An Evening Arrival in Kyoto
by Natsume Sōseki
Translation copyright Richard Donovan
(Originally published in Translating Modern Japanese Literature, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019.)
Swift as a shooting star, the steam train has traversed 200 leagues of springtime landscape before shaking me off at Shichijō Station. As my heels strike the platform, sending up a chilly echo, the black hulk coughs up a shower of sparks from its black throat and roars off into the dark country.
Oh, but what a lonely place Kyoto is. The fields blooming with scarlet kadsura, the rivers with their ducks, the mountains Hiei, Atago and Kurama—all just the way they have been since ancient times, they are, Kyoto’s fields, rivers and mountains. And it is the same as one travels among these constant fields, rivers and mountains, past Ichijō, Nijō, Sanjō Avenues, and ever further south of the Imperial Palace, on down to Kujō and Jūjō Avenues: everything remains as it was. Were one to count off to the hundredth such avenue, or live a thousand years, Kyoto would assuredly remain as lonely.
Arriving in the spring chill of early evening, unceremoniously offloaded by the train before it runs on apace, I must cross this lonesome Kyoto, however cold and lonely I may be. I must cross from the south to the north—so far north that the town has run out, the houses have run out, the lamps have run out too.
“It’s a long way,” my host says after me. “A long way!” the acolyte calls ahead of me. I am shivering as I get into the rickshaw. When I left Tokyo, I hadn’t thought such a cold place in Japan existed. Until yesterday, it had felt as if fireworks were sparking off all the jostling bodies, as if my fevered blood were running rampant in its vessels, as if my sweat would ooze out of every pore of my body. Tokyo is a fervid place indeed. Having left such a scintillating capital and suddenly alighting in as ancient a place as Kyoto, I felt as if I were a stone baked by the sun in the height of summer that has dropped into a dark pool, a pool so far down in the green depths that it does not reflect the sky. I worried that the sudden loud burst of steam that escaped me might shake the quiet Kyoto night.
We three in our rickshaws—the man who said “It’s a long way”, the man who echoed him, and my shivering self—proceed in convoy up the narrow street, north and further northward. The quiet night is drowned out by the clanging of the wheels as we go. The clanging, baffled on either side by the narrow roadways, resounds to the open sky—kankararan, kankararan—and when we hit a stone, kakan, kakaran. It is not a melancholy sound; but it reverberates coldly. The wind blows from the north.
The houses crammed together along the narrow street are uniformly black. Every door without exception closed. Here and there under the eaves hang large paper lanterns, with the red characters for zenzai, red-bean soup. What might they be waiting for under the deserted eaves, these scarlet advertisements for zenzai? The chill spring night deepens. Who knows: perhaps Emperor Kanmu’s ghost will deign to appear at the last—when even the waters of Kamo River have dried up—to come and eat that soup.
Whether these lanterns for zenzai already stood out red under the eaves during Kyoto’s first emperor’s reign is a question for history. But red-bean soup and Kyoto—each with a thousand years of history—are at once utterly inextricable, and mutually indispensable. I know not whether Emperor Kanmu may have partaken of zenzai in antiquity, but I feel that fate has bound Kyoto, zenzai and myself together since before recorded history. I first came to Kyoto some fifteen or sixteen years in the past. That time Masaoka Shiki was with me.
Shiki and I arrived at an inn called Hiiragiya in Fuyachō district, and when we went out sightseeing in the Kyoto night, the first thing I saw was those large red lanterns for zenzai. Now that’s Kyoto, I thought on seeing them, for some reason, and now here we are in the fortieth year of the Meiji era and my impression is unwavering. Zenzai is Kyoto, and Kyoto is zenzai—my first impression remains my last.
Shiki is dead. Still I have yet to eat zenzai. The truth is, I don’t even know exactly what it is. Shiruko—sweet red-bean soup with mochi? Boiled azuki beans? Whatever the actual ingredients, they are nowhere to be seen—yet just a glance at those bold, sloppy red characters advertising the stuff is enough to transport me back to Kyoto in a flash. And to recall at the same time that—alas, Shiki is dead. He shrivelled like a dried-up loofah gourd and died—the lanterns still dangle from the dark eaves. I tuck my neck in against the cold and continue my traverse of Kyoto, south to north.
The clanging rickshaw—kankararan—startles Emperor Kanmu’s ghost as it races on. The acolyte in front rides on in silence. Nor does my host behind show any sign of speaking. The rickshaw pullers are intent on rushing north along the long, narrow street—kankararan! It is indeed a long way! The farther we go, the stronger the wind. The faster we run, the more I shiver. The acolyte took my lap blanket and umbrella for me after I was tossed out of the train at the station. Being deprived of my umbrella doesn’t matter as long as it doesn’t rain. But having lost my blanket in this cold, I regret splurging so much on it—twenty-two yen and fifty sen—as I was leaving Tokyo.
When I came with Shiki, it wasn’t this cold. I particularly remember us walking down some thronging street dressed to impress, Shiki in serge, I in my flannel uniform. Shiki had bought bitter natsumikan oranges somewhere, and passed me one, telling me to eat it. I peeled the orange and then tore off a segment and ate it, tore off another and ate it, wandering aimlessly until at length we found ourselves in a narrow alley just six feet wide. Houses lined both sides, and every house had a one-square-foot hole in its door. And from each hole came a voice saying hello. At first we thought nothing of it, but the further we went and the more holes we passed, the more the voices seemed to be addressing us in concert. And they were so vociferous that should we ignore them, I felt, hands would emerge from the holes to grasp at us. I turned back to Shiki in query, and he said it was a brothel. Still chewing on my orange, in my mind I drew a line roughly down the middle of the narrow lane, and walked a mental tightrope of disinterest as I marched along it. I thought I would be in serious trouble if hands were to emerge from the holes and grab at the seat of my trousers, for example. Shiki laughed at this. If he were to see me now, shivering without my confiscated blanket, Shiki would surely laugh again. But the dead, however much they may want to laugh, and the shivering, however much they may want to be laughed at, must want in vain.
The kankararan caravan veers left towards the approach to a long bridge, and then heads across it, passing over the faint white of the riverbed and then past a clump of unevenly arranged houses with what looks like thatched roofs. The rickshaw suddenly swerves to the side, stopping directly beneath a myriad of lanterns that light up a stand of large trees with a circumference of four or five arm-spans apiece. We have passed through the cold city only to end up in an equally cold place. I look up at the sky far above, and it is obscured by branches; in the depths of a patch in the heavens the size of a palm-width the stars emit a frigid glow. I get out of the rickshaw and wonder where on earth I am going to sleep.
“This is Kamo no Mori,” says my host.
“Kamo no Mori is our garden,” says the acolyte. I skirt around some of the huge trees, and then, retracing my steps, glimpse a light in an entranceway. I realise there is a house there.
Noaki-san, waiting in the entranceway, has a shaved head like a monk. So does the old man who pokes his head out of the kitchen. My host is a philosopher. The acolyte, a lay monk based here rather than at a temple, is a disciple of the Zen rōshi Kōsen Oshō. And the house is in the middle of the wood Kamo no Mori. Behind it is a bamboo grove. How their shivering guest, who has suddenly descended on them, feels the cold!
Yes, it has been fifteen, sixteen years since I came here with Shiki and found myself equating zenzai and Kyoto. Riding on the summer night’s full moon, wandering Kiyomizu Temple’s precincts, the colour of the obscure night recumbent like a floor covering before me; letting my eyes roam far into the hazy depths, abandoning myself to liquid, dreamlike fantasies on the countless points of red light—it was a period of life when I was well aware the buttons on my uniform were made of brass, but still I was drawn to gold. When we had the epiphany that brass was but base brass, we tossed our uniforms away and dashed out into the world stark naked. Shiki coughed up blood and became a newspaperman; I tucked up my kimono skirts and hightailed it to the western provinces. We both lived tumultuous lives. And at the peak of his tumult, Shiki turned to bones. Those bones moulder away to this very day. And even as he lies rotting there, he would surely never have guessed that Sōseki would renounce teaching and become a newspaperman himself. But if he’d heard that Sōseki had given up teaching and come to visit cold Kyoto, he would likely have asked if I remembered the time we climbed Maruyama hill. It would doubtless surprise him to hear I was living the quiet life as a newspaperman, spending my leisure time deep in the woods of Tadasu no Mori, along with a philosopher, a Zen acolyte, a young shaven-head, and an old shaven-head. He would surely scoff at how affected I’ve become. Shiki was the kind of man who liked to scoff at things.
The acolyte bids me take a bath. My host and the acolyte, together, unable to ignore my shivering, urge me into the bath. My teeth are chattering wildly as I plunge bodily into the limpid waters of the Kamo. Among all those who have taken the waters since antiquity, there can have been few who shivered so much as I did as I entered. When I emerge from the bath, I am advised to sleep. The young priest carries thick futons into a twelve-mat room. When I ask if they are clad in Gunnai silk, he replies that it is the thick silk cloth futo-ori, “brought in brand new for thee.” Though chastened I cannot reciprocate, his explanation reassures me, and I gladly accept the great hospitality behind this thoughtfulness.
They are as comfortable as can be, these two layers over me and the two under, but they remain mere futons in the end, and cannot keep out the winds of Tadasu no Mori—chilly, chilly they blow upon my shoulders. I cannot escape the cold—cold in the rickshaw, cold in the bath, and finally, unexpectedly, cold in the futon. Hearing from my host that Kyoto does not make night-clothes with sleeves, I feel that this city does its utmost to chill people to the bone.
In the middle of the night, the eighteenth-century clock on one of the staggered shelves in the alcove above my pillow chimes in its square rosewood case, resonating like ivory chopsticks striking a silver bowl. The sound penetrates my dreams, waking me with a start; the clock’s chime has ended, but in my head it rings on. And then this ringing gradually thins out, grows more distant, more refined, passing from my ear to my inner ear, and from there into my brain, and on into my heart, then from the depths of my heart into some further realm connected with it—until at last it seems to reach some distant land beyond the limits of my own heart. This chilly bell-ring perfuses my whole body; and the ringing having laid bare my heart and passed into a realm of boundless seclusion, it is inevitable that body and soul become as pure as an ice floe, as cold as a snowdrift. Even with the futo-ori silk futons around me, in the end I am cold.
A crow cawing atop a tall zelkova tree at daybreak shatters my dreams for the second time. But this is no ordinary crow. It doesn’t caw in the usual mundane way—its call is twisted into a grotesque cackle. Twisted too its beak, into a downward grimace, and its body hunched over. Myōjin, the resident deity of Kamo, may well have imposed his divine will to have it caw like that, so as to make me all the colder.
Shedding the futo-ori futons, shivering still, I open the window. A nebulous drizzle thickly shrouds Tadasu no Mori; Tadasu no Mori envelops the house; I am sealed in the lonely twelve-mat room within it, absorbed within these many layers of cold.
Spring cold—
Before the shrine,
The crane from my dreams
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(The above translation is taken from Translating Modern Japanese Literature, which was published in 2019 and is available from the publisher, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, or on sites such as Amazon. If you are interested in obtaining a copy at a discount, please contact Richard directly at donovanrichardn [at] hotmail.com.)