Unhuman tour

by Soseki Natsume

I listened to the song, holding myself down in the bed; but as it went farther and farther, I felt, I must chase it, despite the consciousness that it was luring me out by the ear. The thinner it grew the more I felt that I should let my ear only fly after it. Just at the moment I thought, however hard I might listen, my ears would hear no more, I could constrain myself no longer and unconsciously I slipped out of my bed. The same moment I opened the “shoji,”[(15)] and stood out in the verandah, with the lower half of my body bathing in the moonlight and a tree throwing its waving shadow on my night clothes. These details did not occur to me, however, at the instant I opened the “shoji.”

But that dying sound? I looked in the direction toward which my ear was running. There I espied a shadowy form in the moonlight as it were, with its back to a tree, which, if in bloom, might be an aronia. The misty dark thing flanked right, stepping on the shadow of blossoms on the ground, even before it had left on me a clear impression that “it must be it.” A corner of the roof, thrown on the ground, of a room adjoining mine, seemed to move lithely, and the next moment shut out from view a tall figure of a woman.

I was lost to myself for many moments, as I stood thinly clad in my night gown, with my hand on the screen. The minute I returned to myself, I was made keenly conscious that a night of Spring in the mountain was decidedly chilly. As it was, I did not hesitate to permit myself to creep back into the bed from which I had crept out, and started on another train of thought. I took out my watch from under the pillow and found it pointing at ten past one. I put the watch back under the pillow, and returned to my thoughts. “It cannot be a spook,” I thought. If not an apparition, it must be a human being, and if a human being, it must be a woman. She might have been the O-Jo-san of this house. If so, it seemed rather defying propriety that a young woman, who had taken a divorce of her husband should, at that hour of night, be out in the garden, that ran into the mountain. In any case, sleep had become impossible, that watch of mine under the pillow ticking me to irrepressible wakefulness. The tiny ticking of my watch had never before troubled me; but on this particular night it seemed to say “No sleep for you to-night, but think, think, think.” It was outrageously extraordinary.

A frightful thing will make poetry when you regard it merely as the form itself of frightfulness; just as a weird eerie sight may be worked into a picture, if you treat it as something horrid in itself, independent of you. Likewise a disappointed love makes an excellent theme of art when gentleness, sympathy, worries and, indeed, even the very overflow of pains, it occasions, are turned objectively into visions before you, divorced from the actual torments felt in your heart. Nay, some people imagine that they are disappointed in love in order to enjoy the pleasure of agonising themselves. Ordinary mortals laugh at them as idiotic, as lunatic; but they are no more unbalanced, from the point of view of having their own artistic ground to stand on, than those who go into the ecstacy of living in a world of their own by creating scenery that nowhere exists.

Looked at in this light, artists as such are, compared with common people, idiots, lunatics—whatever be their qualification in their daily life. When by themselves they never cease complaining, from morn till night, of the hardships of their pedestrian journeys in search of fit subjects for their canvas or for their pen. But they betray not even a shadow of grievance when they tell others of their experiences. They not only narrate gleefully the things they enjoyed and were delighted with, but are enthusiastic over events that once tortured them but now come back as sweet memories. Not that they mean to deceive themselves and others; but the truth is that when out on the road they see and feel as ordinary mortals do, but they become poets when they talk of their past. And this accounts for their inconsistencies. He may be called an artist, then, who lives in a triangle, built by knocking off a corner called common-sense of the four-angled world.

Be it in nature or in the world of man, artists thus discover countless gems and stones of inestimable value, in places which the multitude dare not approach. The secret of such a discovery is commonly called beautifying. But in reality there is no beautification about it at all, light and colour having in their brilliancy always existed in this mundane world; but because flowers fall from the sky in vain for common eyes; because worldly trammels are unshakable; because the thought of success and prosperity hang so heavy on the human mind, nobody has been able to see the beauties of a railway train till Turner showed them, and the world waited for Ohkyo to be shown the æsthetics of a ghost.

The shadow I had just seen had, as a phenomenon complete in itself and nothing more, something poetical about it that none could deny who saw or heard it. A sequestered spa in the bosom of a mountain—the shadow of flowers in a Spring night—The soft warbling of a song under a tell-tale moon—a dreamy figure in pale moonlight—every one of them would have made a capital subject for an artist. For all that, I was trying unnecessarily to see what might be behind the vision, and a blood-chilling sensation that had taken possession of me blinded me to the elegance of the situation, which was perfectly consistent in itself and the picturesqueness that could not be hoped for. I thought myself unworthy of my professed unhumanity and felt I must go through more training before I could proclaim myself a poet or an artist. Salvator Rosa of Italy came vividly before my eyes with his perilous tale of joining the banditti of the Abruzzi. I had wandered away from my home with just a sketch book, and I should be ashamed of myself, if I had not Rosa’s resolve.

How should I rehabilitate myself as a poet in such circumstances? All that is necessary is, I argued to myself, I may put myself in a condition that would enable me to take hold of my feelings, lay them before me, stand a step behind, and examine them calmly unprejudicedly as if I were another person, not myself. The poet is under an obligation, when he dies, to dissect his own body and publish the cause of his malady. There may be various ways of doing this; but the easiest and nearest is to make an instantaneous survey of everything you can lay your hand on, and reduce it into a seventeen syllable “hokku”. The seventeen syllable effusion is the simplest of poems, and you can have it, when you are washing your face in the morning, or when you are going in a tram car. It makes a poet of you most simply and most easily. To be a poet is to be enlightened, and I mean no disparagement, when I say, it is the simplest and easiest. The simpler the more beneficial it is, and should the more be respected. Suppose you lose your temper. You make a seventeen syllable “hokku” of your indignation. The moment seventeen syllables get into shape, your anger becomes something outside of you—you cannot be fuming with anger and composing a “hokku” at the same time. You are moved to tears; you make seventeen syllables, and they delight you. When your tears are changed into seventeen syllables, your tearful anguish has left you, and you have become a self only joyous of being a man capable of weeping.

This has always been the stand I insisted upon, and I now wanted to put it to a practical test. Lying abed, I set about making a series of seventeen syllables of the events of the night. A very deliberate enterprise as I was undertaking, I lay open my sketch-book near the pillow, to jot down in it as fast as I got the lines, lest they might become lost as fugitive thoughts, hard to recapture.

“Kaidono tsuyuo furu-u-ya monogurui,”[(a)] I wrote down as my first production. If the reading of it did not strike me as particularly captivating, neither did it give rise to any uncomfortably creepy feeling. I next jotted down: “Hanano kage, onnano kageno oborokana.”[(b)] It was faulty with a redundancy. I forgave myself for it; because all I wanted was to recover calmness and humour myself into an easy frame of mind. For the third piece, I ventured: “Shoichi-i onnani bakete oborozuki.”[(c)] It sounded droll and amused me.