Longing and Other Stories, by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki ("Sorrows of a Heretic")

Jun'ichirō Tanizaki

Loging and

O er S tories

Translated by

Anthony H. Chambers & Paul McCarthy

2.

Sorrows of a Heretic Translated by Anthony H. Chambers

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hōzaburō knew very well that he was dreaming. Fluttering over his head, the feathers of a white bird, its wings outspread, shimmered like satin. Sometimes the fluttering came so close to his nose that he found it hard to breathe, and the pure, soft feathers brushed faintly against his eyelashes, like a light spring snow that has begun to thaw. I’m dreaming, he thought more than once. His awareness began to go numb as he seemed to be lured into the depths of a sweet, fragrant sleep; but he pulled back, and a renewed alertness flickered in his brain. He wanted to be tossed about for a while longer, drifting in this state of semiconsciousness between sleep and wakefulness. I could wake up now if I wanted to, he thought, but, gazing vaguely at the phantom bird, he allowed his soul to savor a mysterious joy and contentment.

The noontime sun of early summer poured through the window and sparkled in his eyes as he lay on his back. The sunlight had become the dream of a white bird; the sound of rustling feathers was probably a breeze. This ability to dream,

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even as he sensed things so clearly, seemed to him a rare and distinctive experience, and he cherished it as a precious state that could be achieved only by a person with his sort of morbid sensitivity. Wondering if he had the power to construct pleasing hallucinations of his own will and to his own liking, he set about replacing the image of a bird hovering before his eyes with the apparition of a captivating woman, whereupon the figure of the bird was gradually swallowed up into the dark background, and countless graceful bubbles arose, brimming with five-hued rainbows, like the soap suds that a child plays with; and on the surface of the largest bubble, he could vividly see the sublime, naked form of a beautiful girl appear and dance seductively, fluttering like smoke that is buffeted in a breeze.

Wonderful, wonderful! My brain is endowed with a mysterious power. I have the ability to weave whatever dreams I like. Maybe I can meet my lover in a dream. I wish I could doze like this forever. But the moment he formed this thought, Shōzaburō’s eyes opened wide. Feeling an incoherent sadness, like that of a child who has destroyed a soap bubble by blowing too hard, he quickly shut his eyes again to summon back the illusory figure that had flown off into the void; but neither the beautiful girl nor the white bird seemed likely to visit him again.

Sitting up wearily, he propped his elbows on the windowsill, rested his chin on his hands, and gazed at the scraps of cloud in the May sky, which he thought must be the original form of the phantom in his dream. In the summery, clear blue sky, a wind blew vigorously from the south and pushed the floating masses of cloud busily to the north.

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When there’s so much beauty in dreams and in the sky, why do I live in such a squalid world? Longing all the more for the phantom world he had just seen, Shōzaburō was overwhelmed by a feeling of helplessness.

Here in the house where he lived, in this second-floor room of a tenement on a cramped back alley in the Nihombashi Hatchōbori neighborhood of Tokyo, there was nothing to arouse a sense of beauty except the thrilling sky visible through the west-facing window. The four and a half mats; the sliding door of the closet; the walls, like those of a jail cell—the surfaces enclosing him on all sides were as soiled as the cheeks of a naughty boy eating cheap sweets; and the damp stench accumulating all year in the stuffy, low-ceilinged space reached the marrow of anyone who lived there. Shōzaburō feared that he would have gone mad and died long ago if he’d not been able to glimpse the sky through the room’s only window. It was unbelievable that this could be the dwelling of an advanced creature who prided itself on being the master of all creation.

But however filthy the human world might be, Shōzaburō had no desire to leap from the ground on which he lived and climb to a fictional paradise, like a child in a nursery tale, or to be delivered into a fantasy world. He wanted to seek pleasure while clinging to the real world, like a plant that grows from the soil, spreads its roots in every direction, and enjoys its life. This did not seem impossible to him. Though ugliness, shadows, and misfortune were never far from the wretched alley and ramshackle house where he lived, he couldn’t believe that the entire human world was as dark and cold as this. On the contrary: if he could acquire all the wealth and health he desired and live like a king, this world would no doubt be far

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more pleasurable and beautiful than any paradise or fantasy land. Sunk in adversity, he might resemble a man wishing for a delusional stroke of good luck; but this outcome was more realistic than trying to be reborn in paradise or in Huahsü, the perfect land of Chinese legend. Simply thinking this way kept him from despairing of his world or his life. Even if he couldn’t ascend to the status of a king, he wanted to be able to rise, little by little, from his present straits to a higher stratum of society. There was pleasure in climbing even one foot.

It angered him, though, that he had no way to achieve even that single foot of progress.

He too was a human being—why did he have to be born into poverty and start out from the lower depths of this society? Why had he been assigned a handicap by the gods of fate?

The more he thought about it, the more exasperated Shōzaburō became. It might be different if he were a stupid, tasteless, worthless person, suitable to be born and die in a squalid alley; but he was a promising young man, educated in the best schools, about to receive the title of bachelor of arts. He was different from the poor who wriggled like worms, satisfied with mere existence from one day to the next with no selfawareness. He possessed great genius. He was exceptionally gifted. But because his genius and gifts happened to flourish only in the arts, and he showed no talent for material success or wealth, he would go on like this forever, unable to break out of his adversity.

“Bah! They’re making a fool of me,” Shōzaburō said aloud, startling himself with the sound of his own voice. Suddenly aware of what he had said, he pulled himself together. Recently he’d gotten into the habit of speaking wildly to himself. It

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wouldn’t be so bad if these outbursts expressed coherent ideas that had occupied his mind for a long time; but sometimes a passing whim, unrelated to anything, suddenly rising from nowhere and crossing his brain from right to left, would burst from his mouth with no warning. Fortunately, there was usually no one around when this happened, because in some cases he came out with remarks that would be extremely embarrassing or frightening if anyone overheard them. These embarrassing or frightening words were always of a kind— erratic utterances that could only be taken for the delirious speech of a lunatic. Recently, the three most common were these: “Slay Kusunoki Masashige, destroy Minamoto no Yoshitsune.” 1 Second, he would call a woman’s name three times: “O-hama-chan, O-hama-chan, O-hama-chan.”

Finally, “Kill Murai, kill Harada.”

For some reason, these three were what he said to himself most often, and hardly a day passed that he failed to utter at least one of them. Each is short, but Shōzaburō would become

1. Kusunoki Masashige (1294–1336): Heroic supporter of Emperor GoDaigo during the period of the Northern and Southern Courts and a model of samurai loyalty. He figures prominently in the Chronicle of Great Peace (Taiheiki, fourteenth century). Minamoto no Yoshitsune (1159–1189): Samurai general who helped his half-brother Yoritomo defeat the Taira clan and consolidate power, as narrated in the Tales of the Heike (Heike monogatari, thirteenth century). His legend is the basis for many plays and works in other genres, including Tanizaki’s favorite kabuki play, Yoshitsune and the Thousand Cherry Trees (Yoshitsune sembonzakura). Tanizaki revealed his enduring interest in both Yoshitsune and the Southern Court in Arrowroot (Yoshino kuzu, 1931).

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aware only when he had completed one of them in full. In the first case, for example, he wouldn’t realize that he was speaking out loud if he stopped short of saying “destroy Minamoto no Yoshitsune” all the way to the end. He’d have no idea what he was doing until he pronounced “Yoshitsune,” and then, startled, he’d shut his mouth. In the case of the second utterance, he’d always say the name “O-hama-chan” three times. In the case of the third, no sooner would he say “kill Harada” than he’d begin to shudder with fright. He spoke quickly, at a normal pitch, like a person talking in his sleep.

Among the names he blurted out, “O-hama-chan” might be judged to have some connection with his thoughts, for this was the name of Shōzaburō’s first love. A fickle young man, he’d broken up with her two or three years before and never gave any thought to where she might be now or what she might be doing, so he was surprised to find himself saying her name so often; even so, he felt more of a connection with this name than with any of the others. He thought he’d put her out of his mind, but no doubt the image of his “first love” lurked deep in his consciousness, and some impulse would bring her name to his lips now and then.

Murai and Harada were the odd ones. These were the names of two of his middle-school classmates, but he didn’t recall having been particularly close to either of them. They’d simply been in the same year at school; he’d never even played with them. They were the handsomest boys in the class, however, and for a time their beauty moved Shōzaburō’s heart. In his youth, he’d been tormented by their images coming to him like phantoms in the night. For six months or a year, thoughts of these two good-looking boys tortured his mind every day;

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but his relationship with them had always been innocent and distant. They didn’t make friends with him, nor did he have the courage to approach them. He heard that when they’d graduated from middle school, Murai had returned to his home in the country and become a farmer, while Harada had entered a premed program at a higher school in Kyushu. The memory of these handsome boys, etched in his mind, grew dim as the years passed, and he’d almost forgotten their existence; but now, suddenly, memories of the two would flash through his mind like shooting stars, only to disappear before he had time to think. It was at the moment when they vanished that he’d say, “Kill Murai, kill Harada.”

It was one thing to speak their names, but he couldn’t understand the reason for “kill.” Since he felt neither affection nor resentment toward them, it should go without saying that he wouldn’t have the slightest desire to kill them.

Even if he had harbored some resentment, he was incapable of murder. Was this perhaps an omen that he might have occasion to kill them in the future, a sign that some terrifying bond from a former life existed between the boys and himself? He considered this possibility, but it was too absurd.

The very absurdity of these words aroused the most intense anger in him. What if he were to speak out in someone’s presence? How startled that person would be! How embarrassed, how appalled he himself would feel! If he came out with it on the street and was overheard by a detective, he’d be dragged into the police station and treated like a criminal or a lunatic.

“I’m not crazy!” No matter how much he screamed, who would believe him? If he were taken to a mental hospital and examined by a specialist, no doubt he’d be pronounced insane.

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And when it came to Kusunoki Masashige and Minamoto no Yoshitsune, his outburst was truly mystifying. He had no idea why these names would pop into his head. As a child he’d loved historical tales and pored over the Chronicle of Great Peace and Tales of the Heike again and again. Like any child, he’d worshiped Masashige and Yoshitsune. Later, though, he’d been drawn to Western thought and literature and gradually forgot his passion for Japanese history.

The ancient exploits of heroes like Yoshitsune and Masashige exerted not the slightest influence on his present life. For one thing, the words “slay Kusunoki Masashige, destroy Minamoto no Yoshitsune” were virtually meaningless. When he uttered these phrases, he’d blush violently and try to hide an embarrassment that made him want to crawl into a hole.

Why do I have this ridiculous habit? Maybe it’s a sign of severe neurasthenia.

He couldn’t believe that his actions arose from a sane mind.

He was somewhat mad—this he had to acknowledge. Fortunately, his fits of insanity were brief, and he was able to come to his senses quickly; for this reason he hadn’t attracted any attention so far.

For a while after this outburst, Shōzaburō scowled and lost himself in gloomy thoughts, but finally he sighed heavily and went slouching down the steep staircase. Beyond the two-mat entry was the shadowy, six-mat sitting room, where Tomi, his consumptive young sister, lay quietly against a pillow, her pale forehead showing above the edge of her bedclothes.

When Shōzaburō entered the room, the invalid turned her ghastly eyes, glittering in their deep sockets, to stare at her brother. There’s no saving her. She’ll be gone in a month or two.

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It may have been this awareness that recently had made Shōzaburō fear being glared at by his sister’s oddly clear, mysterious eyes and feel awkward when he needed to walk past her on the way to the toilet. Looking to one side, careful not to let their eyes meet, he’d hurry through to the veranda, open the door to the toilet, and show no sign of emerging anytime soon.

Just the other day, a friend in the medical school had warned him, “When you get a headache, watch out for constipation.”

Since then, he’d forced himself every day to drink hot water and move his bowels as often as possible. As a result, he was in the habit of visiting the toilet at least two or three times a day and squatting there for fifteen minutes at a time. He’d often lose himself in endless meditation, as if he’d forgotten what he was doing there.

This day too, as he squatted over the toilet, fragments of nonsensical thoughts rose in his mind and faded, rose and faded, one after another, until he found himself thinking of the Chinese poet Po Chü-i.

Wait a minute. Wasn’t I thinking of Po Chü-i while I was in the toilet yesterday too? he said to himself. Yes, definitely yesterday. And not only yesterday—I thought of Po Chü-i the day before yesterday at around the same time. I wonder why he comes to mind when I go to the toilet. What’s the connection between this toilet and Po Chü-i?

As he traced the flow of his thoughts upstream, the answer came to him. Two or three days before, a sheet of newspaper had lain on the floor, and his eyes had fallen on an article about Hakone Hot Springs. No doubt this was the connection. As he scanned the article, he recalled the bath at an inn

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he’d come upon as he wandered through the greenish mountain air. The inn had been constructed on the banks of a brook in a cool gorge; the tub overflowed with a steady, limpid stream of hot water. When he recollected how his body had relaxed as he lowered himself to the bottom of the tub, a line describing the pleasures of the bath, in the famous T’ang-dynasty poem Song of Everlasting Sorrow, had risen from the depths of an old memory: “Soft the waters of the hot spring; they rinsed her pale skin.” The poem, in turn, inevitably had made him think of its author, Po Chü-i. No doubt this sheet of newspaper had lain discarded on the floor for three days, his eyes had fallen on the article any number of times, and he’d repeated the process of association until it finally led him to Po Chü-i.

Judging from this experience, it would seem that his mental activity had been stuck in the same place for three days— that his mind responded to a stimulus by stubbornly nursing a single fancy. For Shōzaburō, at least, Bergson’s “uninterrupted stream of consciousness” did not flow unceasingly.

Hmm. Then maybe Bergson was right about “pure duration.”

For five or six minutes, his thoughts shifted to questions of psychology, and he tried to recall the point of Bergson’s Time and Free Will; but he’d forgotten almost everything and couldn’t summon up a single part of the argument. Nevertheless, he felt happy that he possessed an intellect capable of extending his thoughts, on occasion, to such lofty issues. When you come right down to it, he reassured himself, no one but me, in this backstreet tenement, among the hundreds of residents of Hatchōbori, knows about Bergson’s philosophy. If a person’s thoughts could be seen from outside as clearly as his actions, how the

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knowledge in my head would surprise the people of this neighborhood. He wanted to boast to someone: “Look! I’m thinking these splendid, complicated thoughts!”

“Mother, is he still in the bathroom?”

When he heard his sister’s voice, Shōzaburō finally staggered from the toilet. His legs were numb. Tomi went on grumbling and nagging while he wiped his hands at the washbasin on the veranda.

“He was in there so long! He goes to the toilet two or three times, and the day’s already gone! What a poor excuse he is for a ‘son of Edo.’ Can’t he make it quicker? Mother? Mother!”

Lying motionless all day, staring at the ceiling, his sister relieved the tedium by talking to her mother, the only companion she could turn to in the dark, lonely house. Frightened by the premonition that she’d be dead in a month or two, she’d feel sad, then anxious, and call out plaintively, “Mother, Mother?” Her mother, working in the kitchen, often couldn’t hear her. Growing fretful then, Tomi would cry, more and more impatiently, “Mother! Mother!”

“Okay, okay,” her mother responded nervously from beyond the shoji.

“Tsk!” the girl clicked her tongue. “You must be deaf,” she scolded. “I’ve been calling and calling. Surely you can hear me, even if you’re busy!” For a girl of fourteen or fifteen, she’d been frighteningly precocious, but since falling ill with an incurable disease she’d grown hypersensitive and as self-centered and willful as a small child. Moved to pity, her mother readily overlooked her selfishness.

Shōzaburō, however, detested his dying sister’s impertinence. When he heard her wield the creepy weapon of

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“dying” as she insulted their mother and him, any sympathy he’d begun to feel for her turned quickly to antipathy.

He often wanted to shout at her, “Idiot! A child shouldn’t talk like that. We keep quiet because we feel sorry for you, and you just get more spoiled and conceited. If you’re sick, you should act sick. Curl up under your bedclothes. I can’t stand a stuck-up person, even if they are about to die!” He even imagined that he wouldn’t rest until he gave her a good scolding, just once, before she died. But now, though the sick girl’s abusive comments about the toilet disgusted him and he glared at her savagely, Shōzaburō wilted and kept quiet when she glared back at him with her frightening, strangely calm eyes, as cold as the eyes of a Western femme fatale. If he argued with his sister now, the fixed stare of those strange eyes would be sure to linger in this room after her death and glare at him every night. It might have been different for someone else; but for the cowardly Shōzaburō, with his morbidly sensitive nerves, this was all too possible, all too certain. Of course it was wicked for a little girl to shout taunts at her mother and elder brother. A crime was a crime, and even a dying invalid should be scolded; but this invalid possessed a mysterious strength, so that it would be the scolder who was forced to bear the attacks of conscience. Knowing this, Shōzaburō had no choice but to restrain himself, however maddening the situation might become.

Since no one would converse with her, the invalid seemed to lose interest in talking and soon fell silent, as if she were short of breath. Her blinking, glittering eyes followed her brother as he walked past the bed. Avoiding her gaze, he reached the bottom of the stairs, then retraced his steps and,

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with some trepidation, slid open the closet door next to where she lay.

“Why are you opening that? What do you need?” she asked sharply, poking her nose in where it did not belong.

“Do you remember the gramophone Mother borrowed from the Nihombashi house? Did we return it already?”

Shōzaburō made an effort to pose this question gently, with his head inside the moldy closet.

“We haven’t returned it. What are you going to do with it?

It’s not in there.”

“I’m thinking of taking it upstairs. Where is it?”

Pulling his face out of the closet, he looked around the room. A square object, resting on a striped cloth on top of a bureau against the far wall, appeared to be the gramophone.

“You can’t just drag it away! O-yō-chan lent it to me, you know. She’ll blame me if you’re rough with it and scratch a record or something.”

“It’s all right if I borrow it for a little while, isn’t it? I won’t scratch anything, don’t worry.”

“Mother! He’s taking the gramophone!” Shōzaburō casually lifted the machine from the bureau and began fiddling with it.

“Shōzaburō, if O-tomi asks you to stop, you should stop.”

His mother emerged from the kitchen, where she’d been doing the laundry, with her sleeves still tied back and her hands covered with suds. “O-yō-chan treasures that gramophone and didn’t want to lend it to us because she was afraid it’d get scratched, but O-tomi wanted to listen to music, so I insisted and borrowed it for her. A roughneck like you doesn’t even know how to use the needle. What do you think you’re going

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to do if you force it and break something? Nobody in this house has touched the thing except O-tomi, not even your father or me.”

O-yō was the daughter of Shōzaburō’s uncle. While Shōzaburō’s immediate family watched its fortunes decline day by day, his uncle had steadily grown richer over the past ten years and now operated a fine general store on the main street in Nihombashi. It was this uncle who had helped pay for Shōzaburō to attend the College of Humanities for the past four or five years, and who’d covered O-tomi’s medical expenses ever since she took to her bed in the spring of the previous year; and yet, though they benefited from his support, the Hatchōbori household barely managed to get by.

Already six months had passed since O-tomi’s mother, at the invalid’s request, had gone to Nihombashi to borrow O-yō’s gramophone.

“O-yō-chan, I’m sorry to ask, but would you lend us your gramophone for a few days? O-tomi is lonely and asked me to come borrow it from you.”

“Oh, yes, that’s fine. Please take it.” O-yō reluctantly agreed, but she deliberately hid her favorite records— including Kosaburō, singing “Tsuna’s Mansion,” and Rinchū’s “Ferryboat.” 2 After explaining how to position the needle, how to wind the spring, and so on, she finally surrendered the machine.

2. Yoshizumi Kosaburō, 1876–1972, a nagauta singer; Tokiwazu Rinchū, 1843–1906, a singer of Tokiwazu ballads. Nagauta are narrative ballads, a major component of kabuki performances.

“These three early works by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki explore family bonds—the mother-son relationship in particular—using different angles and styles: dreamy and lyrical, painfully realistic, tragically fraught. In stories rendered with elegant precision by Anthony H. Chambers and Paul McCarthy, Tanizaki masterfully probes the complexities of the human heart.”

—JULIET WINTERS CARPENTER , translator of Minae Mizumura’s An I-Novel “Among the most original and insightful novelists of twentieth-century world literature, Tanizaki creates richly idiosyncratic characters embodying the paradoxes of modern life. As deftly translated by veteran Tanizaki specialists Chambers and McCarthy, his short fiction will fascinate and delight readers.”

—KEIICHIRO HIRANO , award-winning author of A Man “Chambers and McCarthy capture well distinctly different voices in these early Tanizaki stories exploring three modes of storytelling. Lyrical dream-memory, naturalistic fictionalized self-revelation, and ironic commentary on conventional social morality presage the author’s later writing. The afterword draws on the translators’ deep knowledge of Tanizaki’s work to enhance our understanding.”

—PHYLLIS LYONS , translator of Tanizaki’s In Black and White: A Novel “Vivid yet hazy, nostalgic and soothing yet disturbing, Tanizaki’s tale of longing for the mother is made available in this beautiful translation, together with two other strikingly different ‘mother’ narratives. This book expands and enriches the Tanizaki corpus in English.”

—TOMOKO AOYAMA , author of Reading Food in Modern Japanese Literature

Jun’ichirō Tanizaki (1886–1965) was born in Tokyo and lived there until the 1923 earthquake, when he moved to western Japan. His many classic novels include Quicksand, Some Prefer Nettles, The Makioka Sisters, and The Key. At the time of his death, he was on the shortlist for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Anthony H. Chambers is professor emeritus of Japanese at Arizona State University.

He has translated many works by Tanizaki, including Naomi (1985), and he is also the translator of Ueda Akinari’s Tales of Moonlight and Rain (Columbia, 2006).

Paul McCarthy is professor emeritus of contemporary culture at Surugadai University.

His many translations of Tanizaki include A Cat, A Man, and Two Women (2015), and he has also translated other works of Japanese literature, including Atsushi Nakajima’s The Moon Over the Mountain: Stories (2011).

Chambers and McCarthy’s recent cotranslations of Tanizaki’s short fiction include Red Roofs and Other Stories (2016) and The Gourmet Club (2017).

Cover image: Evening Cool, 1925, Ito Shinsui (1898–1972), Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Robert O. Muller Collection, Bridgeman Images.

Cover design: Lisa Hamm C O L U M B I A U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S / N E W YO R K PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

ISBN: 978-0-231-20215-2

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