The day of the festival the year Jirobei turned twenty-two dawned fair and sunny. A single black-eared kite flitted about above the town, lifting its voice in song, and the people who came to the shrine to worship offered thanks first to the god of the shrine and then to the kite and the clear blue sky. It was a little past noon when black clouds suddenly billowed up on the northeastern horizon, and in a matter of seconds a shadow had fallen over Mishima and a moist, heavy wind was crawling and swirling through the streets. Moments later, as if summoned by that wind, large drops of water began to spill from the heavens, and finally the rain, unable to contain itself any longer, poured down in a great torrent.
Jirobei was drinking saké in a shop across from the gate of the Great Shrine, watching the girls outside running for shelter with little mincing steps, when suddenly he rose up in his seat. He had spotted someone he knew—the daughter of the calligraphy teacher who lived across the street from him. Dressed in a heavy red kimono with a floral pattern, she ran five or six steps, slowed to a walk, ran five or six steps, then slowed to a walk again. Jirobei dashed outside, parting the shop-curtain that hung at the entrance, and spoke to the girl, saying: “Let me get you an umbrella. You don’t want to ruin that nice kimono.” The girl stopped and slowly twisted her slender neck to look at him. When she saw who it was, a blush spread over her soft white cheeks. “Wait one second,” Jirobei said and, ducking back inside, bullied the shopkeeper into lending him a rough, oil-paper umbrella. Ha, calligraphy teacher’s daughter! No doubt your old man, your old lady, and you yourself think I’m a good-for-nothing, a drunk, a rogue, and a scoundrel. Well, you’ve got another think coming. I’m the sort of man who, if I feel sorry for somebody, I’ll see to it that they get an umbrella, like this, or anything else they might need. How does that grab you? Jirobei was inwardly shouting this challenge as he headed back to the street. When he flipped the shop-curtain aside again, however, the girl was gone; there was nothing but the rain, pouring down even harder now, and a stream of people shoving and jostling one another as they ran past. A chorus of catcalls—Woo! Woo!—came from inside the shop, where six or seven local toughs were drinking. Jirobei stood there dangling the umbrella in his right hand and thinking: When you find yourself looking ridiculous, reasoning isn’t worth a damn. If a man offends you, strike him down. If a horse offends you, strike it down. That’s the way to be, he told himself. And from that day on, for the next three years, Jirobei stealthily trained in the art of fighting.
What fighting requires, first and foremost, is courage. Jirobei cultivated his with saké. He was drinking more than ever now. His eyes grew as cold and cloudy as those of a dead fish, and his forehead developed three greasy furrows, which only added to the brazen insolence of his features. His movements became ponderous and deliberate, so that just to lift his pipe to his lips for a single puff he would swing his arm around from behind in a great, sweeping, slow-motion arc. As far as appearances went, at least, he seemed a man with nerves of steel.
Next was the manner of speaking. He decided to speak in a fathomless kind of murmur. Before fighting, of course, it’s customary to recite some sort of cocky, clever-sounding threat, and Jirobei agonized over his choice of words. Clichés rang hollow; at length he settled upon something original: “Aren’t you making a bit of a mistake? Or perhaps you’re joking. You’d look awfully funny with the tip of your nose all purple and swollen. It would take a hundred days to return to normal. I do think you’re making a mistake.” In order to be able to deliver these lines smoothly at any given moment, he recited them thirty times each night after going to bed. And as he recited the words, he remembered to refrain from sneering or glaring any more than necessary—maintaining, if anything, a hint of a smile on his lips.
Now he was ready to begin the actual training. Jirobei was opposed to carrying weapons. Winning a fight with weapons didn’t make you a man; if he couldn’t gain victory with his bare hands, it just wouldn’t feel right. He began his research with the study of how to form a fist. It occurred to him that leaving the thumb outside the fist, unprotected, could result in a sprain. After experimenting with various methods, he tucked his thumb inside and covered it with the knuckles of the other four fingers. This made for a wonderfully hard fist, and when he struck himself on the kneecap with it his hand didn’t hurt at all; he felt such pain in his knee, however, that he nearly keeled over. This was a tremendous breakthrough. Next, he set out to make the skin of his knuckles as thick and hard as possible. Each morning when he awoke he clenched his fist in the manner he’d discovered and punched the hardwood tobacco tray next to his pillow. Walking about the streets of the town, he lashed out at all the stone walls and wooden fences he passed. He pounded the table at the shop where he drank, and pummeled the cast-iron hearth in his house. He spent a year on this stage of the training, and by the time his tobacco tray was falling to pieces, all the walls and fences in sight were riddled with holes of various sizes, the table at the drinking shop had developed an enormous crack, and the hearth in his house was covered with an almost fashionable pattern of dents and bumps, Jirobei was finally sure of the hardness of his fists. He had also discovered during this stage of the training the secret to throwing a punch. Punching straight out, piston-like, was about three times as effective as swinging from the side, he found. And it was about four times as effective if you rotated your arm one hundred eighty degrees as you punched. The fist would dig into your opponent’s body like the tip of a screw.
The following year he trained in the pine forest behind his house, the site of the former Kokubun Temple. There he punched at an old, dried tree stump that was shaped like a man and stood about five-and-a-half feet tall. Having pelted his own body with blows from head to foot, he had ascertained that the most painful spots were t
he solar plexus and the space between the eyebrows. He’d also contemplated experimenting with the area that is traditionally said to be the most sensitive and vital spot on a man’s body, but eventually ruled out low blows as being beneath a man of his dignity. He knew that the shins, too, were quite vulnerable to pain, but kicking was the only feasible means of attacking the shins, and Jirobei shrank from the thought of using his feet in a fight; such tactics struck him as cowardly and underhanded. No, he would concentrate exclusively on the solar plexus and the space between the eyes. With a long knife he carved on the stump triangular marks that corresponded to these targets and punched away at them day after day. “Aren’t you making a bit of a mistake? Or perhaps you’re joking. You’d look awfully funny with the tip of your nose all purple and swollen. It would take a hundred days to return to normal. I do think you’re making a mistake...” Then, suddenly, a shot between the eyes! A left to the solar plexus!
After a year of this training, the triangular marks on the stump were buried at the bottoms of two round depressions as deep as tea bowls. Jirobei took stock. Now I can hit the spot every time, he told himself—a hundred shots, a hundred bull’s-eyes. But that’s no reason to relax. My opponent won’t be standing still, like this stump. He’ll be moving... It was then that Jirobei’s eye was caught by the waterwheels that stood at virtually every bend in the road. Dozens of full-bodied, limpid streams, fed by the snows melting on Mount Fuji, babbled past the foundations and under the verandas and through the gardens of Mishima’s houses, and every night, on his way home from drinking, Jirobei would subjugate one of the slow-turning, moss-covered waterwheels that harnessed these streams, whacking away, one by one, at the sixteen revolving blades. At first it was hard to find the range, and he didn’t do much damage, but soon the sight of immobile waterwheels dangling their broken blades became common about the town.
Jirobei bathed himself frequently in the cold waters of the streams. Sometimes he dived to the bottom and crouched there, motionless. He was taking into consideration the possibility of accidentally slipping and falling into the water during a fight. It could happen, what with streams crisscrossing the entire town. As an added precaution he tied his cotton bellyband an extra inch tighter to guard against letting excessive amounts of saké into his stomach, knowing that if he got too drunk, his legs might unexpectedly fail him.
Three years had passed. Thrice the festival at the Great Shrine had come and gone. The training was complete. Jirobei looked more stolid and imposing than ever and was so muscle-bound that it took him a full minute just to turn his head to the left or right.
Relatives, being tied by blood, are quick to notice changes in one another. Ippei knew that Jirobei was up to something. He had no idea exactly what sort of training his son was engaged in, but he sensed that he’d become a man to be reckoned with. Setting in motion the scheme he’d cherished for so long, he arranged for Jirobei to be named his successor in the honorary post as head of the fire brigade. Jirobei, by virtue of his unaccountably grave and commanding demeanor, immediately earned the trust and allegiance of the fire fighters; they called him “Chief’ and treated him with the utmost respect, the sad upshot of which was that opportunities to challenge someone to a fight simply never presented themselves. Jirobei was disconsolate to think that at this rate he might go to his grave without ever having partaken in a brawl. Each night his arms, bulging with the muscles he’d acquired through his rigorous training, itched maddeningly, and he scratched at them in a wretched frame of mind. Finally, out of sheer deviltry and desperation, and in hopes of creating an occasion to display his powers, he had his entire back tattooed. The tattoo was of a blood-red rose some six inches across, around which were gathered five long, slender, mackerel-like fish that poked at the petals with pointed bills and were themselves encircled by a pattern of rippling blue wavelets that lapped at Jirobei’s ribs and spilled over onto his chest. So impressive was this tattoo that, far from exposing Jirobei to the insults and provocative comments he was prepared for, it merely served to spread his fame up and down the Tokaido Road, and soon he was a hero not only to the firefighters but to all the ruffians and layabouts in town. Now his prospects for a fight were nil, and it was more than he could bear.
But then, just when he’d all but given up hope, a ray of light appeared. There was in Mishima at that time a wealthy saké brewer named Jinshuya Joroku, the Shikamayas’ greatest rival and competitor. Joroku’s saké was cloyingly sweet and darkish in color, and he himself was no exception to the rule that a brewer resembles his saké. A blackguard and an incorrigible womanizer, he was unsatisfied with the four mistresses he already had and was doing all he could think of to increase the number to five. It so happened that the arrow of his desire described an arc that passed over the Shikamaya home and pierced the grass-thatched roof of the calligraphy teacher’s modest abode across the way. The calligraphy teacher didn’t give in easily to Joroku’s demands concerning his daughter. Such was his despair on hearing them, in fact, that he twice attempted hara-kiri and would have succeeded had he not been discovered and restrained by members of his household. Jirobei, having caught wind of this unjust state of affairs, awaited his chance, his muscles squirming and itching for action.
Three months later an opportunity arose. In early December, Mishima was visited by a rare heavy snowfall. Flurries began to fall at sunset, and soon enormous, peony-like flakes were floating down thick and fast. Some four inches of snow had accumulated on the ground when, all at once, the town’s six warning bells began to sound. Fire! Jirobei sauntered calmly outside. The house going up in flames was that of the tatami-mat maker who lived next door to Joroku. Balls of fire danced and whirled over the roof of the poor fellow’s house, and sparks billowed out like clouds of pinetree pollen, scattering far and wide; from time to time black smoke rose up like a tremendous, malevolent ghost, enveloping the entire roof; and the great flakes of snow, tinted with the bright colors of the flames, looked even more exquisite and precious as they fluttered down from the sky. When Jirobei reached the scene, the firefighters were engaged in an argument with Joroku. Joroku wouldn’t let them drench his house with water and demanded they knock down the tatami maker’s roof to snuff the flames and keep them from spreading. The firefighters, for their part, maintained that to do so would be in violation of the firefighters’ code.
“Joroku-san,” Jirobei said, stepping forward. He kept his voice as low and restrained as possible and spoke with something almost like a smile on his lips. “Aren’t you making a bit of a mistake? Or perhaps you’re joking. You’d —”
“I say!” Joroku interrupted him. “If it isn’t the young master Shikamaya! I’m only joking, of course. Ha, ha! Just having a little fun with the boys, you know. Go right ahead, let the water flow!”
It didn’t develop into a fight after all. There was nothing Jirobei could do but stand there gazing dumbly at the fire. Fight or no fight, however, the young chief once again saw his reputation grow as a result of this incident. For a long time afterwards the story was told among the firefighters of how fearsome, how like a very god, Jirobei had looked facing down Joroku that night, and how, as he stood in the glow of the fire, ten or more large snowflakes fell on his flushed, red cheeks and clung there without even melting.
On an auspicious day in February of the following year, Jirobei finished construction of a new house on the outskirts of town. The ground floor consisted of three rooms that measured six, four-and-a-half, and three tatami mats in size, and upstairs in the rear was an eight-mat room with a spectacular view of Mount Fuji. On an even more auspicious day in March, he brought his new bride, the calligraphy teacher’s daughter, to live with him. That night all the firefighters squeezed inside Jirobei’s new house to drink in celebration, and one by one as the night wore on they took turns entertaining the company with homespun party tricks and performances. It was morning before the last of them got up to deceive all the drunken and sleepy eyes with a magic trick involving a pair of saucers; when he was finished, a tiny splash of applause came from one corner, and with that the wedding banquet was brought to a close.
Jirobei was vaguely aware that things had turned out pretty well for him after all, and he passed each day in a mild sort of stupefaction. His father, Ippei, was also heard to mutter, as he tapped out the ash of his long, slender pipe: “Well, that’s one load off my mind.” But then there occurred a tragic event that not even Ippei, with all his clearheaded wisdom, could have foreseen. One night during the second month after the wedding, Jirobei was sitting at home with his wife, drinking the saké she poured for him, when he suddenly said: “I’m a hell of a fighter, you know. Here’s what you do when you’re fighting somebody: first you punch them between the eyes with a right, like this, then you slug ’em in the solar plexus with your left, like that.” The demonstration was only in jest, of course, and he scarcely touched her, but his bride slumped to the floor, dead. Apparently those were, indeed, effective spots to hit a person. Jirobei was arrested, charged with manslaughter, and sent to prison—punished for being all too skilled at his art.
Even in prison, that indomitable composure that one sensed about Jirobei prevented him from being abused or looked down upon by the guards and earned him the respect of the other inmates, who lost no time in recognizing him as boss of the cellblock. Seated upon his throne of several mats stacked one atop the other, with the rest of the convicts gathered at his feet, Jirobei would intone a mournful melody of his own invention, a melody that was not quite a song and not quite a chant:
With cheeks flushed red,
I whispered to the rocky crag:
“I’m tough, you know!”
The crag made no reply.
SABURO THE LIAR
Once upon a time, in the town of Fukagawa in old Edo, there lived a widower and scholar by the name of Haramiya K
oson, a specialist in Chinese religions. Koson had one child, whose name was Saburo. People in the neighborhood were wont to remark that it was just like a scholar to be so perverse as to name his only son Saburo, which is of course a name normally reserved for third sons. The fact that no one could explain what it was that made that particular act so typical of scholarly perversity was, it was said, precisely what made it so. Koson was not very highly thought of in his neighborhood. Word had it that he was exceedingly stingy—so stingy, in fact, that according to a persistent rumor he habitually regurgitated half his rice to re-use as paste.
It was as a consequence of this miserliness of Koson’s that Saburo’s lies first began to blossom. Until he was eight years old, Saburo never received a single sen of spending money, but was forced to pass his days memorizing sayings of the ancient Chinese sages. Sniffling his perpetually runny nose and muttering the aphorisms to himself over and over, he would walk about the house working nails loose from the walls and pillars of all the rooms. As soon as he’d accumulated ten nails, he’d take them to a nearby junk dealer and sell them for one or two sen, which he’d invest in deep-fried dough cakes. Later on, when the junk dealer informed him that he could get about ten times as much money for books, Saburo began stealthily making off with one volume after another from his father’s library. It was as he was stealing the sixth book that his father caught him. Tears streaming down his cheeks, Koson chastised his wayward son with three quick blows to the head. Then he spoke. “To whip you at greater length would only cause both of us to work up an appetite in vain. I shall therefore leave your punishment at this. Sit down.”
Saburo was forced to vow tearful repentance, and it was with this vow that his lies began.
That summer, he killed the next-door neighbor’s pet dog. The dog was a Pekinese. One night it began to raise a horrible racket: long, drawn-out howls, frantic, scream-like yaps, exaggerated, moaning wails—a full repertoire of ghastly cries that made it sound as if it were suffering the agonies of the damned. When it had carried on without pause for an hour or so, Koson spoke to his son, who was in the bed next to his, saying: “Go have a look.” Saburo had been lying there with his head raised, blinking and listening. He got up, slid open the rain shutters, and looked outside. The Pekinese, tied to the neighbor’s bamboo fence, was writhing on the ground. “Hold it down,” said Saburo. In response, the Pekinese began to make a show of rolling in the dirt and chewing hungrily at the fence, as if it had gone quite mad, then proceeded to yap even more shrilly than before. Its infantile mentality inspired in Saburo a burning hatred. “Hold it down, hold it down,” he muttered beneath his breath as he stepped into the garden, picked up a stone, and hurled it. The stone hit the Pekinese square in the head; it gave a short, piercing cry, spun its white, furry body about like a top, and dropped to the ground, dead. When Saburo had closed the rain shutters and got back in bed, his father asked in a sleepy voice what had happened. Saburo pulled the quilt up over his head and said: “It stopped barking. It appears to be ill. I shouldn’t be surprised if it dies within a day or two.”
During the autumn of that same year, Saburo killed a person. He pushed a playmate off the Kototoi Bridge into the Sumida River. He did it for no special reason; it was strictly on impulse—the sort of impulse that makes a man want to stick a pistol in his own ear and fire. The boy he pushed, the youngest son of a tofu peddler, moved his long, slender legs as he fell, taking three slow, waddling steps, as if trying to get a foothold on the air, then splashed through the surface of the water. When the current had carried the ring of ripples some yards downstream, a hand poked out from the center, clenched in a tight fist. Then it disappeared again. The ripples fell apart as they flowed along, and only when Saburo had watched the last of them vanish did he begin to wail at the top of his lungs. In response to his cries, people came running up and, looking at the spot Saburo pointed to as he sobbed, surmised what must have happened. One man who was particularly quick to jump to conclusions patted Saburo’s shoulder and said: “You did well, calling for help. Your friend fell in, did he? Don’t cry, we’ll save him. You did well!” From the crowd three confident swimmers stepped forward, raced one another into the water, and proceeded to display their rather remarkable aquatic skills. All three of them, unfortunately, were more concerned with how they looked to the crowd than with actually searching for the tofu-peddler’s son, as a result of which, when they finally did find him, he was already dead.