Lane Dunlop - Autumn Wind and Other Stories

For Ce Roser

Acknowledgments are due to the editors of the following magazines, in which these stories first appeared in slightly different form: Translation for "The Fox", "Mount Hiei", "Autumn Wind", "Bamboo Flowers" and "Borneo Diamond"; The Literary Review for "Flash Storm", "Along the Mountain Ridge", and "Ivy Gates"; Prairie Schooner for "The Garden", New England Review for "One Woman and the War" and "Grass"; Mississippi Review for "The Titmouse" and "Ugly Demons"; Michigan Quarterly Review for "Invitation to Suicide."

Kitsune 1909 by Nagai Kafu, 1959 Nagai Nagamitsu; Niwaka are 1916 by Satomi Ton, 1983 Yamauchi Shizuo; H eizan 1935 by Yokomitsu Riichi, 1947 Yokomitsu Shozo; Akikaze 1939 by Nakayama Gishu, 1969 Nakayama Himeko; Higara 1940 by Kawabata Yasunari, 1972 Kawabata Hite; Senso to hitori no onna 1946 by Hayashi Fumiko, 1951 Hayashi Fukue; Iwa one nite 1956 by Kita Morio; Shumatachi 1965 by Kurahashi Yumiko; Take no hana 1970 by Mizukami Tsutomu; Jisatsu no susume 1969 by Watanabe Jun'ichi

Published by Tuttle Publishing, an imprint of Periplus Editions (HK) Ltd., with editorial offices at 364 Innovation Drive, North Clarendon, Vermont 05759 U.S.A. and 61 Tai Seng Avenue #02-12, Singapore 534167.

Copyright 1994 by Charles E. Tuttle Publishing Company, Inc.
First Tuttle edition, 1994

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LCC Card No. 94-60314
ISBN: 978-1-4629-0309-2 (ebook)

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Contents

7

NAGAI KAFU 11
SATOMI TON 31
AKUTAGAWA RYUNOSUKE 54
JUICHIYA GISABURO
YOKOMITSU RIICHI 78
OKAMOTO KANOKO 95
NAKAYAMA GISHU 109
KAWABATA YASUNARI 127
SAKAGUCHI ANGO 140
HAYASHI FUMIKO 161
KITA MORIO 183
KURAHASHI YUMIKO 201
MIZUKAMI TSUTOMU 222
WATANABE JUN ' ICHI 237

253

Translator's
Preface

These stories span sixty years of twentieth-century Japanese literature. Between the bittersweet, nostalgic evocation of childhood in Nagai Kafu's "The Fox," set against a background of a still largely traditional Japan, and the alienated, thoroughly modern world of Watanabe Jun'ichi's "Invitation to Suicide" is a development comparable in range and scope to that of any world-class literature. During these years Japan, after centuries of seclusion, adjusted to its full-scale entry into the world, to the successive traumatic shocks of the Great Earthquake of 1923 and the catastrophic defeat of World War II, and to the phoenix-like revival of its economy.

Most of the writers represented in this selection are what might be called standard authors. Their work, all or some of it, continues to be in print decade after decade. Kawabata Yasunari, Japan's only Nobel Prize winner for literature, needs almost no introduction to Western readers; on the other hand, Juichiya Gisaburo, who is perhaps remembered for the one story included in this selection, must be all but unknown even to Japanese. The anthology includes the famous and the unfamiliar, writers known to English readers and others whose work has not been translated previously. Most of the stories themselves are new to English. Those that are not exist only in translations that have been out of print for so long as to be well nigh inaccessible to all but the most devoted student.

It may be said that the dominant tone of Japanese writing is one of characteristically understated sobriety. Whether this is due to the nature of the language, the Japanese temperament, or the realistic mode that has prevailed in the literature is beyond the ambition of this preface. But having once noted it, one must also note the variety of modulations this voice is capable of. In this selection alone are the poignant yearning for the past of Nakayama Gishu's "Autumn Wind," the buoyant cynicism of Sakaguchi Ango's "One Woman and the War," the sexual knowledgeability of Kurahashi Yumiko's "Ugly Demons"perhaps as many variations as there are writers. It is the translator's sincere hope that some of the pleasure afforded him by the perusal and translation of these stories will be conveyed to, and shared with, the reader.

The sound of dry leaves racing through the garden, the sound of wind rattlingthe paper doors.

One afternoon in my winter study, by a dim little window, as if in memory of the autumn-evening field where I'd parted from my lover some years ago, I was leaning lonelily against a brazier and reading a biography of Turgenev.

One summer evening, when he was still a child without knowledge of things, Turgenev wandered through his father's garden, densely overgrown with trees and shrubs. By the weedy edge of an old pond, he came upon the miserable sight of a frog and a snake trying to devour each other. In his innocent, childish heart, Turgenev had immediately doubted the goodness of God ... As I read this passage, for some reason I remembered the frightening old garden of my father's house in Koishikawa, where I was born. In those days, already more than thirty years ago, the canal of the Suido district flowed through fields of spiderwort like a rural stream.

At that time the vacant residences of vassals and lower-grade retainers of the old shogunate were coming on the market here and there. Buying up a group of them, my father built a spacious new mansion, while leaving the old groves and gardens intact. By the time I was born, the ornamental alcove posts of the new house had already acquired some of the soft luster of the polishing cloth. On the stones of the garden, which was just as it had always been, the moss grew deeper and deeper, and the shade of the trees and shrubs grew darker and darker. Far back, in the darkest part of those groves, there were two old wells, said to be vestiges of the original households. One of them, during a period of five or six years from before my birth, had been gradually filled in by our gardener, Yasukichi, with all the garden trash, such as dead pine needles, broken-off cryptomeria branches, and fallen cherry leaves. One evening at the beginning of winter, when I had just turned four, I watched Yasu at work. Having finished the job of getting the pines, palms, and bananas ready for the frost, he broke down the sides of the well, which were covered all over with mushrooms dried white like mold. This is one of my many frightening memories of the garden. Ants, millipedes, centipedes, galley worms, earthworms, small snakes, grubs, earwigs, and various other insects that had been asleep in their winter home, crawling out from between the rotten boards in great numbers, began to squirm and writhe slipperily in the cold, wintry gale. Many of them, turning up their dingy white undersides, died on the spot. With a helper whom he'd brought along, Yasu gathered the day's fallen leaves and dead branches together with the chopped-up boards of the well and set it all on fire. Raking in with a bamboo broom the insects and wriggling snakes that had begun to crawl away, he burned them alive. The fire made sharp, crackling noises. There was no flame, only a damp whitish smoke, which as it climbed through the high tops of the old trees, gave off an indescribably bad smell. The wintry wind, howling desolately in those old treetops, seemed to blow down dark night all through the garden. From the direction of the invisible house, the voice of the wet nurse was calling loudly for me. Abruptly bursting into tears, I was led by the hand by Yasu back to the house.