Читать книгу Heredity of Taste - Soseki Natsume - Страница 10

Under the influence of the weather, even the gods lose their reason. "Let's exterminate mankind! Let loose the ravenous dogs!" was the cry that resounded from the heavens to the depths of the Sea of Japan and made it rage in all directions. The cry penetrated as far as Manchuria. As soon as they heard it, the Japanese and Russians responded by creating an immense slaughterhouse in the plains to the north of the Continent of Asia, stretching over more than 400 kilometers. So, under the skies, great hordes of ferocious dogs appeared and sped across the vast expanse. These four-legged bullets tore endlessly through the air, scenting fresh flesh. Delirious in their joy, the gods shouted to the dogs "Drink the blood!" Tongues darted out effortlessly like flames and lit up the dark earth with their brilliance. The sound of blood spurting down the beasts' throats echoed across the plains. Then the gods, walking on the edge of the black clouds, clamored "Devour the flesh!" again and again. "Devour the flesh! Devour the flesh!" The dogs all reared up, barking with one voice. Then, without further delay, they tore limbs to pieces with sinister crunching sounds. Opening their deep jaws from ear to ear, snatching at the trunks of the bodies and tugging at them from all sides, they stripped the skin from the bones. At last, when the gods saw that all the flesh had been devoured, their terrifying voices pierced through the clouds that covered the skies: "When you have done with the flesh, go on to the bones and suck them dry! Now, suck the bones!" Dog's teeth are better suited to gnawing bones than to devouring flesh. Created by demented gods, the creatures are equipped with instruments perfectly adapted to carrying out their insane commands. Their teeth have been especially designed by the divinities for that purpose. Of that there can be no doubt. "Make noise! Make noise!" ordered the gods. The dogs planted their fangs with brute force into the bones. Some bones were shattered so that the beasts could eat the marrow. Others were reduced to tiny pieces and made shapes on the earth that might have been paintings. The bones that the dogs' teeth did not manage to destroy were used to sharpen their fangs....

I was lost in my accustomed reverie. As I reached Shimbashi station,¹ I told myself that such images sent shivers down my spine. Paying attention to what was going on around me, I saw that there was a large crowd on the square in front of the station, although an access path of about four meters² leading to a triumphal arch,³ had been left free. From both sides people pressed forward in a long line, which it seemed impossible to pass through. What was going on then?

Among the crowd I noticed a suspicious-looking man wearing a silk hat on the back on his head, his ears fortunately preventing his headdress from falling off. Another individual was wearing traditional trousers, which seemed too tight or uncomfortable for him, because he was continually gazing at his silk twill outfit as if it belonged to someone else. A third fellow afforded a very singular spectacle. He was dressed in a frock coat, that I freely acknowledge, but he had put on white canvas shoes and gloves, which he made no attempt to conceal and which in fact he was displaying to all and sundry. A score of people brandished conveniently sized banners. The majority of these bore inscriptions in white characters on a mauve background, but on others someone had prettily emblazoned ebony inscriptions on white fabric. To find out why all these people were assembled there, I started to read the banners and was struck by the one nearest to me, which proclaimed, "The volunteers of the Renjaku⁴ district celebrate the triumphal return of Mr Kimura Rokunosuke." I understood then for the first time that an enthusiastic welcome was being organized in honor of somebody; and even the gentlemen I had just seen, decked out in the strange accouterments, acquired a certain distinction in my eyes. Moreover, I quickly began to regret having imagined that war had been provoked by gods who had descended into madness and that soldiers were going to the battlefield to be devoured by dogs. In fact, I was going to the station because I had an appointment to meet someone. With this crowd amassed all about me, I realized that to get there I would have to walk on my own along the path that split the impenetrable throng. Surely no one here was capable of fathoming those poetic visions that had been in my mind a moment before. Even under normal circumstances I am uncomfortable about walking alone in the road, attracting glances and feeling people's eyes concentrated on my little self. But if they knew that I had imagined their loved ones as leftover dog food, it was safe to assume they would be annoyed. With such thoughts in my mind, I had to fight against unease and reluctance beneath my air of nonchalance as I forged a path to the stone steps of the station.

Once I had reached the building, the next problem was to get inside it. Given the number of people who had turned up to welcome the combatants, it was no easy task to get to the appointed place, and when I did finally arrive at the first-class waiting room I found that the person I had arranged to meet there had not yet come. Near the fireplace, an officer in a red cap was talking enthusiastically, his sword clicking continuously. Next to him were two silk hats, side by side. Above one of them there was a widening ring of cigar smoke. In a corner at the other end of the room, a woman was talking to a fine looking lady of about fifty years of age, whispering so quietly that their conversation could not have been overheard by someone sitting next to them. A man in a traditional "haori" cotton⁵ jacket, with his cap sideways on his head, went up to the two ladies and told them that they could not buy platform tickets because the area beyond the ticket gate was already full of people. He must have been their servant. People in the crowd who had grown tired of waiting were gathered around tables in the center of the room, leafing through newspapers and magazines and rolling them up to kill time. Very few were reading seriously. The expression "leafing through" describes what they were doing perfectly, I think.

The man I was meeting still had not arrived so, bored with waiting, I decided to take a short walk outside. Just then, however, a bearded man walked into the room and said as he passed in front of me, "There is not much longer to wait—the train is expected to arrive at 14.45."

I looked at my watch and saw that it was half past two. So in just quarter of an hour's time, I would be able to see the triumphal return of the soldiers. With apologies for the diversion, I must tell you in passing that people like me, who spend most of their time in libraries, do not generally have the opportunity to wait at Shimbashi station to welcome home combatants. Considering that it would be a good thing to do, I decided to go and watch. As I left the waiting room, I noticed that the people in the station enclosure had formed into queues, as they had done in the road, and that some Westerners who had come to watch the ceremony were now mingling with the crowd. As even Westerners were participating I, a subject of the Emperor, must surely be there to welcome home the soldiers. Telling myself that I really had to go and shout "Banzai!" I slipped into the crowd and joined the queue.

"Have you come here to welcome home a relation too? I was really frightened of being late and came here without any lunch. I've been waiting for two hours."

However hungry this person appeared, he seemed to be in good shape. At that moment, a lady of about thirty arrived and asked a little anxiously, "Will the soldiers who have returned in glory to the Mother Country all pass through here?" The earnest manner in which she spoke to us communicated her deep anxiety that she might miss someone who was dear to her.

The man with the complaining stomach answered re-assuredly, "Yes, they will all pass through here, without exception! So you will surely have to stand here for another two to three hours." He spoke with great confidence, but did not go so far as to add that she would have to wait with an empty stomach.

A French novelist has compared the whistle of a train to an asthmatic whale. Just as I was remembering this very appropriate description, the train twisted into the station like a snake and vomited out five hundred hearty-looking people on to the platform.

Someone stretched out his neck and shouted, "The train has arrived, hasn't it?"

"What's the matter?" asked our hungry colleague, "We're all right if we stay here. No problem!" And maintaining his imperturbable calm he showed no intention of moving. To listen to this man, it seemed that it didn't matter whether the train arrived or not. He was phlegmatic in spite of his hunger pangs.

Shortly afterwards, the cry of "Banzai!" erupted on the platform one or two hundred meters in front of us. The shout passed in a wave from one person to another until it came to me.

"What's the matter? No problem, n...."

The people lined up on either side of me shouted in unison a "Banzai!" that muffled the rest of this utterance from our starving friend. The shouting was still going on when a general, giving a military salute, passed in front of me. He was a short man, with a tanned face and sporting a pepper-and-salt beard. The people at my side, seeing that the general was leaving, once again shouted "Banzai!" Now, it may seem strange but I had never once in all my life shouted "Banzai!" It was not that, as far as I can remember, anyone ever told me not to. Nor was it because I disapproved of it—obviously there is nothing objectionable about it. But, impeded by this lack of experience, now that I was on the point of crying out "Banzai!," no sound came out of my mouth, as if I had a pebble stuck in my windpipe. Whatever I did, the "Banzai!" remained stuck in my throat, noiseless; however hard I tried, I could make no sound. Nevertheless, I had determined some time in advance that a sound would indeed come out of my mouth. In fact, I had been telling myself as I waited that it would be best if the opportunity would present itself as soon as possible. I was not the man next to me; but I found it reassuring to insist to myself that there was no problem. As soon as the asthmatic whale had bellowed, I had held myself in readiness for the moment that was to come, and when the people surrounding me had shouted so loudly, I tried instantly to join in. In fact, it is strictly true that the "Banzai!" had started to rise from the depths of my throat, but the general had passed at the very moment it reached my mouth. And then I saw his tanned face and his pepper-and-salt beard and my "Banzai!" was stillborn. Why?

How could I know why? To understand something and identify the precise reason for it, we need to reflect calmly on the event after it has happened. It is only by going over the facts and analyzing them that we can arrive at an understanding of them. If I had known why the cry would be strangled in my throat, well, I would have taken steps at the outset and made sure that my "Banzai!" did not stick in my gullet. If it were possible to address human actions in that way, how peaceful human history would be! It must be said that my "Banzai!" had been blocked by something transcendent, beyond the scope of my right of intervention. At the same time as the "Banzai!" was blocked, spasms difficult to describe shook my breast and two tears rolled down my face.

Perhaps the general had a swarthy face from birth? But most people who have endured the winds from the Liatong⁶ peninsula, or experienced the Moukden⁷ rains or been burned by the sun at Shu he,⁸ come back darker skinned than they left. Someone whose complexion is naturally pale will become browner. It is the same with a beard. A few white strands will probably appear in a black beard once its owner has left for the front. Those of us who were looking at the general for the first time, had no way of drawing a comparison between what he had been before and what he was now. Presumably his wife and daughters, who had anxiously counted the days and nights, would be surprised by what they saw. War, when it does not kill people, ages them. The general was extremely thin, but perhaps his thinness was attributable to the cares he had endured. The only aspect of his physique that could not have changed from what it was before he left for the front was his height. People like me who live with their noses in books are like hermits, withdrawn from the world, and we know nothing of what is happening beyond our places of work. This is not to say that I do not ordinarily read newspapers or express my views on the war poetically. However, the imagination is limited to fantasy, and the newspapers, however intently we read them every day from front to back, end up as waste paper. Thus, when there is a war, we do not genuinely feel as if it is really taking place. For a carefree person like me, fortuitously engulfed in the crowd that invaded the station, what most struck me was that face burned by the sun and that beard tinted with frost. I have never seen war with my own eyes, but when the consequences had furtively passed in front of me, or, more precisely, a fragment of the consequences, and moreover a living fragment, under the influence of that fragment I could see very clearly in my mind's eye the post-combat scenes on the plain of Manchuria.

Furthermore, all around that little fragment, which we can consider as an image of the war, were the cheers of the people shouting "Banzai!" This was nothing more than the echo of the war cries that had resounded on the Manchurian battlefield. The meaning of "Banzai!," if we take the literal interpretation of the Chinese characters that comprise it, is "May you live for a thousand years!" When a war cry sounds, on the other hand, its form and meaning differ singularly. The war cry is a short and simple "Aaah!" Unlike "Banzai!," it has no particular meaning, but just because it has no meaning does not prevent it from having an extreme and deep significance. There are different kinds of human voices. Some are piercing, others harsh, some clear, some deep. The linguistic structures and inflections they express are equally varied. For 23 hours 50 minutes of every 24 hours people use words that have a precise meaning. Whatever "domain," whatever field of knowledge or activity, whether it is clothing or food, negotiations or deals, greetings or trivial gossip, everything can be expressed vocally. Ultimately, it could even be argued that a domain does not exist if nobody is talking about it. But people do not usually utter sounds that make no sense and do not refer to a particular domain. In purely economic or utilitarian terms, however often we may utter a particular sound, we will be wasting our vocal energy if it has no recognizable meaning. Only in extreme situations are we forced to try to make ourselves understood through apparently meaningless sounds which needlessly assault the eardrums of innocent people. The war cry is a vocal distillation of the emotions of someone in a critical situation or threatened by great danger. It is a natural cry of the deepest sincerity which rises straight up from the depths of the diaphragm when a man, his whole body trembling, balances dangerously on a tensed metal wire, hovering between life and death, between this free world and hell. When someone yells "Help!" the sincerity of his cry is clearly expressed in the word. The howl "I am going to kill you!" is clearly not without credibility, but precisely because the words have a meaning, the degree of certainty is reduced. As long as we retain sufficient discernment to use words that make sense, it cannot be said that we are uttering truth straight from the heart, unalloyed with anything else. Moreover, there is not the slightest crumb of humanity in a war cry. The war cry is "Aaah!" In a war cry there is no sarcasm or common sense. It contains no good or evil. It is as devoid of falsehood as it is of any attempt to manipulate. It is, from beginning to end, only "Aaah!" The emotion that it crystalizes, explodes and sends out shock waves in all directions; that is what causes this "Aaah!" to resonate. It has not that sense of sinister augury conveyed in expressions like "Banzai!," "Help!," or even "I am going to kill you!" In other words, "Aaah!" is mind; "Aaah!" is soul; "Aaah!" is humanity; "Aaah!" is truth. And I think that it is only when we are able to hear this truth expressed simultaneously by tens, hundreds, thousands and tens of thousands of people that we can appreciate the supreme, unfathomable and infinite dimension of it. The fresh tears that rolled down my face when I saw the general were perhaps a reaction to this sense of a supreme truth.

After the general, two or three officers passed in front of us, sporting the new tan-colored uniform. They had apparently come to meet the general, judging from their expressions, which were very different from his. I have known from childhood, because I have heard it so often, that saying of Mend us,⁹ "the dwelling changes the attitude of the mind," but now, seeing how much the faces of those returning from the war differed from the faces of those who had stayed in the city, I felt I understood it more acutely than ever before. I wanted to see the general's face once again, for good or evil, and I stood on the tips of my toes—but in vain! I could see only a crowd of several tens of thousands of people, gathered outside the station and shouting war cries so loudly that I thought they would shatter the station windows. The crowd all around me finally broke the ranks it had formed and headed in a mass towards the main entrance. It seemed to me that the people shared my desire to see the general again. I, too, pushed by the black wave, was carried three or four meters in the direction of the stone steps, but when I got to this point I could not go any further. At such times—when, for example, I am leaving a Yose¹⁰ show by a narrow doorway, or have to take a tram to meet someone, or must buy a railway ticket at a busy station, in fact whenever I have to compete with other people in a crowd—at such times my nature counts against me and I always end up at a disadvantage. More often than not on such occasions I end up last, well behind everyone else. The present case was no exception—I was very easily passed by the other people. It was not just that I allowed myself to be overtaken in a normal way: I was effectively relegated to the back and that was really depressing! If, at a funeral reception, I don't reach out assertively and don't manage to get my rice with red beans¹¹ cooked, it doesn't matter to me. However, to fail to contemplate a representative of the vitality and energy that determine the destiny of the Japanese empire, that was really a shame! One way or another, I was determined to see the general. Shouts of "Banzai!" resounded everywhere; they filled the air and assaulted my eardrums with the power of great waves breaking on the rocks. The noise became unbearable. I had to see what was going on. Suddenly, I had an idea. The previous spring, I was making my way along a street in the Azabu¹² district when I heard laughter coming from a large house surrounded by a high adobe wall. It sounded as if a lot of people in there were having a good time. Was it because my stomach was giving me trouble that day that I wanted to have a look and find out what was going behind the wall? Yes, I am sure that this sudden desire originated from the state of my stomach. If it had not been for my stomach, such a stupid notion would certainly not have entered my head. But whatever the reason, when you want to see something, you want to see it. And that wish will be as steadfast or as transient as the reason behind it. Anyway, as I have just said, people were laughing on the other side of the wall, and, in the absence of any hole in the wall, I could see no way of satisfying my desire to know what was going on. When circumstances make it seem impossible for us to see what we want to see, the desire just gets stronger. Silly though it may seem, I was firmly resolved not to go on before I had seen inside. However, to go into a house uninvited would be to act like a thief. On the other hand, I was even more perturbed at the thought of having to ask permission to go in. It was disagreeable to reflect that my curiosity to see what was going on would either cause annoyance to the people living there or damage my reputation. I could think of no good stratagem to achieve my aim, other than surveying the premises from the top of a nearby hill or from a hot-air balloon. But neither of these methods seemed very practical under the prevailing circumstances. Well! The only way to solve the problem was to fall back on my own resources. I would resort to the magical technique of the high jump that I had practiced in high school. I would jump up and try to see over the wall: this seemed to me an ingenious plan. Luckily, there was no one else in the street, and anyway, if there had been someone, they would have had no reason to complain. No sooner said than done—I leaped into the air with all the power my legs could bestow. My training produced a remarkable effect. Not only my neck, but my shoulders appeared above the wall, as I had expected. I stared with all my concentration to make sure I didn't miss this great opportunity to satisfy my curiosity. "There, that's certainly where it's coming from!" I said to myself as I saw in a flash four women playing tennis. As if someone had told them to expect me, they all greeted my leap into the air with a loud burst of laughter. With an exclamation of surprise I fell back heavily on to the ground I had just departed from.