law left for the house of a distant relative in the hills some four miles from the city to try to get food for the following day. My wife and the children and I sat on one of the futons and used the other to cover ourselves. We decided this was as good a place as any to hold our ground. I was exhausted. I’d had just about enough of running hither and thither with the girl on my back. The children were now lying quietly on the futon, asleep, while their parents gazed vacantly at the glow of Kōfu going
up in flames. The roar of the airplanes had decreased considerably.

  “I guess it’s about over,” my wife said.

  “Yeah. Well, none too soon for me, I’ll tell you.”

  “I suppose the house burned down.”

  “Well, you never know. It’d be nice if it was still there.”

  I figured it was hopeless, but wouldn’t it be wonderful if by some miracle the house was still standing?

  “Not likely, though,” I said.

  “No, I suppose not.”

  It was hard to abandon the last flicker of hope, however.

  A farmhouse was blazing away right before us. It took an incredibly long time to burn to the ground. One could almost see the history of that house going up in flames along with its roof and pillars.

  The night faded into a pale dawn.

  We carried the children to the national school, which hadn’t burned. They let us rest in a classroom on the second floor. The children began to wake. Even after waking up, of course, the girl’s eyes remained closed. Groping about, she amused herself by climbing up on the lecturer’s platform and what not. Her condition seemed scarcely to weigh on her mind.

  I left the wife and children there and set out to check on the house. It was a tremendous ordeal just walking through the streets, what with the heat and smoke from the smoldering houses on either side, but by following a roundabout path, changing course any number of times, I somehow managed to reach our neighborhood. How happy I would be if the house were still standing! But, no, it couldn’t possibly be. I told myself I shouldn’t get my hopes up, but the phantom of that one-in-a-million chance kept raising its head. I came in sight of the black wooden fence around the house.

  It was still there!

  But it was only the fence. The house itself was completely destroyed. My sister-in-law was standing in the ruins, her face black with soot.

  “Hi. How are the children?”