Crackling Mountain and Other Stories Read online

  With five or six days of rehearsing over, we scheduled our first performance for that evening. We had set up the stage on the wide veranda before the library-storehouse, with a small curtain suspended in front. It was still broad daylight when Grandmother came by, but she didn’t notice the wire. When her jaw got caught on it, she cried out, You pack of river bums!6 Stop it! That wire could’ve killed me.

  Despite this incident, we gathered ten or so manservants and maids for the evening performance. The memory of Grandmother’s words weighed heavily upon me. While performing the title role in Yamanaka Shikanosuke and that of the boy in The House of the Dove, and even while dancing Kappore, I felt isolated and completely listless. Eventually I put on such plays as The Rustler, The House of the Broken Plate, and Shuntoku Maru, but Grandmother always looked disgusted.

  Though I didn’t much care for Grandmother, I was grateful to her on sleepless nights all the same. From the third or fourth year of grade school, I had suffered from insomnia. Midnight would be long past, and I would still be lying awake in bed. Since I cried so often at night, the family tried to come up with remedies for my insomnia. Lick sugar before bed, I was told, or else count the ticking of the clock. I tried other suggestions, like cooling my feet in a pan of water or placing a leaf from the “sleeping tree” under my pillow. But nothing seemed to work. A bundle of nerves, I would anxiously turn over one thing after another in my mind. This only made falling asleep more difficult. I had a succession of bad nights after secretly playing with Father’s pince-nez and cracking the lens.

  The notions shop two doors away handled several kinds of books and magazines. One day I was looking at the illustrations inside the front cover of a ladies journal, one of them a watercolor of a yellow mermaid. I wanted this illustration so badly that I decided to steal it. I had quietly torn the page out when the young manager sharply called out my boyhood name, Osako! Osako! I flung the magazine to the floor and rushed home. Blunders such as this one kept me awake for nights on end.

  Sometimes I’d lie in bed needlessly worrying that a fire might break out. I wondered, What if the house burned down? and after that I couldn’t sleep at all.

  One evening I was heading for the toilet just before bedtime. The room where the family accounts were kept was right across the hallway from my destination. The room was dark, and the student who kept the accounts was running a movie projector. The picture on the sliding door hardly seemed bigger than a matchbox, but I could make out a polar bear about to plunge off an ice floe into the sea. Observing this, I sensed something unbearably sad about the student. Back in bed, I thought about the movie scene and reflected as well on the life of this student, my heart pounding all the while. What would I do if the film caught fire? I wondered. Beset by these worries, I couldn’t get to sleep until almost dawn. On nights such as this, I would feel especially grateful to my grandmother.

  Around eight o’clock in the evening, a maid would come to my room and lie next to me until I fell asleep. Since I felt sorry for her, I would lie still with my eyes closed. As soon as she left, I’d start praying that I could fall asleep. I would toss and turn until almost ten o’clock, then break into a whimper and get up. By that time the whole family other than Grandmother would be in bed.

  Grandmother would still be in the kitchen by the large hearth, sitting across from the night watchman. Ensconced between them in my quilted pajamas, I would dejectedly listen to their inevitable gossip about people in the village. Late one night, as I leaned over to hear, the beat of a great drum echoed from afar. People were still up, celebrating the Insect-Expulsion Festival,7 an occasion when farmers try various means of ridding their fields of harmful pests. I have not forgotten how reassuring it was to know that others were still awake.

  That far-off drumbeat brings other memories to mind. My oldest brother was at a university in Tokyo around then, and whenever he came back for a summer vacation, he brought word of the latest trends in music and literature. My brother studied drama, and he even published a one-act play in a local magazine. Called The Struggle, it was much discussed by the young people hereabouts. Along with my other brothers and sisters, I had listened to him recite the play just after he had finished the manuscript. Everyone had complained that it didn’t make sense. I alone understood, even down to the poetic curtain line, “Ah, how dark the night is!” However, I did think the title should be The Thistle rather than The Struggle. And in tiny letters I wrote this opinion in a corner of some used manuscript paper. Perhaps my brother didn’t notice, for he published the play without changing the title.

  My brother’s large collection of phonograph records had both Japanese and Western melodies. I already knew the Japanese melodies because of the geishas who came to our house. Whenever he gave a party, my father would send word to a city some distance away to request their services. I remember being hugged by these geishas from the age of four or five. I recall watching them dance too, and listening to their songs, “Once Upon a Time” and “The Tangerine Boat from Ki Province.”

  As I lay in bed one night, a fine melody filtered out of my brother’s room. I lifted my head from the pillow, listening closely. The next morning I got up early and went over. I selected one record after another and played every one on my brother’s phonograph. At last I found the melody that had so excited me last night, a samisen ballad about the ill-fated drummer Ranchō.8

  Nevertheless, I felt much closer to my second oldest brother. After graduating with honors from a Tokyo business school, he had come back to work in the family bank. This brother was treated callously, just like I was. Mother and Father said he was the worst boy in the family (after me, of course), so I figured looks were the problem with him too. He would sometimes say to me, I don’t need anything now—but if only I’d been born good-looking. Then, turning to me, he would ask teasingly, What do you think of that, Shu?

  Despite such bantering, I never thought my brother so ill-favored. I regarded him as one of the smarter boys in the family, too. He seemed to drink every day and then quarrel with Grandmother. Each time this happened, I felt a secret hatred for her.

  With my third brother, the one just older than me, I was always feuding. He knew many of my secrets, and that made me uneasy. He looked quite a bit like my little brother, and everyone remarked how handsome he was. I was, so to speak, being squeezed from above and below, and I could hardly bear it. When this older brother went off to high school in Tokyo, I breathed a sigh of relief.

  My little brother was the family baby. He had a gentle look as well, and this endeared him to Father and Mother. I was always jealous and would hit him now and then. Mother would scold me, and then I’d resent her too. I must have been about nine or ten when the problem with the lice occurred. They were all over me, scattered like sesame seeds on the seams of my underwear and my shirt. When my brother grinned about this, I just knocked him down—I really did. His head began swelling in several places, and that worried me. I got hold of some ointment labeled “For External Use Only” and applied it to his bruises.

  I had four older sisters, all of them fond of me. The oldest one died, however, and the next one left to get married. The two youngest sisters went off to school, each to a different town. Whenever their vacation came to an end, the two of them had to go seven or eight miles from our village to reach the nearest train station. During the summer they could. take our horse-drawn carriage. When the hail was blowing about in the fall, however, or the snow melting in the spring, they had no choice except to walk. They might have gone by sleigh during the winter, but the sleigh happened to make them both sick. That’s why they ended up walking then too. Whenever they were due back in the winter, I’d go out to the edge of our village where the lumber was piled up. Even after the sun went down, the road remained bright in the snow. When the flickering lamps that my sisters carried finally emerged from the woods of the next village, I would throw up my arms and let out a whoop.

  The school of the older sister happened to b
e in a smaller town. Because of that, the souvenirs she brought back could not compare with the younger sister’s. Once she took from her basket five or six packets of incense-sparklers and handed them to me. I’m so sorry, she said, a blush upon her cheeks. At that moment I felt my breast constrict. According to my family, this sister too was homely.

  She had lived in a separate room with my great-grandmother until she went away to school, so how could I avoid thinking of her as the old lady’s daughter? Then, about the time I was finishing grade school, my great-grandmother passed away. I caught a glimpse of the small, rigid body dressed in a white kimono as it was being placed in the coffin. I fretted about what to do if this scene kept haunting me.

  I graduated from grade school in due course, but I was too frail for high school. My family decided to send me to a special intermediate school for one year to see if I got stronger. If I did, Father would send me to high school here in the province. My older brothers had all studied in Tokyo, but that would be bad for my health. I didn’t care much about going to high school, anyhow. But I did get some sympathy from my teachers by writing about how frail I was.

  The intermediate school belonged to the county, a new unit of government back then. Five or six villages and towns had gotten together and put up the building in a pine grove more than a mile from my home. Many bright students from grade schools throughout the area were enrolled, and I had to maintain the honor of my own school against this competition. I had to strive to be the best, even though I would often be absent because of my health.

  Nonetheless, I didn’t study there either. To one headed for high school, the place seemed dirty and unpleasant. I spent most of every class drawing a cartoon serial. During recess I would explain the characters to my classmates and even give impersonations of them. I filled four or five notebooks with such cartoons.

  With my elbow braced on the desk and my chin resting in my palm, I would gaze outside for a whole hour. My seat was near the window where a fly had been crushed against the pane. Glimpsed from the side, the fly astonished me time and again. It almost seemed to be a large pheasant or a mountain dove.

  I would play hookey with five or six friends and together we would head for the marsh just beyond the pine grove. While loitering at the edge of the water, we’d gossip about the girls in our class, then roll up our kimono skirts to stare at each other’s fuzz. It was great fun to compare how we were all doing.

  I kept my distance from every girl at school, though. I was so easily aroused that I had to watch myself. Two or three of the girls had a crush on me, but I was a coward and pretended not to notice.

  I would go into Father’s library and take down the volume of paintings from the Imperial Art Exhibition. As I gazed at a nude painting buried somewhere among the pages, my cheeks would begin to glow. Another thing I would do is put my pair of pet rabbits in the same cage, my heart pounding as the male climbed on and hunched its back. By doing these things I kept my own urge from getting out of hand.

  I was really a prig and didn’t tell anyone about the massaging. When I read how harmful it was, I decided to stop. But nothing seemed to work.

  Since I walked all the way to school and back each day, my body grew stronger. At the same time little pimples came out on my forehead like millet grains, much to my embarrassment. I would paint them with a red ointment.

  That same year my oldest brother got married. On the evening of the wedding my younger brother and I tiptoed up to the bride’s room and peeked in. She was having her hair done, with her back to the door. I caught a glimpse of the pale, white face in the mirror, then fled with my younger brother in tow.

  “What’s so great about her?” I swaggered. Ashamed of my forehead and the red ointment, I reacted all the more violently.

  As winter drew near I had to start studying for the entrance exam to high school. I looked over the book ads in the magazines, then ordered various reference works from Tokyo. I arranged them on my shelves, but didn’t do any reading. The high school of my choice, located in the province’s largest city, would attract two or three times more applicants than it could admit. Now and then I was overcome with fear; I must get down to studying or else I would fail the exam. A week of hard work would restore my confidence. During these bouts of study I would stay up until midnight and usually get up at four the next morning. A maid named Tami stayed by me. I’d have her keep the charcoal fire going and make the tea. No matter how late she stayed up, Tami always came to wake me at four o’clock the next morning. While I puzzled over an arithmetic problem involving a mouse and the numbers of her offspring, Tami sat quietly nearby reading a novel. Presently she was replaced by a fat, elderly maid. When I heard that Mother was behind this change and thought of what her motive might be, I could only frown.

  Early the following spring, while the snow was still deep, my father coughed up blood in a Tokyo hospital and died. The local paper published his obituary in a special edition, an event that affected me more than the death itself. My own name appeared in the paper too, on a list of people from the gentry.

  Father’s body was brought home in a great coffin mounted upon a sleigh. I went along with a large crowd to meet the hearse near the next village. Eventually a long procession of sleighs glided from the woods. The hood of each vehicle reflected the moonlight, creating a lovely scene.

  The next day our family gathered in the shrine room where the coffin rested. When the lid was opened, everyone burst into tears. Father seemed to be asleep, his prominent nose looking very straight and pale. Enticed by the weeping, I too shed some tears.

  For the next month the house was in such chaos that one might have thought a fire had occurred. I forgot about my studies altogether. And, when the time for the final exam arrived, I could only give haphazard answers. The examiner knew about my family, though, and I was graded third highest among the group. I suspected that my memory was starting to weaken. For the first time ever, I felt I could not handle an exam without preparing for it.

  II

  Although my scores were low, I passed the exam for high school that spring. The school was in a small town on the coast and, when the time came, I had to leave my own village. I dressed quite stylishly for the trip—new hakama,9 dark stockings, laced boots. In place of the blanket I had been using, I threw a woolen cloak over my shoulders and deliberately left it unbuttoned. When I reached my destination, a dry-goods store with an old tattered noren curtain hanging in the front entrance, I took off this outfit. The shop was run by distant relatives to whom I became deeply indebted over time.

  There are people who get suddenly worked up over anything whatever, and I’m one of them. Now that I was in high school, I’d put on my student cap and new hakama just to go to the public bathhouse. Catching my reflection in the shop windows along the way, I’d even nod my head and smile.

  I couldn’t get excited about school, however. Not that the place wasn’t nice enough. The building was situated at the edge of town, with a park behind extending to the Tsugaru Strait. It was painted white outside, and inside there were wide hallways and classrooms with high ceilings. During class one could hear the hiss of the waves and the sough of the pines.

  But the teachers in that school were always persecuting me. As early as orientation day the gymnastics instructor called me a smart aleck and started hitting me. That really hurt, since he was the very person who had been so gentle with me on the oral examination. Knowing that my father had passed away, he had understood why I wasn’t prepared for the entrance exam. When he had mentioned this, I had hung my head for his benefit.

  Then the other instructors started hitting me. They gave all sorts of reasons for dishing out such punishment. I was yawning, grinning, or whatever. My unrestrained yawning apparently became a subject of conversation in the teachers’ room. It amused me to think what dumb things they talked about there.

  One day a student from my own village called me over to the sand dune in the schoolyard. You’re bound to flunk,
he warned, as long as they keep hitting you like that. And, he added, you really do act like a smart aleck. I was dumbfounded. That afternoon after class, I hurriedly set out for home along the beach. With no one else around, I sighed as the waves licked against my shoes. I raised my arm, wiping the sweat from my brow with my shirt sleeve. A gray sail, astonishingly large, wavered past my very eyes.

  I was a petal quivering in the slightest breeze, about to fall any moment. Even the slightest insult made me think of dying. Believing I would amount to something before long, I stood up for my honor so firmly that I could not allow even an adult to make light of me. That’s why failing at school would have been a disaster. From that time on I became tense in the classroom, so anxious was I to pay attention. During every lesson I believed myself in a room with a hundred invisible foes. I could not let my guard down in the least. Every morning before setting out for school, I turned up a playing card on the desk in search of my daily fortune. A heart was lucky, a diamond promising; a club was foreboding, while a spade meant certain disaster. At this time of my life, spades turned up day after day.

  With an exam coming soon, I memorized every word of my natural history, geography, and ethics textbooks. I was finicky, and for me the exam was a matter of do or die. But my method turned out to be faulty. Inexorably I felt hemmed in and unable to adapt to the exam. Certain questions I answered almost to perfection. In other cases, however, I tripped over the words and phrases in my confusion and ended up soiling the test booklet with mere gibberish.