Tales grotesque and curious
have a look at the jar, he raised his eyes. Rolling them up, he saw the
mouth of the jar and the upper half of its generously bulging side.
This was all he saw with his eyes, but at the same time there floated
into his imagination the brimming golden wine in its shadowy interior.
Unconsciously he licked his chapped lips once around with his parched
tongue, but there was not the least indication of any saliva. Even the
sweat, dried up by the sun, now ceased to flow.
Then followed in succession two or three severe attacks of dizziness.
His head had ached incessantly for some time. In his heart, he
gradually came to hate the mountain priest. He wondered why he, in his
position, had ever allowed himself to be taken in by such a man’s fair
speeches and made to suffer such fool’s pain. Meanwhile his throat
became drier and drier. His chest became strangely queasy. He could
bear to lie still no longer. So at last he boldly determined to ask the
priest to stop operations and, panting, opened his mouth.
Then the thing happened. Liu began to feel an indescribable mass
creeping up little by little from his breast into his throat. Sometimes
it seemed to be wriggling like an earthworm and sometimes to be
crawling step by step like a gecko. Anyhow some soft thing, in all its
softness, was slowly making its way up along his gullet. At last, just
as he felt that it had forced its way past his Adam’s apple, something
like a loach suddenly slipped out of the dark interior and sprang
energetically into the outer world.
At that instant from the jar was heard a sound like something dropping
with a flop into the wine.
Then the mountain priest suddenly got up from where he had been calmly
squatting and began to untie the cord wound round Liu’s body. Now that
the wine worm was out, they might feel easy.
“Did it come out?” said Liu in a voice like a groan, and raising his
dizzy head and in the greatness of his curiosity forgetting even his
thirst, he crawled naked as he was to the jar. When Master Sun saw
this, he hurried to the others protecting himself against the sun with
his fan of white feathers. There, when the three peeped into the jar
together, they saw something like a small salamander, flesh-colored
like cinnabar, swimming about in the wine. It was some three inches
long. It had both mouth and eyes. As it swam, it seemed to be drinking
the wine. When Liu saw this, he suddenly felt sick.
IV
The effect of the mountain priest’s treatment was immediately evident.
From that day, Liu Tai-cheng never drank another drop of wine. Now
he hates even the smell of it. But, strange to say, his health has
declined little by little ever since. This is the third year since he
vomited the wine worm, and there is left no shadow of his former plump
round form. His sallow greasy skin is stretched over his bony face and
only a little grizzled hair remains above his temples, and it is said
that he takes to his bed innumerable times during the year.
But it is not only Liu’s health that has declined ever since that time.
His fortune also has declined rapidly, and his three hundred acres
of rich suburban fields have almost all passed into other hands. He
himself has been compelled to take the spade in his own unaccustomed
hands and lead a miserable day-to-day existence.
Why has Liu’s health declined ever since he vomited the wine worm? Why
has his fortune declined? Such questions are likely to occur to any
one who considers his ruin in the light of cause and effect. In truth
these questions are considered and reconsidered by people in all sorts
of occupations in Changshan and are given all sorts of answers by them.
The three answers I now give here are only those I have chosen as the
most representative among them.
First. The wine worm was Liu’s blessing and not his affliction. Because
he chanced to meet the idiotic mountain priest, he had deliberately
lost this heaven-sent blessing.
Second. The wine worm was Liu’s affliction and not his blessing. For it
is quite beyond the understanding of any ordinary man that Liu should
be able to drink a jar of wine at a time. If, therefore, he had not
got rid of the wine worm, he would certainly have died before long.
Consequently that he fell into poverty and illness one after the other
should be called his good fortune.
Third. The wine worm was neither Liu’s affliction nor his good fortune.
He had always been a heavy drinker. When wine was taken from his life,
there was nothing left. So Liu was himself the wine worm, and the wine
worm was Liu. Therefore, getting rid of the wine worm was quite the
same as killing himself. In short, the day Liu stopped drinking wine,
he was Liu without being Liu. If Liu himself was already dead, it was
most natural that the health and fortune of the Liu of other days
should have been lost.
Which of these answers is most nearly right, I do not know. I have only
set down such moral judgments at the end of this story in imitation of
the didacticism of Chinese novelists.
THE BADGER
According to the “Shoki,” it was in the second month of the
thirty-fifth year of the Emperor Suiko in Michinoku that a badger first
assumed the shape of a man. True, according to one copyist’s version,
the badger was mistaken for a man instead of taking a man’s shape, but
since it is written in both copies afterwards that it sang, it seems
that, whether it took a man’s shape or was mistaken for a man, it is a
fact that it sang songs like an ordinary man.
Earlier than this, it was written in the “Suininki” under date of the
eighty-seventh year, that after the dog of a man named Mikaso in the
province of Tamba had eaten a badger, there was found in its belly the
curved Yasakani jewel. The story of this curved jewel was later made
use of by Bakin in “Hakkenden” where he introduced Yao Bikuni Myōchin.
But the badger of the time of the Emperor Suinin only had a brilliant
gem in its belly and could not change itself at will into other shapes,
as could the badgers of later days. Then after all, it was probably
in the second month of the thirty-fifth year of Suiko that the badger
first assumed the form of man.
Of course the badger had lived in the fields and mountains of Japan
ever since the eastern expedition of the Emperor Jimmu. And it began
to bewitch people for the first time in the year 1288 of the Japanese
calendar. At this, you may at first be surprised. But it probably
began in some such way as the following:
In those days a Michinoku girl who carried water up from the sea was in
love with a salt maker of the same village. But she lived alone with
her mother. And since they tried to meet nightly without her mother
knowing it, there was no slight worry.
Every night the man crossed over a hill by the sea and came near the
girl’s house. And she, her mind on the time appointed, would slip
stealthily out. But out of regard for her mother’s feelings, she was
likely to be late. Sometimes she would finally come as the moon was
beginning to decline. Sometimes she had not yet come even when it was
time for the first cock to lift his voice far and near.
It was one night after things had gone on thus for some time. The man,
squatting under a high rock like a folding screen, sang a song to
beguile his loneliness as he waited. He gathered up his impatience in
his salty throat and sang with all his might against the surging waves.
The mother, hearing the song, asked her daughter lying beside her what
it was. The girl shammed sleep at first, but after she had been asked
a second and third time, she could not but answer. “It doesn’t seem to
be a man’s voice, does it?” she said deceitfully, frightened out of her
wits.
Then the mother came back with the question what could sing save a man.
And through sheer quickness of wit, the girl replied that it might be a
badger. Through the ages, time and again, has love taught such wit to
women.
When morning came, the mother spoke of having heard the song to an old
woman of the neighborhood who wove straw mats. And the old woman was
one of those who had heard the song. She expressed her doubt that a
badger could sing but handed the story on to a man who gathered reeds.
When, after passing from mouth to mouth, the story came to the ears
of a mendicant priest who had come to the village, he explained with
reason how a badger could sing a song. In Buddhist teaching there is a
thing called metempsychosis. So the soul of the badger might originally
have been the soul of a man. In which case, what the man could do, the
badger could do. Such a thing as singing a song on a moonlight night
was not greatly to be wondered at.
After that in this village any number of people came to say that they
had heard the song of the badger. And then at last appeared even a man
who said he had seen the badger. He said that one night, while on his
way home along the beach from gathering seagulls’ eggs, he had seen
distinctly by the light of some remaining patches of snow a badger
hulking along singing a song at the foot of a seaside hill.
Already even its form had been seen. It was natural that after that
practically everybody in the village, young and old, male and female,
should have heard the song. Sometimes it came from the hills. Sometimes
it came from the sea. And sometimes, besides, it came from over the
roofs of the rush-thatched huts scattered about between the hills and
the sea. And that was not all. At last one night the girl who drew
sea-water was herself suddenly startled by the song.
She, of course, thought it was the man singing. She listened to her
mother’s breathing and thought that she was fast asleep. Then she stole
from her bed, and opening the door the least bit, peeped out. But
outside there was only a dim moon and the sound of the waves, and no
man’s form anywhere. Involuntarily, in the chilly spring-night wind,
she pressed her hand to her cheek and stood transfixed. There in the
sand before the door were dimly visible the scattered footprints of a
badger.
This story was immediately carried across hundreds of miles of mountain
and river to the district of the capital. Then the badgers of Yamashiro
changed their shapes. The badgers of Omi changed theirs. Finally the
related racoon dog began to assume human form, and in Tokugawa days,
a fellow called Sado-no-Danzaburō, who was neither a racoon dog nor a
badger, began to bewitch even the people of Echizen Province across the
sea.
He did not begin to bewitch them, but it came to be thought that he
did, you may say. But how much difference is there after all between
being bewitched and believing that one is bewitched?
This is true not only in the case of badgers. Is it not a fact that all
things that exist for us are in the end but things in the existence of
which we believe?
It is written in “The Celtic Twilight,” by Yeats, that some children
on Lake Gill believed without a doubt that a little Protestant girl
in blue and white garments was the Holy Mother Mary herself. When we
think of them as both living in the human mind just the same, there is
no difference between Mary on the lake and the badger in the wilds.
Should we not believe in that which lives within us just as our
forefathers believed that the badger bewitched men? And should we not
live as bidden by that in which we believe?
Herein lies reason why we should not despise the badger.
THE BALL
I
It was the night of the third day of the eleventh month of the
nineteenth year of Meiji (1886). Akiko, the seventeen-year-old daughter
of the distinguished family of ----, accompanied by her bald-headed
father, climbed the stairs of the Rokumeikan, where the ball that night
was to be held. Great chrysanthemum blossoms, which seemed almost to be