Tales grotesque and curious

he wished. So, rolling up his eyes and fastening them on the cracks in the disciple’s chapped feet, he answered in an angry-sounding voice, “No, it doesn’t!” As his nose was being trampled on where it itched, he really found it more comfortable than painful. After a while, something that looked like grains of millet began to come out on his nose. It looked, so to speak, like a bird plucked and roasted whole. The disciple, seeing this, stopped moving his feet and observed as if to himself, “He told me to pull these out with hair-tweezers.” The Naigu, puffing out his cheeks with dissatisfaction, without a word, left his nose to the disciple to deal with as he wished. Of course it was not because he was unaware of his disciple’s kindness. But though he was aware of that, he was displeased at having his nose treated just as if it were a commodity. Reluctantly, with the expression of a patient being operated on by a doctor in whom he has no faith, he watched the disciple with hair-tweezers pulling the fat out of the pores of his nose. The fat came out in the shape of bird quills half an inch long. Finally when the nose had once been gone over, the disciple looked relieved and said, “If you boil it once more, it’ll be all right, I think.” The Naigu, still knitting his brows and looking dissatisfied, did as the disciple told him. Well, when he took his boiled nose out the second time, indeed it was short as it had never been before. Now it was not greatly different from the ordinary hooked nose. The Naigu, stroking his shortened nose, peered shame-facedly and nervously into the mirror the disciple gave him. His nose, that nose which had hung down below his chin, had shrunk up almost unbelievably and now simply clung on spiritless above his upper lip. The red blotches on it here and there were probably bruises left by the trampling. Now surely nobody would laugh at him. The Naigu’s face in the mirror looked at the face outside and blinked its eyes contentedly. But during all that day, he was uneasy for fear his nose might become long again. So while he read the sutras and while he ate his meals, whenever opportunity offered, he put up his hand and stealthily felt the tip of his nose. But it simply kept its place decently above his lips, and there was no sign of its getting any longer. Then after a night’s sleep, when he awoke early the next morning, he felt his nose the very first thing. It was still as short as ever. Whereupon, for the first time in many years, the Naigu experienced the same sense of relief he had enjoyed when he had finished heaping up merit for himself by copying out the Hoke Sutra. But within the next two or three days, the Naigu discovered a surprising fact. It was that a samurai who was at the temple at Ike-no-O on business at that time looked more amused than ever and, unable to talk as he wished, did nothing but stare at the Naigu’s nose. Moreover, the Chūdōji who had once dropped his nose in the gruel kept his eyes on the ground at first, and stifled a laugh when he met the Naigu outside the hall, but finally burst out laughing as if he could restrain himself no longer. It happened not only once or twice that the under priests who were being given orders listened respectfully while face to face with him, but fell to tittering whenever he so much as looked around behind him. At first the Naigu interpreted this as being due to the change in his features. But by this interpretation it seemed by no means possible to arrive at a full explanation. Of course the reason for the Chūdōji’s and under priests’ laughing must have lain in that. But all the same, there was in the way they laughed something that had not been there in the days when his nose was long. If his unfamiliar short nose looked more ridiculous than his familiar long nose, so much for that. But there seemed to be something more to it. “They didn’t laugh so constantly before,” the Naigu would murmur sometimes, interrupting the sutra he had started to recite and cocking his bald head on one side. On such occasions, the amiable Naigu was sure to look absent-mindedly at a picture of Fugen hanging beside him and, thinking of the time a few days back when his nose was still long, fall into low spirits, thinking, “like unto a man utterly ruined pondering the time of his glory.” Unfortunately he was lacking in the perspicacity to solve this problem. In the human heart there are two feelings mutually contradictory. Of course there is no one who does not sympathize at the misfortune of another. But if that other somehow manages to escape from that misfortune, then he who has sympathized somehow feels unsatisfied. To exaggerate a little, he is even disposed to cast the sufferer back into the same misfortune once more. And before he is aware of it, he unconsciously comes to harbor a certain hostility against him. What somehow displeased the Naigu, though he did not know the reason, was nothing other than the egoism he indefinably perceived in the attitude of those onlookers, both priests and laymen, at Ike-no-O. So the Naigu’s humor became worse every day. He scolded everybody ill-naturedly at the slightest provocation. Even the disciple who had operated on his nose finally came to say behind his back that he would be punished for his avarice and cruelty. It was that mischievous Chūdōji who enraged the Naigu most. One day, hearing a dog yelping noisily, he went out casually and found the Chūdōji brandishing a stick about two feet long and chasing a thin shaggy dog with long hair. And he was not simply chasing the dog around. He was running after it crying tauntingly, “Watch out for your nose there! Watch out for your nose there!” The Naigu snatched the stick from his hand and gave him a hard thwack in the face with it. The stick was the one with which his own nose had formerly been held up. The Naigu came to feel angry regret that he had thoughtlessly shortened his nose. Then one night the wind seemed to have suddenly begun blowing after sunset and the ringing of the wind-bells on the pagoda came to his pillow annoyingly. Moreover, as the cold increased perceptibly, the old Naigu could not get to sleep, try as he might. Then as he lay blinking in bed, he suddenly became aware of an unaccustomed itching in his nose. When he felt it with his hand, it was swollen as if a little dropsical. There even seemed to be fever in that part only. “Since I shortened it against nature, it may have got diseased,” he murmured, pressing his nose with his hand as reverently as he was accustomed to offer incense and flowers to the Buddhas. The next morning when the Naigu awoke early as usual, the leaves of the maidenhair trees and horse chestnuts in the temple grounds had fallen over night, and the garden was as bright as if carpeted with gold. It may have been because of the frost which lay on the roof of the pagoda that the nine metal rings in its spire sparkled dazzlingly in the still faint light of the morning sun. Zenchi Naigu stood on the veranda with the shutters up and drew a deep breath. It was at just about this moment that a certain sensation which he had all but forgotten came back to him again. He put his hand to his nose excitedly. What it touched was not the short nose of the night before. It was his long old nose dangling some five or six inches from above his upper lip to below his chin. He found that it had grown again in one night as long as it was before. And at the same time he realized that a light-hearted feeling similar to that which he had felt when his nose became short had come back to him from somewhere. “Now nobody will laugh at me surely,” murmured the Naigu in the depths of his heart, the while he dangled his long nose in the wind of the early autumn morning. THE HANDKERCHIEF Prof. Hasegawa Kinzō, of the Law College of the Imperial University, was sitting in a cane chair on his veranda reading Strindberg’s “Dramaturgy.” His special study was colonial policy. Wherefore the fact that he was reading “Dramaturgy” may cause the reader some surprise. But he, a professor noted not only as a scholar but as an educator, even if the books were not necessary for his special investigations, always, so far as his leisure permitted, looked through any books that were connected in any sense with the thought or feelings of present-day students. In truth, not long before, he had read Oscar Wilde’s “De Profundis” and “Intentions” only because the students of a certain college of which, along with his other work, he acted as president, were fond of them. Since he was such a man, we need not marvel that the book he was now reading was a treatise on the modern drama and players of Europe. For among the students under him there were not only those who wrote criticisms on Ibsen, Strindberg and Maeterlinck, but even some enthusiasts who intended to follow in the footsteps of such modern dramatists and make play writing their life work. Every time he finished one of the excellent chapters, he put the yellow cloth-covered book on his lap and glanced carelessly at the Gifu paper lantern hanging on the veranda. Strange to say, no sooner would he do this than his thoughts would part company with Strindberg. And in place of Strindberg, he would begin to think of his wife, with whom he had gone to buy the Gifu lantern. He had married in America while studying there. So his wife was of course an American. But she loved Japan and the Japanese not a whit less than he did. Especially was she fond of Japan’s exquisite objects of industrial art. Wherefore, that the Gifu lantern hung on the veranda should be looked upon rather as an expression of one phase of her taste for things Japanese than of his own predilections. Whenever he put down his book, he thought of his wife and the Gifu lantern, and of the Japanese civilization represented by that lantern. In his belief, Japanese civilization had made rather remarkable progress during the last fifty years in material things. But spiritually it was practically impossible to find any progress worth mentioning. Nay, rather, in a sense, it was degenerating. Then what (and this was the urgent task of the day’s thinkers) was to be done to develop a way of saving it from this decline? He concluded that there was nothing for it but to rely upon Japan’s peculiar Bushidō. Bushidō should by no means be regarded as the narrow-minded morality of an insular nation. Rather there was even that in it which should be identified with the Christian spirit in the nations of Europe and America. If through this Bushidō a trend could be shown in the modern current of thought in Japan, it would not only be a contribution to the spiritual civilization of Japan alone, but it would be, in addition, advantageous in making easy a mutual understanding between the Japanese people and the peoples of Europe and America. Or international peace would be promoted by it. For some time he had been thinking, in this sense, of becoming a bridge between East and West. For such a professor it was by no means unpleasant that the thoughts of his wife, the Gifu lantern and the Japanese civilization represented by it should arise in his consciousness with a certain harmony. But, as he enjoyed such satisfaction again and again, he gradually realized, even as he read, that his thoughts were getting far away from Strindberg. Then he shook his head, a little provoked, and began to pore diligently over the fine type again, and just where he had begun to read, the following passage occurred: “When an actor discovers a suitable expression for a most common sentiment and gains some popularity for himself by means of this expression, because, on the one hand, it is easy and, on the other,