Ten Nights Dreaming Read online

  Eventually, the man in white stepped around to my side and began trimming around my ears. Now that locks of hair had stopped flying around, I could open my eyes without fear. ——Awamochi3 here, mochi, mochi, someone called from quite near. They were keeping time by pounding the mochi in a small mortar and pestle as they chanted. I had not seen an awamochi peddler since I was a child, and I wished I could see this one. But they never appeared in the mirror. The sound of mochi being pounded was the closest I got.

  I peered into the corner of the mirror, straining my vision to the limit. Suddenly, I realized that there was now a woman kneeling behind the slat screen. She was dark of complexion, with thick eyebrows and a heavy build, had her hair up in an Ichō-gaeshi hairstyle,4 and wore a plain suawase over a black juban.5 She was counting a stack of bills. They looked like ten-yen bills to me. She lowered her long eyelashes and pursed her thin lips, focusing intently and counting at a remarkable speed. Nevertheless, there seemed to be no end to the bills. There couldn’t have been more than a hundred or so in her lap, but those hundred bills remained a hundred bills no matter how long she counted.

  I stared absently at the woman’s face and the ten-yen bills. Then, in a loud voice right by my ear, the man in white said, “Let’s get you shampooed.” It was just the chance I needed, so as soon as I rose from the chair I looked back over towards the counter. But behind the counter I could see neither the woman nor the bills nor anything else.

  Paying my bill and leaving the barber shop, I saw five small oval tubs lined up in the street to the left of the doorway. The tubs were full of goldfish: red goldfish, spotted goldfish, skinny goldfish, fat goldfish, and many other kinds. The goldfish peddler sat behind them. Chin in hand, he sat gazing at the goldfish lined up before him, completely motionless. The bustle and movement all around did not seem to bother him at all. I stood there for a while watching him, but I did not see him move once the entire time.

  * * *

  1. Irasshai!: The traditional greeting for a customer entering a place of business.

  2. Shimada hairstyle: A traditional Japanese hairstyle, with the hair arranged up in a type of bun—usually worn by young women.

  3. Awamochi: Pounded cakes (mochi) made of foxtail millet (awa).

  4. Ichō-gaeshi hairstyle: Another traditional Japanese hairstyle, associated with women in service positions and a slightly older age range than the Shimada.

  5. Plain suawase over a black juban: A simple, unlined kimono worn over a black inner garment—a far from glamorous look.

  The Ninth Night

  The Ninth Night

  As with the second dream, many scholars see echoes of Sōseki’s own childhood in this story. That the violent internal struggles of Japan’s Meiji Restoration began one year after Sōseki himself was born is suggestive.

  There were rumblings of unrest abroad. War seemed ready to break out at any time. Unsaddled horses fleeing burned-out stables seemed to gallop around the house day and night, chased by unruly guardsmen. Within the house, however, all was quiet and still.

  In the house were a young mother and her child, almost in his third year. The child’s father had left for parts unknown. He had set out on a night with no moon. He had pulled his straw waraji1 onto his feet, donned a black hood, and gone out the side door. The mother had been holding a bonbori lantern2 from which the light fell long and thin into the dark night, illuminating the old cypress by the hedge.

  The child’s father never came back. Every day, the mother would ask her child, “Where’s Daddy?” The child did not say anything. Eventually he began to reply, “Away.” When the mother asked, “When will he be home?” the child would smile and say “Away” again. This would make the mother smile too. Then she would repeat to the child, over and over, “He will be home soon.” The child, though, only learned to say “Soon.” Sometimes he would reply “Soon” when she asked him “Where’s Daddy?” too.

  Once night had fallen and it had grown quiet outside, the mother would retie her obi3 around her waist, slipping into it a short sword in a sharkskin scabbard, tie the child to her back with another, narrower obi, and then duck out through the side gate. She always wore zōri4 on her feet. The sound of these zōri was sometimes enough to lull the child to sleep.

  The mother would walk west, leaving the earthen walls of the houses behind, until she reached the bottom of the hill where the great ginkgo tree stood. Cutting right at the ginkgo tree, she would continue another hundred yards or so until she saw the torii5 off to the right, at the end of a path with a rice paddy on one side and nothing but bamboo scrub on the other. Beyond the torii was a dark stand of cedar trees. After that, she would walk another forty stone-paved yards before arriving at the foot of the stairs leading up to the old shrine. Above the offering box, which had been washed a dull gray, a rope hung from a large bell, and in the daytime a framed sign could be seen hanging beside the bell which read “Hachiman-gū.”6 The first character on the sign was drawn in an interesting way, like two pigeons facing each other. Many other framed offerings hung there too. Most were gold-papered kinteki7 accompanied by the names of the warriors that had shot an arrow through them. Here and there a sword had been offered up as well.

  Past the torii, there were always owls hooting in the branches of the cedars. The mother’s rough zōri slapped wetly on the ground. Once they reached the temple and the sound stopped, the mother would first ring the bell, then immediately drop to a crouch and bring her hands together. The owls usually fell silent at this point. The mother would then pray fiercely for the safety of her husband. Her husband, she reasoned, was a samurai, while Hachiman was god of the bow; surely prayers as fervent as hers would not go entirely unheard.

  The child would often wake at the sound of the bell and, scared by the surrounding darkness, burst into tears on the mother’s back. At such times, the mother would not stop mumbling her prayers, but she would jog the child gently on her back soothingly. Sometimes this was enough to stop the child crying. Sometimes it just made things worse. Either way, the mother did not rise from her crouch lightly.

  Once she had made all the prayers for her husband’s safety that she could, the mother would loosen the narrow obi around her back and bring the child around to her front, holding him in her arms as she climbed the stairs to the shrine proper. “Be good, now,” she would say, rubbing her cheek close against his. “I won’t be long.” Then she would slip the narrow obi off entirely, tie one end around the child, and loop the other through the railing on the shrine’s porch. This done, she would descend the staircase again to begin the task of treading back and forth across the forty yards of paved stone one hundred times to seal her petition.

  Left tied to the temple, the child would crawl about its broad porch in the darkness as far as the obi would allow. Nights like this were a great relief to the mother. When the tied-up child cried and wept, on the other hand, she would be driven to distraction. The pace of her hundred repetitions across the courtyard would pick up dramatically. She would become terribly out of breath. Sometimes she had no option but to interrupt her pacing to climb the stairs to the shrine proper, soothe the child any way she could, and then begin her hundred repetitions again.

  The mother spent countless fretful nights this way, unable to sleep for worry over the child’s father — but he was long since dead, slain by a masterless samurai.

  This sad tale I heard from my mother in a dream.

  * * *

  1. Waraji: Sandals made of rough straw rope.

  2. Bonbori lantern: A paper lantern with a square wooden frame.

  3. Obi: A sash of thick material worn as part of a traditional Japanese outfit.

  4. Zōri: Flat traditional sandals, more refined than waraji.

  5. Torii: The distinctive gateway found outside shrines.

  6. Hachiman-gū: A shrine dedicated to Hachiman, tutelary god of warriors.

  7. Kinteki: A small archery target with gold paper stretched over it used in traditiona
l Japanese archery.

  The Tenth Night

  The Tenth Night

  The series finishes with the uneasy comedy of the tenth story — which, read carefully, contains no indication that it is a dream at all.

  Shōtarō had come home in the evening, seven days after the woman took him away, and immediately gone to bed with a fever — or so I heard from Ken, who had visited to give me the news.

  Shōtarō was the best-looking man in the neighborhood, and impeccably honest and upright to boot. He had just one vice. When evening fell, he would put on his Panama hat, seat himself outside the fruit shop, and gaze at the faces of the women passing by. He always found much to admire in them. Outside of this hobby, he had no particular quirks worth mentioning.

  When women were scarce, he would give up on the foot traffic and look at the fruit instead. All kinds of fruit were there: peaches, apples, loquats, bananas, all neatly arranged in two rows of baskets, ready for use as visiting gifts. ——Beautiful, Shōtarō would murmur, gazing at the baskets. If I were to go into business, it’d have to be a fruit shop. Not, of course, that he ever did anything but loaf around in his Panama hat.

  ——Such a pretty color, he might say, admiring, for example, some natsumikan.1 But he had never actually put down the money to buy any of the fruit, and of course none of the fruit could be eaten for free. Praising their color was as far as he went.

  One evening, a woman had suddenly appeared outside the store. She had appeared to be of some standing in society, and had been splendidly dressed. Shōtarō had been utterly entranced by the colors of her kimono. He had also found much to admire in her face. Doffing his Panama hat, he had greeted her cordially; she had responded by pointing at the largest basket of fruit and saying, ——That one, please. Shōtarō had handed it to her at once. The woman had held it in one hand for a moment before saying, ——My, how heavy it is!

  Unburdened by other obligations and solicitous by nature, Shōtarō had volunteered to help the woman carry her fruit home, and left the store with her. He had never come back.

  Shōtarō had always been irresponsible, but this was too much even for him. After seven days his family and friends had begun to fear the worst, and just as they were raising the alarm he had casually strolled home again. Everyone crowded around to ask where he had gone, and he told them a story of riding a train into the mountains.

  It must have been a remarkably long train ride. As Shōtarō told the story, when the train stopped he had disembarked to find himself in a meadow, so large that he had seen nothing but green grass in every direction. He had walked across the grass with the woman until suddenly they were at the edge of a cliff. ——Now, the woman had said to him, jump. Peering over the edge, Shōtarō had seen the face of the cliff, but could not see the ground below. Doffing his Panama hat again, he had made several polite demurrals. ——If you don’t jump, the woman had said, you will be licked by a pig; are you quite sure? There were two things Shōtarō despised: pigs, and the rōkyoku singer Kumoemon.2 He did not, however, despise either of them more than he valued his life, and so he had again refused to jump. At that moment, a pig had appeared, snuffling as it came. Seeing no other option, Shōtarō had struck the pig across the snout with his betelwood walking stick. The pig rolled over the edge of the cliff with an oink. Shōtarō had barely breathed a sigh of relief before another pig had begun nuzzling him with its large snout. Once more he had no option but to raise his walking stick. Once more the pig had oinked and tumbled upside-down into the pit. And then yet another pig appeared. This was when Shōtarō had happened to glance up and realize that a whole herd of pigs, a line of countless thousands stretching out to the edge of the grassy meadow, were noisily making their way directly to where he stood at the edge of the cliff. Terror had gripped his heart. Still, with no other options, all he could do was strike the pigs across the snout with his walking stick one by one as they arrived. Mysteriously, the pigs would roll over the edge of the cliff as soon as the stick touched their snouts. Peering over the precipice, Shōtarō had seen a whole column of upside-down pigs falling down the cliff face into the apparently bottomless depths. The idea that he had sent so many pigs over the cliff had scared even him. But the pigs had been relentless. They had been like a dark cloud with legs, oinking and inexhaustible as they trampled the fresh green grass.

  Shōtarō had put up a heroic fight, beating pigs across the snout for six nights and seven days. Eventually, however, his energy dwindled, his hands became weak as konnyaku,3 and finally he had been licked by a pig. With that, he had collapsed at the edge of the cliff.

  ——So you see, too much girl-watching can be bad for you, Ken said as he concluded his story. I had to agree. But Ken had also been talking about how he wanted Shōtarō’s Panama hat.

  Shōtarō was doomed. That Panama was as good as Ken’s.

  * * *

  1. Natsumikan: An orange-yellow citrus fruit about the size of a grapefruit.

  2. The rōkyoku singer Kumoemon: Rōkyoku was a popular music genre during the Meiji period. Kumoemon was one of the best known and most popular exponents of the form.

  3. Konnyaku: A rubbery yam cake made from the root of the konjac plant.

  The Cat’s Grave

  The Cat’s Grave

  First published in 1909, this autobiographical vignette details an episode from the previous year, just after the Ten Nights Dreaming stories were published. The cat in the story was the model for the title character in the satirical I Am A Cat (1905), Sōseki’s first major success as a novelist.

  After our move to Waseda, the cat began to grow thinner and thinner. He no longer showed any interest in playing with the children. Whenever the sun was out, all he would do was lie on the engawa,1 not moving a muscle, square chin on his neatly arranged paws as he stared out at the bushes in the garden. No matter how rowdily the children played nearby, he did not deign to notice them. The children, for their part, had long since given up on the cat. Obviously finding him no fun any more, they treated this old friend of theirs like a stranger. Nor were they the only ones: the maid put out food for the cat three times a day in the corner of the kitchen, but had little time for him otherwise. Worse yet, most of what she put out was gobbled up by a big calico who lived nearby and visited just for this purpose. Our cat did not seem particularly angered by this. I never saw fight. He just lay there. There was, however, a certain joylessness in his repose. He did not look like someone stretching out to luxuriate in the sun’s rays; rather, he seemed to lack any way to move — no, this does not fully describe it. It appeared that his listlessness had grown so great that, as lonely as it was to stay unmoving, to move would have been still lonelier, leaving him with no choice but to stay where he was, enduring things as best he could. His gaze was always fixed on the garden, but I doubt he saw the leaves on the bushes, or the shapes in which they grew. That was just where his greenish-yellow eyes happened to be resting. Just as the children no longer recognized his existence, he did not seem to clearly register the existence of the world around him either.

  Still, he did go out from time to time, apparently with business to attend to. Every time he did so, however, the calico cat that lived nearby would give chase. Terrified, our cat would leap back up onto our veranda and burst through the paper of the closed shōji2 screens to take refuge by the hearth inside. Those were the only times that we noticed his existence. No doubt they were also the only times that he was fully aware that he was alive.

  As these things went on, the fur began to fall out of the cat’s long tail. At first it just seemed dimpled here and there, but then patches of raw skin began to spread, and the whole thing drooped in a way that was pitiful to see. He took to twisting and straining his body, already weary enough with everything, to lick at his sore spots.

  —Hey, I grunted to my wife. Looks like something’s wrong with the cat. —Yes, I think he’s just getting old, she replied, supremely indifferent. I let the matter pass as well. Not long afterwa
rds, though, the cat began to bring up his food from time to time. His throat would pulse violently as he let out a painful-sounding noise somewhere between a sneeze and a hiccup. Painful as it sounded, though, I had no choice but to chase him outside whenever I noticed him like this. Otherwise, he would have soiled the tatami3 or the futon4 without a second thought. Most of the large zabuton5 we had set aside for visitors were ruined this way.

  “We have to do something. It’s probably a stomach bug — stir some Hōtan6 in with his drinking water.”

  My wife didn’t say anything. Two or three days later, I asked if she had given the cat any Hōtan to drink. —It’s no use trying to make him drink, she replied. He won’t open his mouth. He throws up whenever he eats fishbones, she added by way of explanation. —Well, why don’t you stop giving them to him, then? I replied, rather roughly, before returning to my reading.

  Nausea gone, the cat went back to quietly lying around as he had before. By now he was curling himself up tightly, huddled and still, as if he had nothing left to rely on but the engawa that held him up. The look in his eyes also began to change. In the beginning there had been a certain steadiness in the melancholy of his gaze, as if he were staring at something too far away to focus on. But this was giving way to an uncertain, incessant motion. Meanwhile, the color in his eyes was sinking deeper and deeper. It put me in mind of flickering lightning as the sun went down. But I let this pass too. Nor did my wife appear to pay it any mind. The children, of course, had forgotten that they ever had a cat.