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- Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
The Miner is the most daringly experimental and least well-known novel of the great Japanese writer Natsume Sōseki (1867-1916). Written in 1908, it explores the indeterminate nature of human personality. An absurdist tale, in many respects, The Miner anticipates the work of Joyce and Beckett. The story unfolds entirely within the mind of an unnamed protagonist, a young man whose love life has fallen to pieces. As the man flees Tokyo, he is picked up by a procurer of cheap labour for a copper mine, and then travels toward - and finally burrows into the depths of - the mine, where he hopes to find oblivion.In a stunning translation by Jay Rubin, and featuring an introduction from Haruki Murakami, this new edition of The Miner brings a lost classic to a new audience.
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The Miner
by Natsume Sōseki translated from the Japanese, with an Afterword, by Jay Rubin Introduction by Haruki Murakami
Acknowledgements
This translation has been extensively revised from the 1988 edition published by Stanford University Press. It would not have appeared back then without a good deal of moral and financial support. My colleagues at the University of Washington, Fred Brandauer, David Knechtges, Ed Kamens, John Treat, Andrew Markus, and Ching-Hsien Wang, provided interest, information and advice. Thanks were also due to Professors Yasuko Imai of Shizuoka Prefectural University, Toshio Ohki of Hamamatsu University School of Medicine, and Edward Fowler of Duke University, and to my mother, Frances.
The translation was made possible by a grant from the Division of Research Programs of the National Endowment for the Humanities, an independent federal agency, with additional support from the University of Washington’s Japan Foundation Endowment and from the university itself. An earlier version of the Translator’s Afterword appeared in the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies. Stanford University Press has enabled the production of a revised edition.
The revision benefitted greatly from the close attention of Professor Shōsaku Maeda, whose passionate interest in the English translation of modern Japanese literature has proved invaluable.
Professor Motoyuki Shibata came to the rescue at crucial points with the translation of the Introduction.
For writing that informative and insightful Introduction, I wish to add a special thanks to Haruki Murakami, whose discussion of The Miner in his Kafka on the Shore provided the spark of interest that led to the publication of this revised translation. Thanks also to editor Scott Pack, the UK’s foremost Murakami fan, who caught the spark.
As always, my wife, Rakuko, kept me focused on what really matters.
J.R.
Table of Contents
Translator’s Note
The Miner (Kōfu) was originally serialized in a Tokyo newspaper, the Asahi Shimbun, in 1908. The translation was based on the text found in Volume 3 of the complete works of Sōseki, Sōseki zenshū, 17 vols. (Iwanami shoten, 1974). The revision was checked against the virtually identical text found in Volume 5 of Sōseki zenshū, 29 vols. (Iwanami shoten, 1994), which indicates the original 96 numbered newspaper installments, but these distracting arbitrary breaks were not indicated when the book appeared and have not been indicated in the translation. For readers interested in problems of serialization, a list of installment breaks is provided in Note 1 of the Translator’s Afterword.
Few personal names appear in the text, and only one of them includes the surname in addition to the given name. This name, Hara Komakichi, appears in the Japanese order, surname first, the practice adopted in the Afterword. Natsume Sōseki is virtually the only author better known in the West with his name in the Japanese order. His surname is Natsume, but in the Introduction and Afterword he is referred to by his pen name, Sōseki, following the Japanese custom. Haruki Murakami, the author of the Introduction, is better known in the West with his name in the Western order.
All monetary sums mentioned are minuscule. A rin was a tenth of a sen, which was one hundredth of a yen, which was worth about a thousand times more than the modern yen.
Most of the smoking done in the book employs the traditional kiseru pipe with its slim bamboo stem and tiny metal bowl. The “tobacco tray” mentioned at one point was actually a small box. It held such utensils as a tinder cup for repeated relightings and a cylindrical (usually bamboo) receptacle, into which the spent shreds of tobacco were energetically knocked.
Introduction to The Miner: A Nonchalant Journey Through Hell by Haruki Murakami translated by Jay Rubin
Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916) is Japan’s greatest modern novelist. Paperback editions of his works can be found in virtually any bookstore in Japan, and that includes this rather strange and by no means representative book, The Miner. How many general readers—those who are not Sōseki scholars or devoted Sōseki fans or professionals interested in mineral extraction—actually make their way through The Miner in the course of their lives is unclear, but the book has never disappeared from the catalogs of major publishers and it probably never will. This is because Sōseki is the pivotal modern Japanese novelist, whose works set a precedent for the tone and structure of the literature that developed after the beginning of the Meiji period in 1868. It has long been the sacred literary duty—almost an act of faith—of all Japanese (myself most definitely included) to preserve the complete works of this writer who lost his life to stomach ulcers at the young age of 49. That fatally raveled stomach, it might be noted, and intricate brain, which remained active to the end, were donated to Tokyo Imperial University’s medical school. The phrase “Japanese literature” always makes me think of the odd fate of Sōseki’s stomach and brain—which, by the way, was judged to be of average weight.
The Miner is, to put it mildly, a most unusual novel, one that is almost impossible for even the most systematic readers of the entire Sōseki corpus to “place” among his works. It doesn’t seem to fit with anything that came before it or after it. Calling it Sōseki’s ugly duckling might be an oversimplification, but it is clearly different from all the others in size and shape and color. You could try lining up all Sōseki’s works in a single box, but this one novel would make it impossible to fit them in neatly and close the lid. What is it that makes this work so difficult to set alongside the other novels?
Perhaps the first thing to mention is the frustration it gives the reader. You get to the end of this book, and all you can do is wonder why Sōseki went to all the trouble of writing it (and he clearly did go to a lot of trouble to put it together). What was his purpose? The author himself seems to be trying to sweep away such doubt and frustration when he undertakes the daring and tricky task of negating the very premise that this book is a novel at all. At the end, the protagonist almost hurls at the reader his parting shot: “That’s all there is to my experience as a miner. And every bit of it is true, which you can tell from the fact that this book never did turn into a novel.” At this point, most readers are ready to throw up their hands and ask, “Well, if it’s not a novel, what is this thing I’ve been spending my time reading?”
Whatever excuses the author (or his protagonist) might be trying to make for the book, the undeniable fact remains that The Miner is a piece of fiction—or, rather, that it could not be anything but a piece of fiction. For one thing, Sōseki himself never went anywhere near a copper mine. He just happened to meet a young man who had worked in such a mine, and he took notes when the young man told him about his experiences there. He went on to reproduce these experiences more or less faithfully, but they were not Sōseki’s experiences, and most of the concretely described scenes and the character’s psychology, vividly conveyed as if the novelist had observed them himself, were products of his imagination. The minutely described three-dimensional world he created based on another person’s recollections could hardly be called “reportage” or “non-fiction.” Perhaps it is best described as “fiction inspired by fact.”
Just as Moby-Dick is not a novel about whaling, The Miner is not a novel about copper mining techniques or miners’ labor conditions. It’s about the inner workings of a flesh-and-blood human being. The method that Sōseki deploys from the arsenal of novelistic techniques to approach his subject is perhaps best called—for him at least—experimental. He all but announces as much to his reader when he declares at the end with urban brusqueness that “this book never did turn into a novel.”
I imagine, however, that Sōseki was not entirely happy with the results of his experiment. There’s a faintly dissatisfied air that clings to the work as a whole. And at the time the novel was serialized in the Asahi Shimbun newspaper, readers’ responses were not all he might have hoped for. (Nor could one blame them, either. The book has nothing that might be called a plot.) But I suspect that once he had finished it, Sōseki felt secretly satisfied that his literary experiment had more or less accomplished its aim—that, as an author, he had created something special. It is my personal conviction that the space occupied by The Miner amid the literary monument that is Sōseki’s complete works is by no means small, that it cannot and should not be overlooked. It is one of my favorites, I confess, and I suspect that there may even be other readers out there—not many, to be sure—who, like me, are far more strongly drawn to The Miner than to such supposedly representative late works as Kokoro (1914, literally, The Heart) or Light and Dark (1916, Meian).
Before I touch upon the experimental qualities of the novel, I’d like to provide a brief overview of the historical background against which it was created, an important element in any discussion of the book. The Miner began to appear on January 1, 1908, and the notes upon which it was based were taken down by Sōseki in late November 1907 when his young informant visited him, but before then, in February 1907, an event had occurred which had gripped the entire country: a violent mass protest staged by workers at Ashio Copper Mine, the very same that serves as the setting for The Miner. When he decided on his material and started writing the novel, Sōseki must have had in mind the startling events that had recently filled the news. And yet his text never once mentions that the copper mine in the book is the one in Ashio (though considering the geography, the towns mentioned and the scale of the mine, it could not have been any other), and he remains almost unnaturally silent about the topics that had so shaken society—the miners’ riot and mineral pollution. This was undoubtedly quite deliberate on Sōseki’s part. Ashio is located deep in the hil4 ls of Tochigi prefecture, north and east of the Kanto Plain that includes the sprawling city of Tokyo.
As the crow flies, it is a mere 110 kilometers northeast of Tokyo, but to drive there still takes a good four or five hours. The vein of copper was first discovered in the sixteenth century, after which Ashio flourished for two centuries as an open-pit mine. Most of the copper coins that circulated in the Edo period (1600–1868) were cast from copper extracted there. The vein was thought to have been exhausted and the mine was all but abandoned by the mid-nineteenth century. In 1877 the prefecture transferred ownership of the mine to the private Furukawa Mining Company (later part of the Furukawa Industrial Conglomerate), which soon discovered, using new technology introduced from the West, that a rich vein of copper still lay sleeping far below the surface. The company invested heavily in the latest mining equipment and proceeded to develop the mine on 4 a vast scale.
The demand for copper was increasing dramatically in those days, both for private enterprise and the munitions industry as Japan continued to solidify its foundations as a newly modernizing nation, gaining victories in two major hard-fought foreign wars (against China in 1894–95 and against Russia in 1904–05) and developing domestic industries to spectacular new heights. As a “strategic company” that received support from the national government, Ashio Copper Mine prospered. For a time it produced up to forty percent of Japan’s copper output. A large town grew up in the mountains, centered on the mine. It had its own rail line, and at its peak almost 40,000 people lived there, rivaling the provincial seat of Utsunomiya. The labyrinth of underground mine tunnels was almost equal in total length to the distance from Tokyo to Fukuoka—nearly 900 kilometers.
The spectacular development of Ashio Copper Mine, however, bequeathed to history a number of dark, even tragic side-effects. The first was that of mineral pollution. The waste water from the smelting process was discharged into the nearby Watarase River, and its powerful toxins killed most of the fish and rice paddies downstream. The soil of the area had always been particularly fertile, but the mulberry trees needed for silkworm culture ceased to grow there, and smoke from the mine operations killed the surrounding thick forests, exposing the soil of the mountainsides and leading to many river floods. The local people suffered serious health problems, of course.
Starting in 1890, farmers living downstream from the mine began to appeal for a shutdown of the mine, but the national government and the company saw copper production as a lifeline of the Japanese economy and turned a deaf ear to the protests on the grounds that no clear causal link had been established. Finally, in 1897, the battles waged by Diet member Tanaka Shōzō began to have an impact, and the government officially recognized the connection between the mine and the environmental disasters, ordering Furukawa Mining to build filter beds and settlement ponds and to attach desulfurization equipment to their smokestacks. Even so, the people of the area continued to suffer from the effects of mineral pollution for many years. Several villages simply ceased to exist, their inhabitants scattered to other parts of the country. This, then, is how a modernizing Japan dealt with one of the first cases of serious industrial pollution in its history, making the name “Ashio” synonymous with horrible environmental pollution on a par with Minamata, the site of the mercury pollution that caused an enormous social problem in the 1960s.
Ashio Copper Mine’s other grave problem involved the cruelty of its labor conditions. The miners’ pay was low, bribery was rampant in the allocation of work, labor supervision was often violent, insufficient safety measures led to frequent caveins, and those miners who were not killed in accidents rarely lived to forty owing to the lung disease known as silicosis. Hygienic conditions were poor and medical facilities wanting, so that anyone felled by illness could do little more than lie there and die. And once one became a miner, it was almost impossible to extricate oneself from the “boiler system,” the regime built around dormitories or “boilers” (hanba), with its stringent contracts and crippling “loans” to workers, each of whom would almost literally “owe my soul to the company store” until the day he died. Many of the miners, it seems, were either men who sought refuge in the mountains from a failed life (living in a “boiler” at least assured one of meals and a place to sleep) or lawbreakers fleeing from the authorities in hopes of hiding themselves in the mine. It was truly a world peopled by men on the lowest rungs of the social ladder, a harsh gathering place for losers, as vividly portrayed in the pages of The Miner.
In February of 1907, however, the miners’ dissatisfaction at being treated like disposable slaves reached the boiling point, and something set off a large-scale riot. The miners dynamited the surveillance and guard facilities, burned the Furukawa Mining staff residences to the ground, and vented their fury in violent attacks against company officials. Although by some miracle no one was killed, the miners took over the entire town of Ashio and sent company personnel who lived there running down the mountain in fear for their lives. The scale of the violence was more than the local police could handle, and armed troops were sent in. They arrested 628 of the miners who had occupied the town. After this, improvements were made to the work environment, but mining continued to be as harsh and potentially deadly as ever.
As mentioned earlier, it was November 1907, nine months after the riot, when Sōseki took down the words of a young man named Arai who had gone to work (or, rather, had been recruited by a quick-talking procurer to work) in Ashio Copper Mine. Arai’s experience, however, dated from before the riot; the mine conditions we see in the book date from just before the explosion, as it were. It would be natural for us to assume that Arai was offering the famous novelist his special take on current events as fresh and valuable primary source material for use in a novel, in return for which he hoped to be paid.
According to Sōseki’s own testimony in an interview, however, this was not the case. Arai primarily wanted to tell Sōseki about the complicated love affair that had led him to flee from Tokyo into the mountains, with his various experiences at Ashio Copper Mine merely a kind of postscript to all that. Sōseki declined the offer then and there on the grounds that it was impossible for a stranger to write such personal matters as another’s love affair accurately. Almost immediately, however, Sōseki received an unexpected request to serialize a novel in the Asahi Shimbun when the writer Shimazaki Tōson informed the newspaper that he would be unable to produce the work he had been commissioned to write. Sōseki was unprepared to write a new novel, but as a special member of the Asahi staff, he was in no position to turn the request down flat. He decided, perhaps as a last resort, to ask young Arai for permission to use his material, not to write a love story but a novel based on his experience in the mine. Arai agreed to this, and Sōseki started serializing The Miner on New Year’s Day, 1908. In other words, he had little more than a month between taking his notes from Arai and starting to write the novel. Far from having a chance to let the material ferment in his consciousness, he wrote it almost extemporaneously.
Of course one cannot always take a novelist’s anecdotes or confidences about his writing at face value. As a novelist myself, I know about such things. I don’t think there’s a novelist anywhere who tells the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about how each of his works came into being. We all set up smokescreens to hide inconvenient truths and make up episodes to add a little color. There must be some novelists, too, who enjoy creating little legends about themselves. Or, even if they don’t do it consciously, their memories can undergo spontaneous change while they are engaged in the creation of their works.
But if we take Sōseki at his word, he displayed not the least bit of interest at first in the young man’s graphic account of his experiences in Ashio Copper Mine. I find this very strange, almost unbelievable. Any practicing novelist would have to be attracted to background information regarding events that had recently commanded the whole society’s attention. And perhaps Sōseki was in fact interested, which would explain why he took such extraordinarily detailed notes (without which he might not have been able to write the novel), but he hesitated to make his interest public.
Why, then, did Sōseki feel he had to pretend to be uninterested in the young man’s talk about the copper mine? My guess as a novelist is that he didn’t want his novel to be directly identified with a serious social problem. As recently as March of 1907 he had resigned his post as a professor at Tokyo Imperial University and launched himself as a professional novelist, a courageous move tantamount to diving off a cliff. No longer could he write fiction as a hobby from the transcendent position of a respected university professor. By becoming a special staff member of the Asahi Shimbun, he had committed to serializing one novel per year. This would require him to settle upon a mature writing style and to undergo a major change in lifestyle. In other words, this was a very delicate time for him, in addition to which he had always been a high-strung personality who suffered from severe stomach illness. He simply couldn’t afford at such a time to risk jeopardizing his literary style by choosing to tackle a major social problem head-on—or so it would seem to me. His concern at the time was directed not so much toward social problems as toward the mental activity of individual human beings. I think it can even be said that society was, for him (at that time at least), an unavoidable external factor that applied varying amounts of pressure to the minds of individuals to bring about something like chemical changes in them. In that sense, the factual social problems surrounding Ashio Copper Mine would have been too serious, too direct, as topics for him to make them his own.
Sōseki was probably, moreover, too much of an elitist to feel sympathy for or to try to understand such laborers as the Ashio miners living in the lower depths of society. It simply might have been a practical impossibility for him to overcome this basic attitude all at once.
Nevertheless, Sōseki was profoundly interested in the look and feel of Ashio Copper Mine as the young man had experienced it. This was a natural part of his makeup as a novelist. His interest was entirely healthy and richly nourishing to him as a creative writer, which is why he took such detailed notes. He could not have cared less about the commonplace love story that the young man wanted to sell him. He wanted to know what it was really like down there in the mine—the black honeycomb of shafts and passageways deep underground; the precarious ladders that went down and down forever; the brutal, violent, mud-smeared men who squirmed in the darkness as they struggled with their wretched circumstances: Sōseki wrote it all down.
When it came to the practical problem of turning this material into a novel, however, Sōseki had few concrete options open to him. He could not, of course, write “proletarian” literature. Nor could he enter the domain of Zola’s social naturalism. Such possibilities simply did not lie within Sōseki’s field of vision. Which is why he chose for his protagonist an educated, well brought-up, city-bred nineteen-year-old (“an inexperienced, aristocratic miner” in the eyes of the other miners) and put his experiences into the form of dark underground “rounds of Hell.” Using such a character, the author was able to give his imagination free rein with relative ease and thus depict the events in the book as one particular extreme experience, skillfully avoiding any larger “socializing” of his novel and technically doing away with any decisive confrontation with members of the lowest rung of society on their level. This was almost certainly why Sōseki had to avoid any mention in his text of either the name “Ashio” or the riot that had occurred there.
As will become clear on reading the novel, the only characters encountered by the protagonist who possess the slightest intelligence and humanity are Yasu, a highly educated man whom circumstances have reduced to becoming a miner (and who is seen by the other miners as superior to them), and the boiler boss, a man of some standing in miner society. All the other miners are depicted as ignorant savages or animals devoid of human feelings. Sōseki draws a sharp, almost amusing distinction between the two types in a way that is reminiscent of his 1906 Botchan’s distinction between the city-boy protagonist and the ignorant, unsophisticated country bumpkins who surround him. It may in fact reflect Sōseki’s own social stance.
Let me emphasize that these views are entirely my own freewheeling inferences as one novelist assessing another. I do not mean to criticize Sōseki from a later generation’s point of view. It goes without saying that the fundamental role of the novelist in any period is to be true to his own ideas, not to maintain political correctness. Of course in Sōseki’s day the idea of political correctness was all but nonexistent.
Earlier I noted the extreme lack of lead time between the author’s gathering of his materials and his shaping of them into a novel. If I can (perhaps somewhat presumptuously) offer my view of the matter, this time constraint seems to have been both a plus and a minus for the book. On the plus side was the fact that Sōseki was not given a chance to prepare thoroughly for the novelization of his materials. This required him to write it spontaneously, forging ahead with the work almost as soon as he had obtained the information on which it was based. This resulted in the book’s uniquely lively style and deepened its experimental quality. I imagine that if another, more ordinary, novelist had undertaken the work, it would have turned out either as a novel focused on a social problem or as a conventional Bildungsroman; that is, as a device intended to educate and enlighten the general populace or as a story showing how one intelligent nineteen-year-old came through a series of outlandish and brutal experiences to emerge as a mature adult. Certainly no one else would have written a social novel like The Miner that stubbornly maintains the protagonist’s individualistic stance to the very end and avoids (or positively rejects) any active engagement with society on the part of the protagonist. I make a point of calling The Miner a “social novel” here because it possesses great practical value as a first-class historical document conveying what life was really like for late-Meiji laborers inside Ashio Copper Mine. If this novel didn’t exist, there might never have been any way for us to learn about the world of the copper mine in such concrete detail. This is an undeniable fact.
On the minus side, obviously, is the fact that the novel lacked the necessary “fermentation period” for bringing it to maturity. Usually when novelists find material they want to write about, they’ll leave it to ferment in their minds until they begin to see whether it will work as a novel, and if so they give it more time so they can think about what form it will take. In the case of The Miner, though, time is exactly what Sōseki was not given. He had to present it to the public before the work could fully ripen—a literary minus, to be sure. If, however, Sōseki had had plenty of time to let his materials ferment, I suspect (and this is pure speculation, of course) that he never would have written the novel at all, and we never would have had a chance to encounter this odd book called The Miner. And that is because, finally, the materials Sōseki had to work with were incompatible with his literary world. The longer he had left it to ferment, the more clearly he might have seen that it was never going to turn into a novel, and he might have put the notes away in a drawer for good. In that sense, we were probably lucky that he wasn’t given enough time to let the novel take shape.
The first time I started reading The Miner, I assumed it would turn out to be a kind of Bildungsroman. The young man was encountering so many trying experiences as I turned the pages, he was sure to undergo a kind of personal transformation in the end and discover some deep meaning in his experiences. When I came to the last line, however, I was astounded. By that point, the young protagonist has managed to spend five months of his life at the mine (though not as a miner digging down into the earth); he has witnessed this hellish world and has himself survived his passage through it, and yet he does not appear to have undergone the slightest change as a human being. He might have changed in some unknown way (not to have changed at all after such an ordeal is unthinkable), but the author says nothing about that. To all appearances, the protagonist leaves the mountain as nonchalantly as he first entered it, without a thought in his head. He just goes with the flow in everything. He went with the flow to enter the mine, and he goes with the flow when he leaves it. He spent five months in this alien world, and yet the author says absolutely nothing about how this experience caused him to grow as a human being or how his worldview has changed or how his social consciousness has deepened: nothing. A blank. The alien world is as alien as ever, tied to nothing and nowhere. Most readers must feel this to be rather odd. And the more I think about it, the more convinced I become that Sōseki deliberately excluded from the book all the usual novelistic elements that come with the story of a young man’s coming of age.
Why would he do such a thing? If he had included a few such elements, The Miner would certainly have turned out to be a more novelistic novel, and there would have been no need for the protagonist to make awkward excuses at the end about how “this book never did turn into a novel.” But Sōseki almost certainly rejected such an approach. To the very last line, he almost perversely maintains his protagonist’s detached posture, in which the alien world is simply that—an alien world.
For years, this feature of the novel has been seen as a structural weakness, and it is one of the reasons that The Miner has not received high marks among Sōseki’s works. In short, there is very little by way of novelistic catharsis in the book.
Yet that is the very thing that strikes me about The Miner—its unsatisfying ending, its weak catharsis, its stubborn detachment. I felt that way when I first read it years ago, and again when I reread it for this commentary. It’s like reaching for the next rung of a ladder in the darkness and grabbing only empty space. “What’s going on here?” you feel when it’s all over, as if the author has deliberately thrust you away and left you feeling stranded, alienated, empty. You get that same kind of parched sensation that a good postmodern novel can give you. Perhaps we can call it a sense of meaning in the very lack of meaning.
This probably sums up what I love and value about The Miner. Thanks to the extremely short lead time between his obtaining his materials and his fashioning them into a work, Sōseki virtually had to strip-mine the novelistic unconscious lurking inside him, bringing it to the surface so openly and forcefully that it surprised even him. In more or less tangible form, this fresh surprise went on to influence all the great novels that flowed from his pen after that, from Sanshirō (1908, Sanshirō) to Light and Dark (1916, Meian). As a novelist myself, I can’t help imagining this to have been the importance of The Miner to Sōseki, and when I do think of the novelist Natsume Sōseki in this way, I feel closer to him, almost as if he were a contemporary.
Finally, on a personal note, I would like to say that I had The Miner in mind as I was writing my Underground (1997), a non-fiction study of the 1995 sarin gas attack against the Tokyo subways by the Aum Shinrikyō sect. I spent a year interviewing 64 survivors of the attack (and members of the victims’ families) and compiling the massive stack of transcripts into one thick volume. I did virtually nothing else for that year. I listened carefully to what they had to say, I took down their words, and I did my best to recreate the scene and atmosphere of the incident as vividly and faithfully as I could. In doing this, I simultaneously had to suppress my creative self and to work my imagination as hard as I could. The task added much to my growth as a writer.
Of course, The Miner is a novel and Underground is non-fiction, so they are very different sorts of books, but I’ve always felt that deep down they share something in spirit. There is an attitude in both that says, “I’m a writer, and I’m going to try my best to visit this other hellish world as an honest witness (an active observer) while keeping my sanity intact and shedding my own kind of light on it.” Another important goal on my part was to establish my text as reliable primary material. Whether that attitude was appropriate or not, whether the work I produced was a success or not, history will judge over the long haul. I can only leave it up to time.
In that sense, it makes me very happy to know that even now I can read this novel written over a hundred years ago as if it were a contemporary account and be deeply affected by it.
December 2014
The Miner
Been walking and walking through this band of pine trees. It’s so long—longer than any band of pine trees I ever saw in a picture. Can’t tell if I’m making headway with only trees around. No point walking if the trees aren’t going to do something—develop. Better to stay put and try to outstare a tree, see who laughs first.
Left Tokyo at nine last night, walked like mad straight north. Worn out, sleepy, no place to stay, no money. Crawled onto a Kagura stage1 in the dark for a nap. Hachiman shrine, probably. Cold woke me up. Still pretty dark. Pushed on without a break, but who feels like walking when there’s no end to these damned trees!
Legs weigh a ton. Every step is torture. Like having little iron hammers strapped to my calves. Kimono tail tucked up for hiking, legs bare. Anywhere else, I’d be set to run a race. But not with all these pine trees.
Here’s a tea stand. Through the reed blinds I see a rusty kettle on a big clay stove. A bench in front sticks way out into the road, a few straw sandals hanging over it. A man in a kimono—a hanten or dotera2 or something—sitting there with his back to me.
I’m moving past and peeking from the corner of my eye and wondering whether I should stop and rest or forget it when this fellow halfway between a hanten and a dotera spins around in my direction, smiling. His tobacco-blackened teeth show between two fat lips. I start feeling queasy but he turns serious. I see he’s been enjoying a talk with the old lady in the tea stand and for no good reason swung around to the road where that smile of his landed smack on me. So he turns serious and I relax. I relax and then I feel queasy again. His face is serious and he keeps it sitting there in a serious position, but damned if the whites of his eyes don’t start creeping up my face—mouth to nose, nose to forehead, over the visor and up to the crown of my cap. Then they start creeping down again. This time they skip the face, go to the chest, to the navel, and come to a stop. Wallet in there. Thirty-two sen inside. Eyes lock onto it right through my blue-and-white kimono. Still focused on the wallet, they cross my cotton sash and arrive at my crotch. Below that, only bare legs, and no amount of looking is going to find anything to see on them. They’re just feeling a little heavier than usual. After a long, careful look at the heavy parts, the eyes finally arrive at the black marks my big toes have rubbed onto the platforms of my geta.3
When I write it out like this, it sounds as if I was standing there in the one spot for a long time practically inviting him to look me over, but that wasn’t it at all. In fact, the second the whites of his eyes started moving, I was sure I wanted to get out of there. But knowing what I wanted to do wasn’t enough, it seems. By the time I had my toes scrunched up and was ready to turn my geta, the whites of his eyes had stopped moving. I hate to say it, but he was fast. If you think it took a long time for his eyes to creep all over me like that, you’re wrong. Sure, they were creeping, and they were calm as could be. But they were fast, too. Damned fast. Here I was, trying to walk past this place, and all I could think of was how strangely a pair of eyes can move. If only I could have managed to turn away before he had finished looking me over! I was like somebody who announces that he’s leaving a place after he’s been ordered to get out. You feel like a fool. The other fellow’s got the upper hand.
Once I started walking, I had a strange, angry feeling for the first ten or twelve yards. But those ten or twelve yards were all it took for the feeling to disappear—and for my legs to grow heavy again. I’ve still got the same legs, don’t I, and the same iron hammers strapped to them? Of course I can’t move quickly. Maybe I was born slow, but that can’t be the reason those eye whites crawled all over me. When I think about it like this, my anger begins to seem pointless.
Besides, I’m not in any position to let little things bother me. I’ve run away and I’m never going home again. I can’t even stay in Tokyo. I’m not planning to settle in the country, either. They’re after me. They’ll catch me if I stop. Once my troubles start running around my brain, there’s no place far enough out for me to relax. So I keep walking. But since I’m walking with no particular goal in mind, I feel as if a big, blurry photograph is hanging in the air in front of my face. Everything’s out of focus, and there’s no telling when it might come clear. It stretches off ahead of me into infinity. And it’ll be there as long as I live—fifty years, sixty—stretching out in front of me no matter how much I walk, no matter how much I run. Oh hell, what’s the difference? I’m not walking to get through this foggy stuff out there. I know damn well I could never get through it if I tried. I’m walking because I can’t stay still.
I thought I knew all this when I left Tokyo at nine last night, but my nerves have been on edge ever since I started walking. Now my legs are heavy, and these endless rows of pine trees are making me sick. Finally, though, it’s not the legs or the pine trees that are bothering me: the ache is in my gut. It’s a new kind of pain, one so bad I know I can’t go on living a second longer if I don’t keep walking, but I have no idea what I’m walking for.
And that’s not all. The more I walk, the deeper I can feel myself tunneling into this out-of-focus world with no escape. Behind me, I can see Tokyo, where the sun shines, but it’s already part of a different life. As long as I’m in this world, I can never reach out and touch it. They’re two separate levels of existence. But Tokyo is still there, warm and bright, I can see it—so clearly that I want to call out to it from the shadows. Meanwhile where my feet are going is a formless, endless blur, and all I can do for the rest of my life is wander into this enormous nothing, lost.
I hate to think that this world of clouds is going to be out there, blocking the path ahead, for the rest of my allotted span. Because what that means is that every time anxiety makes me take a step, I walk one step deeper into anxiety. Pursued by anxiety from behind, drawn on by anxiety ahead, I have to keep moving, but I can walk and walk and walk, and nothing is going to be solved. I’ll go on walking through an anxiety that will stay unsettled as long as I live.
I’d be better off if the clouds would grow darker every step of the way. Then I could keep going from darkness to deeper darkness. Before long the world would be pitch black and I wouldn’t be able to see myself. Then everything would be fine.
The road I’m traveling refuses to be of any help. It won’t turn bright, but then, it won’t turn dark either. Always somewhere halfway between light and shadow, it remains enveloped in a fog of unsettled anxiety. A life like this is not worth living, I know, but still I cling to it. I want to go somewhere without people and live by myself, and if I can’t do that, I might as well …
Strange, the thought of the ultimate “might as well” didn’t frighten me. In Tokyo I had often been on the verge of committing something rash, but never without a throb of fear. Afterward there would always be a rush of horror at what I’d almost done and I’d be glad I hadn’t done it. But this time there was no throb, no rush, no nothing, probably because I was so full of anxiety that the throbs and rushes could have gone to hell for all I cared. And probably, too, I knew in the back of my mind that the “might as well” was not about to happen at any moment. Maybe I figured there was nothing much to worry about. It could have been tomorrow, the next day, a week later. And, if need be, I could have put it off indefinitely. No doubt I was half-conscious of the fact that, whether I was going to throw myself over Kegon Falls or into the crater of Mt. Asama, I still had a long way to go. Who’s going to start throbbing before he actually comes to the place where he plans to end it all? That’s why I could let myself think about doing it. This out-of-focus world was agony, but as long as there was hope of escaping from it before that throb happened, there was still some point in dragging my heavy legs along. I had decided at least this much for myself, apparently. But I know this now only from having dissected my psychological state after the fact. At the time, I was walking with only one thought in mind: Go into the dark, you’ve got to go into the dark. Now it seems ridiculous, but there are times in life when we come to feel that the only comfort left us is to move ahead toward death. Of course, the death we’re aiming for probably has to be pretty far away for us to feel this. At least, I believe it would have to be. When it’s too close, it can never be a comfort. That’s just how death works.
So here I was, walking along, my head filled with fog—into the dark, got to go into the dark—when someone called me from behind. It’s strange: your soul can be ready to drift off into space, but another person calls you and you find it’s still anchored down somewhere. I turned around, not quite knowing why. One thing is certain, though: I was not even conscious that this was in response to something. Only when I had turned did I realize that I hadn’t gone forty yards from the tea stand. And there in the road in front of it was that cross between a hanten and a dotera, calling me and flashing his huge, tobacco-stained grin.
I hadn’t talked to anyone since leaving Tokyo the night before, never dreamed that a person would try speaking to me. I felt absolutely certain that I was unfit to be spoken to. Then it happened so suddenly—he was waving to me frantically and showing me this big, snaggletoothed grin—that the foggy feeling I turned around with cleared itself out, and my feet started moving in his direction almost before I was aware of it.
Now, let me tell you, I didn’t like anything about this man—his face, his clothes, his movements. Especially when he gave me the once-over with those white eyes of his, I could almost feel myself beginning to hate him. Less than forty yards later the feeling had disappeared and I turned back to him with a sense of warmth instead, but don’t ask me why. My only thought had been to go into the dark. Which means that when I started walking back toward the tea stand, I was moving away from my destination, away from the dark. Still, I was almost glad. I’ve had plenty of experiences since then, and I’ve run across contradictions like this everywhere. It’s not just me. These days, I don’t believe any more in the existence of “character.” Novelists congratulate themselves on their creation of this kind of character or that kind of character, and readers pretend to talk knowingly about character, but all it amounts to is that the writers are enjoying themselves writing lies and the readers are enjoying themselves reading lies. In fact, there is no such thing as character, something fixed and final. The real thing is something that novelists don’t know how to write about. Or, if they tried, the end result would never be a novel. Real people are strangely difficult to make sense out of. Even a god would have his hands full trying. But maybe I’m jumping to conclusions, presuming that other people are a mess just because I’m put together in such a disorderly way. If so, I should apologize.
Well, anyhow, I walked up to this dark blue dotera and he said to me, “Hello there, youngster,” as if he’d known me for years. He had his chin pulled in a little behind his collar, and he was staring at me, somewhere up around my forehead.
I planted my two brown legs a good distance from him and asked politely, “Yes, sir?”
Ordinarily, I was not the sort who would favor someone like this dotera with a cordial reply, especially if I’d been called “youngster.” A grunt or a “What?” was about as far as I would go. But at that moment I had the feeling that I and this dotera, with his horrid physiognomy, were human beings on an entirely equal footing. Nor, certainly, was I lowering myself to him in hopes of gaining some advantage. In return, he spoke to me as if he also saw us as equals.
“Hey, kid. Want a job?”
Until that moment, I had been resigning myself to having no other business in life than to go into the dark, so when asked out of nowhere if I wanted a job, I didn’t know what to say. I just stood there with my bare shanks planted in the earth, staring at this fellow with my mouth hanging open.
“Hey, kid, want a job? How about it? Everybody’s got to work.”
By the time he repeated his question, I had grasped enough of the situation to be able to reply.
“I don’t mind.”
This was my answer. But the fact that my head had managed—in a makeshift way, perhaps—to clear itself out enough for these three words to reach my mouth, meant that it had passed through a certain—albeit simple—process, one that went something like this:
I didn’t know where I was going, but I was sure I wanted to go where there were no people. In spite of that, I had turned and started walking toward the dotera. So, while I was walking, I couldn’t help feeling a little disappointed in myself. Even the dotera was a human being, after all. Here, someone supposedly heading away from human beings had been drawn back in the direction of a human being, which not only proved how great was the gravitational pull of human beings, it also proved that I myself was so weak that I had already abandoned my own resolution. In short, I wanted to go into the dark, but I was actually doing it against my will, and if some entanglement came up to hold me back, I was probably ready to jump at the chance to stay in the real world. Fortunately, the dotera had provided me with the entanglement I needed, and so my feet simply turned around and went toward him. Let’s say I Shamefully Betrayed My Ultimate Goal—a little. If the first words out of the dotera’s mouth had not been “Want a job?” but instead, “Where you going to do it, kid, the mountains or the fields?” that goal I had been forgetting about would have come back to me with a start, and the thought of the dark place, the place without people, would have filled me with horror. Which only goes to show how my ties with the world had begun to reassert themselves the instant I began to retrace my steps. And the more he called to me, and the more I moved in his direction, step by step, the more these ties seem to have grown in strength, the moment I planted my bare shanks in the earth in front of him being the point at which they reached their highest intensity. It was at that moment he asked, “Want a job?”—an invitation by means of which this scruffy dotera exploited my psychological state with great finesse. My initial response to this unexpected question seems to have been a blank stare, but by the time I snapped out of it, I had become a human being in the real world. As a human being in the real world, I had to eat. And to eat, I would have to work.
“I don’t mind.”
The answer slipped from my mouth without the slightest difficulty. “No, of course you don’t! How could you?” the expression on his face seemed to say. Strangely enough, I found this expression perfectly natural.
“I don’t mind, but what kind of job?” I added.
“You’ll make plenty of money. I guarantee it. What do you say?”
He watched me expectantly, a gleeful grin on his face. A smile from the dotera was not about to charm any hearts, though. His was not a face made for smiling. The more he tried, the worse it looked. Still, I found that smile strangely moving.
“OK,” I said, “I’ll give it a try.”
“You will? Great! There’s plenty of money in it for you.”
“I don’t care about the money.”
“Huh?” His voice sounded strange when he said this.
“What kind of job is it?”
“I’ll tell you if you promise me you’ll take it. You’ll take it, kid, right? I don’t want you backing down, now, after I tell you what it is. You’ll take it for sure, right?”
“I’m planning to.”
This reply didn’t come as easily as the first one. I more or less had to force it out. Apparently, I was willing to do anything within reason but still wanted to leave myself an escape, which is probably why I said I was planning to take it. (I know it’s a little strange for me to be writing about myself in this tentative way, as though I were someone not myself, but humans are such inconsistent beings that we can’t say anything for certain about them—even when they’re us. And when it comes to past events, it’s even worse: there’s no distinguishing between ourselves and other people. The best we can say is “probably” or “apparently.” I may be accused of irresponsibility for this, but there’s no getting around it, because it’s true. Which is why I intend to continue with this approach whenever anything doubtful comes up.)
The dotera understood my answer to mean that I had accepted his offer.
“Come in,” he said. “Relax. We’ll have some tea and I’ll tell you all about it.”
That seemed fine with me. I stepped in and sat down on the bench next to the dotera. A woman in her forties with a twisted mouth set a cup of odd-smelling tea in front of me. The first sip made me hungry. Or maybe I just suddenly realized I was hungry. I was thinking about using the thirty-two sen in my wallet to buy something to eat, when the dotera said, “Have a smoke?” and shoved a pack of Asahis sideways in my direction. Quite the gentleman. I didn’t mind that he was offering me such cheap smokes, and I could live with the fact that the corner of the pack was torn. But it was grimy, too, and squashed so badly that the cigarettes inside must have been squeezed together into a single lump. The dotera had no sleeve pockets on his dotera, and probably had to stuff his smokes into the pocket of his haragake.4
“No, thanks,” I said.
With no show of disappointment, the dotera extricated a cigarette from the lump using his dirt-blackened fingernails. Just as I had thought, the cigarette was wrinkled and bent. Still, it didn’t look torn, and when he puffed away at it, smoke came from his nostrils. Strange to see it just barely managing to function as a cigarette.
