discussion post - Author of the Week: Modernist, Post-Modernist, and Post-Colonial Literature and Visual Memories

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Scenes of the Mind X

Kajii Motojirō

The literary career of Kajii Motojirō, which spanned a few pro- ductive years between 1925 and 1932, was constrained by financial dif- ficulties and cut short by tuberculosis. The task of writing was such an ordeal that his oeuvre amounts to no more than about twenty fully real- ized short stories. Yet despite the obstacles he faced, Kajii developed a voice and style admired for its polish and inventiveness. More important, his willingness to engage in formal literary experiments that chronicle and celebrate the liberating powers of the imagination makes him a truly rep- resentative figure of Japanese modernism.

“Scenes of the Mind” displays for us the techniques of style and the themes that distinguish Kajii’s art. The protagonist, Takashi, is a flaneur— the kind of peripatetic urban stroller common to modernist fiction. The difference in Kajii’s delineation of this character type is that Takashi is dispossessed and alienated by poverty and disease, a man forced by his situation to find solace and release in the creative powers of his mind. Still, such liberation comes at a price, for the reliance on imaginative escape intensifies his feelings of isolation from society. The very conditions of his existence divide the world into radically separate and irreconcilable spheres: one illuminated by hopeful imagination, the other darkened by acute awareness of the inescapable tragedy of life.

“Aru kokoro no fūkei” by Kajii Motojirō (1901–1932), 1926. Translated by Dennis Washburn. This translation is based on Remon, Aru kokoro no fūkei (Ōbunsha, [1972] 1974) (4th ed.). This story is also in Kajii Motojirō zenshū (Chikuma shobō, 1999) vol. 1, 19–105.

Co py ri gh t @ 20 13 . Un iv er si ty o f Ha wa ii P re ss .

Al l ri gh ts r es er ve d. M ay n ot b e re pr od uc ed i n an y fo rm w it ho ut p er mi ss io n fr om t he p ub li sh er , ex ce pt f ai r us es p er mi tt ed u nd er U .S . or a pp li ca bl e co py ri gh t la w.

EBSCO : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 1/13/2019 9:43 PM via RASMUSSEN COLLEGE AN: 750887 ; Yiu, Angela.; Three-Dimensional Reading : Stories of Time and Space in Japanese Modernist Fiction, 1911-1932 Account: s9076023.main.ehost

Scenes of the Mind 51

Like many of Kajii’s other stories, “Scenes of the Mind” reflects the anxieties and bouts of depression the author himself experienced as a result of personal circumstances. Yet his stories go far beyond autobio- graphical explorations of an individual’s state of mind to touch on more profound paradoxes that define the human condition—that we are beings bound by mortality, yet capable of imagining the eternal; that we can construct perfect ideals even as we live in a world marred by injustice and disorder; that we can recognize our common bonds, especially our shared mortality, even as we remain essentially isolated and alone. Kajii plumbs the inner recesses of subjective consciousness, but in a way that ultimately dissolves the individual subject. His art is not one of mere self- expression, but of transcendence achieved through the transformational power of literary language.

This story was first published in the coterie magazine Aozora, August 1926.

Takashi stood at the window of his room and stared out at the slumber-ing street. All the other windows were dark, since no one else was up, and the late-night silence was like a corona enveloping the streetlamps. The sharp, raspy chirring of gold bugs echoed intermittently.

The district was a complex labyrinth that didn’t see much traffic even in the daytime—the kind of place where the innards of fish or the bodies of dead mice might lie undisturbed for days. Ramshackle houses lined both sides of the street. One could see traces where they had been weathered by the wind. The fading dark, reddish brown paint and the crumbling fences of rough plaster created the impression that the peo- ple who resided there were leading lives as limp and lethargic as an old, worn-out hand towel. If the street that Takashi’s window overlooked were a dining table, then his room would be the seat occupied by the master of the house.

From time to time he could hear the pendulum on a wall-clock through a crack in the door. He could see the wind blowing darkly through

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some trees in the distance . . . then, a moment later, a nearby oleander tree began to sway in the depths of the night. Takashi stared intently into the scene before him. Each time the oleander swayed, the overhangs of the houses, which floated up dimly white in the darkness along the street, moved in or out of his line of sight, disappearing behind the branches, then reappearing. Takashi sensed that once more the vague, uncertain fancies he harbored in his mind would venture forth. Crickets were chirp- ing. The scent of withering plants somewhere close to him came wafting up faintly.

One time an acquaintance who was visiting him said to Takashi, “Your room smells like escargot.”

Another person told him, “You know, it doesn’t matter where you live. You make any room feel dark and gloomy.”

His futon bedding was spread out, crammed in amidst a messy clut- ter . . . a cheap kettle, the kind used for picnics, clogged with the dregs of black tea leaves . . . various books pulled out of their cardboard covers and tossed about haphazardly . . . scraps of paper. Like a gray heron, Takashi would sleep there during the day. Whenever he was awake, he could hear the sound of a school bell ringing in the distance. Then, in the evening, just when others were settling in to sleep and everything was growing still, he would come to the window and stare out.

His fancies, passing by like shadows in a thick fog, would gradually take shape and become distinct.

The scene outside the window repeatedly dissolved and re-formed before his eyes. One moment it looked completely familiar to him. The next it seemed utterly strange. Then another moment passed. He was no longer able to distinguish between the scene of the late-night street as it really was and the scene as he imagined it. The oleander standing there in the pitch-black darkness was his depressed state of mind. An earthen wall was illuminated by streetlamps that were out of his line of sight. The shadow of the wall blended into the darkness. His fancies had once again taken on three-dimensional forms.

In such a setting Takashi felt he would be able to beckon a scene of the mind.

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Scenes of the Mind 53

Takashi was up at the window so late at night because he found it impos- sible to sleep at that hour. Even when he tried to sleep he was tormented by dark thoughts that overwhelmed him. He had contracted a serious venereal disease from a prostitute.

A long time ago he had the following dream . . .

His feet are swollen. Along the top of his feet are two rows of what look like bite marks. The swelling is gradually getting much, much worse. And as it does, the bite marks get deeper and the area around them puffier.

Some of the marks are navel-like swellings. Repulsive soft flesh peeps out from the inside. Other marks are long slits, narrow and deep like the marks left by worms gnawing through old books.

It’s a peculiar feeling, for even as he watches, his feet continue to swell and turn bluish. There is no pain. The swellings are crimson, like cactus flowers.

His mother is there. “Ahh, just look at what’s happened to my feet!” His tone is accusing. “What’s it to do with me? I don’t know anything about it.” “But . . . you scratched me with your nails, didn’t you?” He believes his mother had pressed her nails into his feet, but as

soon as he voices his suspicions, it suddenly occurs to him that the marks may be a symptom of that condition.

He reconsiders and feels relieved that his mother knows nothing about his disease. In his dream, he urges her to help him. “Mother . . . do something!”

She’s at a loss, but after a while tells him, “All right, then, I’ll try to make it better.”

In the meantime, before he realizes it, the two rows of swellings and slits have spread. They now extend from his chest to his belly. As he looks down at them, wondering what his mother is going to do, she pulls at the skin of his chest (the skin had suddenly grown slack like a withered

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54 kajii motojirō

breast), fitting one row of the swellings over the slits like a row of but- tons fastened together. Takashi stares silently at his mother’s ministra- tions with a look of discontent. Each swelling on one row is paired with a slit on the other.

“This is Doctor So-and-so’s method of treatment,” his mother says. Takashi looks like he’s wearing a frock coat with lots of buttons. Still, he feels anxious, worried that if he moves even slightly the rows would immediately come undone.

In his dreams he was always turning on his mother, quarrelling with her while concealing his personal affairs. And even though they were just dreams, they affected Takashi.

Takashi wondered if his experience with prostitutes hadn’t become such an integral part of his depressing life that it was influencing his dreams. In real life he was seeing a young woman. She would do all sorts of mean, spiteful things, and whenever she behaved that way the image of a blunt, hardened hooker would rise up in his mind, filling Takashi with unbearable self-loathing. Each time he encountered that image he was even more aware of his own internal corruption, wondering just how much it warped him, like a wedge driven into his life.

Anxiety about venereal disease was another wedge warping his life. Part of an old recurring dream had turned into reality.

He would find himself eyeing a doctor’s shingle on some thor- oughfare. He would find himself casually reading an advertisement in a newspaper. Until now he had never once been so self-conscious. It would make him happy to see something beautiful. Then he would suddenly sense something unpleasant in his heart. Pursuing that feeling, his self- reflection always brought him back to that disease, just as he expected it would. Whenever that happened Takashi couldn’t help feeling that dark things were lying in wait for him everywhere.

From time to time he would take out those parts of himself that were ailing and gaze at them. They would plead with the expression of some melancholy creature.

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Takashi frequently recalled the events of that unhappy night.

He was sitting by himself in a room facing the street, where he could hear the voices of drunken men and of prostitutes calling out to their custom- ers. The lively sounds of samisen and taikō drums echoed from nearby, reverberating in his solitary heart.

Takashi thought, It’s this air! He strained to listen. The shuffling of shoes and boots. The clopping of geta clogs weaving in at intervals among the other sounds. He felt as if all this noise had some purpose. The calls of the ice cream vendor . . . the voices singing . . . every sound around him.

The geta he had heard just out front on Shijō Avenue did not have the same sharp reverberation as the geta of the servant girl in this brothel.

He sensed that the Takashi inside this room was the same as the one who, just a few minutes earlier, had been strolling along Shijō Avenue, letting his mind freely roam.

So I’ve come here after all, he thought. The servant climbed the stairs to his room. She was carrying a bra-

zier. The scent of wax from the charcoal cylinders permeated the space. Takashi could not satisfactorily put his feelings into words, but after the maid went back downstairs he was struck by how his mood could change so abruptly.

The woman was late. Takashi, anxious and impatient, decided on a whim to climb up to the fire-watch cupola on the roof of the brothel house—a space he knew intimately.

As he was about to climb the rickety stairs, he glanced over at a slid- ing paper-panel door, which was wide open. Futon bedding had been laid out inside the room and a couple was glaring at him. Takashi proceeded up the stairs, pretending he hadn’t noticed anything. After all, it was the sort of shamelessness one expected in an establishment like this.

When he reached the cupola, he saw that the buildings in the district were roofed entirely by dark tiles. Here and there, in the spaces between the houses, he could peer through bamboo blinds into rooms lit by electric

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lamps. A tall building that housed a restaurant rose up in a spot where he had not expected it. Is that Shijō Avenue over there? He could make out all sorts of things through the gaps between the tiled roofs . . . the vermilion gate of Yasaka Shrine . . . a forest faintly reflected in the light of electric streetlamps. Evening mists obscured things farther in the distance . . . the district of Maruyama and Higashiyama beyond it. The Milky Way flowed toward him from there.

Takashi felt a sense of liberation. From now on, he thought, I shall always indulge myself by climbing up here.

A black-crowned heron flew past, calling out as it went. A soot-black cat was walking along a roof. Takashi glanced down at a pot of withered autumn flowers at his feet.

The woman said she was from Hakata. Her Kyoto speech was peculiarly accented. Takashi complimented her on her attractive figure, and such flattery made her talkative. She told him that even though she was still new to the district, she had sold several thousand flowers the previous month, which ranked fourth among all the women of the licensed quar- ters. She did this because the geisha exchange registry always posted the names of those who sold the most, and the women at the top of the list would receive money for their sales. She also told him the reason she was so neat and pretty was that her madam, a woman she called Mother, paid special attention to industrious girls like her.

“That’s why I work as hard as I can,” she said. “Recently I caught a cold and was exhausted. Mother told me to take it easy, but I just couldn’t rest.”

“Are you taking any medicine?” “They gave me some pills, but those things cost five sen each! And in

any case, they don’t do much good, no matter how many you take.” As Takashi listened to her talking, images of a different woman—

one whom he had heard about from a certain man, a Mr. S—floated up in his mind.

Mr. S had told him how ugly this woman was and how ashamed he felt, no matter how drunk he was, to have to say her name when he called for her. He also mentioned that her nightgown was disgustingly filthy.

Mr. S had been given the woman quite by chance the first time they

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met, and he had a strangely perverse sexual experience with her on that occasion. He also said that after their first encounter he would always end up calling for that woman whenever he got totally drunk, no matter how much he tried to resist his urges. That impulse arose when he drank—a wild, violent desire that only that particular woman could satisfy.

When he first heard this story Takashi wasn’t especially bothered by it. He figured it didn’t matter all that much so long as the woman who performed those acts did so because she preferred such perverse pleasures. But when it occurred to him that it might be the life-or-death competition for customers at the brothels that forced the ugly woman to do what she did, he fell into a dark mood.

Mr. S mentioned that the woman never spoke a word to him. She was like a mute—though he admitted that he was never inclined to speak with her anyway. As soon as Mr. S mentioned that detail, Takashi won- dered just how many of her other customers preferred to remain silent.

Takashi let the woman he was with now prattle on, all the while imagining how she might compare to that ugly prostitute.

“You’re certainly a quiet one, aren’t you,” she said. Her skin was hot. Each time he touched her, exploring a new place

on her body, he was struck by how hot she felt. “I have to go meet another customer,” she said. She started to get

ready to leave. “You’ll be going home too?” “Yeah.” Takashi was lying down, watching while the woman turned toward

him to put on her kimono. While he was looking at her, he took stock of his own feelings—Well, how about it? Yes, this is it. What he had in mind by “this” was a specific feeling—I’m always thinking about women, and so I come to a brothel. A woman comes to my room, and at that point she’s still a woman to me. While she’s disrobing, she’s still a woman. But then, once the sex starts, I begin to wonder what I imagine a woman to be. I tell myself, “Well . . . this is a woman’s arm.” Yet even after I confirm for myself that it’s a woman’s arm, it doesn’t mean anything to me. Then, just as the woman pre- pares to go home, she once again displays her womanliness.

“Are the trains still running?” “I don’t know . . . I wonder . . .”

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In his heart Takashi was hoping that the trains had stopped run- ning. In that case, the proprietress downstairs might say to him, “If you don’t feel like going home, you may sleep here till morning.” Then again, Takashi thought that if he wasn’t going to ask for another woman, the best thing for him would be to have her insist that he go home.

“Aren’t you leaving with me?” The woman had dressed and made herself up, but she continued to

dawdle. Oh well, he thought, as he removed his sweat-soaked summer robe. Soon after the woman left, he told the servant girl to bring him a beer.

Sparrows were twittering with high-pitched voices around a water pipe. Takashi, who was half-awake, pictured in his mind the fresh exterior of the brothel growing light in the early morning haze. When he raised his head, he saw the light from an electric streetlamp glowing dimly in the morning air, illuminating the sleeping face of a woman.

Hearing the voices of the flower girls calling outside the entrance, he was now fully awake. Those voices struck him as refreshingly vibrant. He envisioned the color of the rising sun flowing over the various flowers and the evergreen leaves of sakaki.

Doors were soon bursting open throughout the district, and he could hear the voices of children out on the street as they made their way to school. The woman continued to sleep soundly.

“I’m going home, then I’ll go to the public bath,” she announced with a yawn when she finally got up. In the palm of her hand was the braided extension she wore atop her own hair. “If you don’t mind, I’ll be going now,” she said and left. Takashi went back to sleep.

Takashi descended the slope from the foot of the bridge at Marutamachi to the banks of the Kamo River. The houses facing the sandy banks were casting afternoon shadows.

Gravel used for repairing the banks was piled up along the river. The rocks gave off a unique, penetrating odor beneath the autumn sun. Off in the direction of Kōjin Bridge some centrifugal dryers had been left in a

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meadow by cloth dyers. Rolled tape measures, glittering in the sunlight, were lying around the dryers.

Below Kōjin Bridge the river waters were flowing downstream in ripples that resembled a bamboo blind. Beyond a sandbar, where sum- mer grasses grew in wild profusion, the shallow rapids shimmered and burbled. A wagtail flew off.

The rays of the sun seemed to pierce his back, but when he entered the shade he found the autumn chill was indeed crouching there. Takashi sat down in the shade.

People go by . . . cars go by . . . he mused. It’s hard being in the city. Cars and pedestrians were moving along a road on the opposite

bank. A municipal market beside the river . . . barrels of tar stacked in front of a shed . . . an empty lot where men were working, probably build- ing a house.

Now and then a breeze would blow from upstream. As he sat there, a crumpled piece of newspaper tumbled along in front of him, rustling as it moved. Obstructed by a small stone, the paper resisted the wind for a while, but eventually it rolled over the stone and was carried away once more.

A dog and two children were walking upstream. The dog came back and sniffed at the piece of newspaper, then tagged along after the chil- dren again.

A zelkova tree thick with foliage loomed on his side of the river. Takashi was charmed by the way the topmost limbs bent so softly in the breeze. He gazed up at them for some time, and as he did so he experi- enced in his mind the sensation of resting leisurely in those pliant green branches, swaying gently amidst tiny leaves in the air currents high above him.

Ahh, this feeling . . . Takashi mused. Observing does mean something, after all. All or part of my soul enters and possesses those branches.

Takashi pondered that feeling. He could sense in the upper branches of this tall zelkova the source of the temptation to sit at his window every night and give himself over to the mystery of a mind capable of observ- ing from afar his own depression and all the bitterness of his life and still finding momentary release.

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It’s hard being in the city. The Kamo forest to the north, dotted with vermilion torii gate-

ways . . . the mountains in the distance that seemed to be stacked atop that forest . . . the smoke spewing from the chimney stack of a textile mill with Mt. Hiei in the background . . . a red-brick building . . . a mailbox. Bicycles were crossing Kōjin Bridge, parasols and horse-drawn drays were moving along. Shadows stretched out along the river, and vendors blew their horns.

Takashi had experienced wandering the streets until the wee hours of the morning.

Except for the occasional drunk passing by, no one else was walking Shijō Avenue. Evening mists had settled on the asphalt pavement. Stores on both sides of the street had set out their garbage bins and locked their doors. Some people had vomited here and there, and some of the garbage bins had been knocked over. Remembering those times when he himself had been drunk, Takashi now walked on in silence.

When he turned into the row of shops on Shinkyōgoku, he found the place strangely lively for so late in the evening. From behind a closed door he could hear the clopping of geta as a woman with a metal basin prepared to leave for the bathhouse. A shop clerk was setting out a pair of roller skates, a man was delivering a take-out order of udon noodles, and some young men were involved in a game of pole-pushing in the middle of the street. It struck him that these people, who otherwise would be obscured by the crush of daytime crowds, could put their existence on show at this hour.

As soon as he left Shinkyōgoku, the district was once more plunged into the darkness of late night. The clopping of his own clogs, which he paid no attention to during the daytime, sounded strange to him. The stillness of his surroundings somehow made him feel ashamed, as if he were walking through the district hatching up some disreputable scheme.

Takashi had a small Korean bell hanging from his waist. A friend bought the bell for him at an exhibition at the Korean Pavilion in Oka-

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zaki Park. It was made of silver and decorated in blue and red cloisonné. It gave off a beautifully dry tinkle. He considered the sound of the bell, which was inaudible in a crowd but quite distinct on this street late at night, a symbol of his mind.

Here too the district opened before him as he walked along, just like that scene he so often stared at from his window.

He had never once in his life set foot on this street, but it seemed genuinely familiar to him all the same. It wasn’t some ordinary road he had passed through a limited number of times. So how long have I been walking here? Just then Takashi felt as though he would continue along this street forever.

At times like that the tinkling of the Korean bell would cause his mind to tremble. One time Takashi imagined his body was invisible and that only the sound of the bell was passing through the district. Another time he fancied that the ringing of the bell would gush forth from around his waist, flowing into him like a pure stream in a mountain ravine and circulating through his body to cleanse his disease-stained blood.

I will gradually get better . . . That one small hope, tinkling like his bell, sent a clear reverberation

through the late-night air.

The scene from his window was the same every night. For Takashi, each night was exactly like any other.

One night, however, Takashi noticed for the first time a bluish white point of light amidst the trees that swayed in the pitch-darkness. He assumed that it was some sort of insect. Takashi saw that same light the next night, and the night after that.

Then, after moving away from the window and lying down on his bedding, he would perceive a point of phosphorescent light in the dark- ness of his own room as well.

You are the incarnation of my illness. I will soon disappear into the dark- ness. But I feel that you will never sleep . . . that you will always be up and about by yourself just like that insect outside . . . a glowing blue phosphorescence . . .

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