In fact my trilogy is soaked in the overflowing influence of all of Yeats's poems.  On the occasion of Yeats's winning the Nobel Prize, the Irish Senate proposed a motion to congratulate him, which contained the following lines:

  ... the recognition which the nation has gained, as a prominent contributor to the world's culture, through his success. ... a race that hitherto had not been accepted into the comity of nations.   ... Our civilization will be assessed on the name of Senator Yeats. ... there will always be the danger that there may be a stampeding of people who are insufficiently removed from insanity in enthusiasm for destruction.

Yeats is the writer in whose wake I would like to follow.  I would like to do so for the sake of another nation that has now been "accepted into the comity of nations" but rather on account of its electrical engineering and manufacture of automobiles.  Also I would like to do so as a citizen of a nation that was stampeded into "insanity in enthusiasm for destruction" both on its own soil and on that of neighboring nations.
     Living in our present, and sharing our bitter memories of the past, I cannot utter in unison with Kawabata the phrase "Japan, the Beautiful, and Myself."   A moment ago I touched upon the "vagueness" of the title and content of Kawabata's lecture.  In the rest of my lecture I would like to use the word "ambiguous," in accordance with the distinction made by the eminent British poet Kathleen Raine; she once said of William Blake that he was not smuch vague as ambiguous. I cannot talk about myself otherwise than by saying "Japan, the Ambiguous, and Myself."
      My observation is that, after one hundred and twenty years of modernization since the opening of the country, present-day Japan is split between the two opposite poles of an ambiguity.  I, too, as a writer, live with this polarization imprinted on me like a deep scar.  (p.5)
 

Physicians and famine in Japan: Takano Choei in the 1830s

           EG Nakamura

Pacific and Asian History, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University, Canberra ACT 0200, Australia

Takano Choei (1804-50) was a rangakusha (a scholar of Dutch studies), and a physician of Western medicine.  Although he was one of the foremost scholars in his field, his career was cut off in its prime when he became the victim of an intrigue in 1839.  As a result, much of his early work has been overshadowed by the political events that followed.  This article takes a different approach to the writing of Choei's history by presenting an example of his work as a physician in the period before his arrest.   It examines the responses of Choei and his colleagues to the famine and pestilence which ravaged the population during the Tempo Famine of the 1830s. The study is based on two short articles: one concerns the precautions people should take against epidemic disease, while the other deals with hardy, rapidly maturing crops thought helpful in warding off starvation.   The focus of this article is on the way knowledge from Western sources was 'received'; that is, how it was actively
assimilated and transformed, through a process of cultural exchange.

  Keywords: famine, potatoes, buckwheat, epidemic disease, miasma, 'receptive' history, Japan

*Choei Takano was born in Obatake-koji, Mizusawa, Oshu City of Iwate Prefecture, near my birthplace!

Most Western martial arts practitioners are at least aware of the existence of the book entitled Bushido.  Many people have even read it as it is one of the few books in English that is readily available nearly anywhere.  Most of the more knowledgeable people know that this book, while widely accepted as the source for information on the Japanese warrior's spirit in the mainstream American martial arts community, is in fact not a very accurate depiction of the morals that the Japanese warrior lived by.  The ones who are even more knowledgeable know that this is the case because it was written after the warrior class had been abolished and is a highly idealized version of what the author wanted the warrior class' values to be.  However, it seems there are very few people in the English speaking mainstream martial arts community who have been willing to dig into the life of the author, Inazo Nitobe.   I suspect that is partly because people think there isn't much information available on him in English as there are no books about him available in your favorite Karate magazine.

I must admit, I never had much interest in him and assumed he was just some cranky old ex-samurai who was complaining about how kids these days aren't like the warriors of old.  In typical fashion, I was proven that I couldn't have been more wrong.  Nanao Senjiro sensei, Karate sensei at Minnesota State University Akita, decided to do a lecture on Bushido and the author as well.  Furthermore Nanao sensei knows a relative of Nitobe's who manages the Inazo Nitobe Memorial Hall in Towada, Aomori and has all kinds of great information on him (I want to say this is Nitobe's grandson, but I can't remember for certain).  The following is a summary of Nitobe's rather interesting and unusual life from both the lecture and a discussion we had further on the topic afterwards.  Much of the factual stuff is from a book he received from the Memorial Hall, but unfortunately since the book is in Japanese, I wasn't able to get the title or author's name.  I'll try and hunt that down later.  As this is just a rough summary of the highlights, as I understood them, readers interested in additional and more accurate information are encouraged to dig around in the Japanese history section of their local library or bookstore.

Inazo Nitobe was born in August of 1862, before the fall of the samurai class.  I have heard people claim his family were commoners, but his family had in fact been of high status in the warrior class and supposedly were descendants of the Emperor Enryaku (a.k.a. Katsurahara, question on the spelling) who ruled 781-782.  His great great grandfather was the Heiho Shihan (master military strategist/scholar may be a decent translation) for the Han (clan or family) that they belonged to.  His grandfather practiced martial arts as did his father and Nitobe himself.  His father was involved in Tamiya Ryu Iaijutsu, Toda Ryu Kenjutsu, and Jinto Ryu Sojutsu.  When Nitobe was young he used to awake at 4 am and train in some form of kenjutsu, jujutsuand sojutsu (possibly the same ryuha his father trained in).

His grandfather was sent to Tozawa in present Aomori prefecture and told to cultivate the land there.  Previous to this time, that area was very poor and had no agriculture to speak of.  His grandfather spent a great deal of time working on making a usable irrigation system for the area and his father continued the work by actually working to get rice grown there.  The year Inazo was born was the first rice harvest in Towada and because his father was so happy, he named his son Inazo (one of the kanji in his name is an old Chinese kanji relating to rice).  (I should note that because of his family's status, I doubt they actually were out digging in the fields, they were probably the planners of the project and in charge of organizing labor and such).  Because of his family's high status, Inazo was strongly encouraged to become a highly educated and wise individual.    He began to study English at an early age and at 13 enrolled in a famous English school in Tokyo.

During the time he was in Tokyo, there was a famous American Professor teaching at Sapporo Agriculture College named Clark.  (He is famous throughout Japan for a quote he said to his students when leaving Japan, "Boys be ambitious.").  Inazo had a strong desire to study with this famous professor so upon graduation from the English College, he enrolled in Sapporo Agricultural College, only to find Clark had since returned to America.  Regardless, he continued his studies there and eventually graduated in 1883.

After graduating from Sapporo, he returned to Tokyo and became an English teacher for a time.  He felt, however, that he needed to further his education (2 degrees wasn't enough I guess) and enrolled in Tokyo University to study international relations.  He did not graduate from Tokyo University, however, because he got the chance to go to America and study at John Hopkins University.  While at the University, he met an American woman named Marry, who was a Quaker studying at the same college.  They formed a long relationship and eventually they were married in the U.S. (despite opposition from her parents that didn't subside until after her death).

She eventually became known in Japan as Mariko, as the name sounded similar to Marry.  Inazo himself eventually converted to Quakerism as he thought it was similar to Samurai ethics (1).  Upon returning to Japan, he became a professor at Sapporo University and through their recommendation was able to again leave the country and study at three different colleges in Germany.  It was during this time in Germany that the idea for the book Bushido was born.  Marry often asked Inazo were the Japanese moral system came from, naturally curious, as it was so different from the American system.  When in Germany, a professor posed a similar question.  He asked Inazo what religions values were taught in Japanese schools.  He replied none.  The professor asked then what moral system they were taught in school.  Again the answer was none.  Probably perplexed himself, he began to ponder the question.

Because of the long years of nonstop study, Nitobe became very ill at 37 and went to California in order to recuperate in the warm climate.    It was during this time in California that he wrote the book Bushido.   The book was written in America and in English.  It was only later translated into Japanese.  From this point on, Nitobe became very involved in foreign affairs through out the world.  In 1920 he became the vice-director of the United Nations.  In 1930, relations between the US and Japan were growing steadily worse and he made several trip to try and resolve the countries' differences.  In 1932, after Japan's work in Manchuria the year before, he again traveled to the US to try and patch things up between the two countries.  Unfortunately, he was unable to do so and was severely disappointed.   Because of the conditions between the US and Japan, he couldn't even bring his wife back to Japan since she was American.  In 1933, at the age of 71, he attended a conference in Canada to again try to make peace between the US and Japan, which was again ultimately unsuccessful.  He died later that year.

Nitobe's greatest influence was not in the martial arts at all, but in international affairs.  Nitobe himself expressed a great desire to bring understanding of the Japanese abroad and is well know for it.  Even recently, a Japanese friend of mine was asked why she wanted to go to America to study and the answer she gave was to quote Nitobe's famous: "I want to be a bridge over the Pacific line."   The book Bushido was written not out of a love so much for Japan's warrior class system, but in a search for how to explain how Japan's ethical system developed.  The book is potent mixture of Confucian, Shinto and Buddhist views that was intended to be used in international affairs and as an explanation for a foreign audience, rather than an educational text for would be Samurai.  He touched on many aspects of the Japanese character and tried to find an answer for their existence in the warrior class' ethics.  Any brief study of Japanese history will quickly show that his views were highly idealized and not a true reflection of the Samurai class (although the ideal end result was probably much the same).  The Japanese government itself skewed the teachings in Bushido for its own aims, which were radically perverted from anything Nitobe intended or believed.  The book is the work of one of Japan's first truly international men and a great look at the ideal intent that Japan was striving for, even if it is not the most accurate portrayal of the warrior class you'll ever find.  And if you have any doubts about Nitobe's influence within Japan, just look at the 5000-Yen bill.
 

  1- This comment struck some members of the audience as rather odd.  We discussed the obvious differences between Quakers and the Samurai culture.  One person pointed out that it should be noted that this was supposedly before the major revisions in the Quaker religion and Quakerism at that time was substantially different from how it is today.

  See also BUSHIDO--- Nitobe Inazo in Ireland.

  ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
   "You and you alone can see what feelings hide within my heart."
  ----------------------------------------------------------------------------

  [Describing an incident in 1000; Sei's empress, Sadako, had been replaced in the emperor's affections by Michinaga's daughter Shoshi (who would later be served by Murasaki Shikibu).  Sadako would die seven months after this scene:]

  When the Empress was staying in the Third Ward, a palanquin arrived full of irises for the Festival of the Fifth Day and Her Majesty was presented with herbal balls from the Palace....

  Then other very pretty herbal balls arrived from other palaces. Someone also brought a green-wheat cake; I presented it to Her Majesty on the elegant lid of an ink stone on which I had first spread a sheet of thin green paper carrying the words, "This has come from across the fence."

  [The last phrase is from a well-known poem: "Stretching his neck across the fence, /The little colt can scarcely reach the wheat. /So I myself cannot attain /The object of my love."]

  The Empress tore off a piece of the paper and wrote the following splendid poem:

  Even on this festive day,
  When all are seeking butterflies and flowers,
  You and you alone can see
  What feelings hide within my heart.       [p.204]

  --------------------------------------------------------------
  "But I suppose this dream of mine is rather absurd."
  --------------------------------------------------------------

  [On the ideal life after court service had been completed:]

  I should like to live in a large, attractive house.  My family would of course be staying with me; and in one of the wings I should have a friend, an elegant lady-in-waiting from the Palace, with whom I could converse.

  Whenever we wished, we should meet to discuss recent poems and other things of interest.  When my friend received a letter, we should read it together and write our answer.  If someone came to pay my friend a visit, I should receive him in one of our beautifully decorated rooms, and if he was prevented from leaving by a rain-storm or something of the sort, I should warmly invite him to stay.  Whenever my friend went to the Palace, I should help her with her preparations and see that she had what was needed during her stay at Court.  For everything about well-born people delights me.

  But I suppose this dream of mine is rather absurd.       [p.245-246]

   -------------------------------------------------
  "Now one can tell what she is really like."
  -------------------------------------------------

  [Describing the origin of her book.  Shonagon would surely have been amused that "pillow book" came in later years to refer to an erotic book left by a bride's pillow to tell her what to expect:]

  It is getting so dark that I can scarcely go on writing; and my brush is all worn out.  Yet I should like to add a few things before I end.

  I wrote these notes at home, when I had a good deal of time to myself and thought no one would notice what I was doing.  Everything that I have seen and felt is included.  Since much of it might appear malicious and even  harmful to other people, I was careful to keep my book hidden.   But now it has become public, which is the last thing I expected.

  One day [c.994] Lord Korechika, the Minister of the Centre, brought the Empress a bundle of notebooks.  "What shall we do with them?"   Her Majesty asked me. "The Emperor has already made arrangements for copying the Records of the Historian."

  "Let me make them into a pillow," I said.

  "Very well," said Her Majesty. "You may have them."

  I now had a vast quantity of paper at my disposal, and I set about filling the notebooks with odd facts, stories from the past, and all sorts of other things, often including the most trivial material....

  I was sure that when people saw my book they would say, "It's even worse that I expected.  Now one can tell what she is really like."       [p.263-264]

In early 11th-century Japan, Kiritsubo, a woman of the lower ranks of the court, gave birth to a son whom she named Genji.  The emperor showed such a liking for Genji that he brought him into the court so he could be raised in his company.  Genji flourished and became a master of speech, manners, poetry, and music.  He grew into an attractive young man as well.   Both men and women were quick to notice his strikingly handsome looks.

While not the entirety of the book, nor the ultimate focus of Murasaki's writing, a strong theme of Genji is the notion of love, lust, and the interaction of members of the opposite sex.  It is upon this aspect that I wish to dwell for just a moment.

After Genji had reached physical and emotional maturity, he spent most of his time showing his affections by writing poems to women that had little interest in him.  Most of the women knew that nothing would ever result in an affair with him and resisted as much as possible.  Although these women admitted that they had similar feelings toward Genji, they knew that the relationship with him would never grow.  Genji's affairs often involved women from outside the court.  Such behavior was scandalous for a person of his position, so he needed to carry out his affairs in complete secrecy.  Genji went through great troubles to hide his illicit affairs and to please his peers at the court.  He conscripted secret messengers from both inside and outside the palace, went out of his way to Utsusemi's house because the stars were not in the right alignment, visited Yugao's house only at night, and adopted a child under the guise that he wanted to be her father.

Each affair is significantly different from all others.  In one of the first chapters, Genji tries to win the affections of Utsuemi by sending her messages and visiting her at odd hours during the night.  The relationship between Yugao and Genji was never stable.  Genji had a man named Koremitsu visit and tell him about the house in which Yugao lived before Genji talked to anyone there.  This relationship ended with the unexpected death of Yugao after she and Genji first made love.  Shortly after, Genji keeps a young girl named Murasaki.  When the nun who raised her died, Genji immediately brings the girl to the palace and provided a room and friends for her---no matter how many people protested it.  While Genji did not have a physical relationship with Murasaki at this point, he definitely said that this was his intention in the future.  In the mean time, Genji lusts after a princess because he cannot resist the beauty of the music she plays on the zither.  Almost instantly he declares his love for her and pursues her with a flurry of letters.  She never answers.  The more he finds out about the princess, however, the less he likes of her.  Genji cannot help but feel guilty after admitting this love, though, and maintains the relationship long after his feelings die down.  In one of the last affairs, Genji is on the receiving side of lust.  An elderly lady, who Genji calls an outrageous flirt, starts fawning on him and Genji has to think of creative ways to dodge the situation without losing face.

The Tale of Genji is at least in part a story about the interactions between Genji and the people (mostly women) that he encounters.  The tale mostly explores the different themes of love, affection, friendship, filial loyalty, and family.  Genji wanders through the landscape of life, death, and love while maintaining a teflon-like dignity.  The story does not have a true, unifying conflict; it is composed of mini-sagas that overlap each other and complicate each other the further the story progresses.

April 22, 2000
Reviewer: Scott Spears (see more about me) from Tokyo, Japan

Many modern Japanese novels are written from a personal stance, oft times becoming very revealing about the author.  This book, it is clear, tells the story of Dazai's own life and feelings from his point of view.

It should also be kept in mind that this was a novel of the times.   The relentless bombings of Japan during World War Two and the long years of reform during the Allied occupation created a very new society filled with people just trying to get back to a normal life... if they could remember what that was.

No Longer Human is not a "clash between new and old, east and west" so much as it is a view outwards at a world filled with people heading for "something," with the main character more or less just doing the moves, and being painfully aware of it.

Before reading this it might help to review post-War Japanese history, especially in regards to the Communist Party of Japan and other "red" movements, otherwise a great deal of the more subtle points will be missed.

I have read the book in Japanese and, in my opinion, Keene did an excellent job, even if his foreword comments are tainted by all-too-often used theories and opinions concerning Japan and "the West."  This book is simply marvelous and a must read for anyone interested in modern Japanese literature.  It is Dazai's "masterpiece" and it delves into the heart of something truly deep, dark, and beautiful....and, ultimately, the great man himself.  Reading pleasure.....guaranteed.

First of all, I must take great exception to the forward written by the translator Donald Keene.  He begins by praising English critics for not giving the book the deadly label of exquisite, and then proceeds to the far greater and more common crime of describing No Longer Human in the same manner that every Japanese novel since WWII has been described, that is, a clash between Japanese traditions/ aristrocracy and Western ideas/culture.  If he wants Japanese authors to be taken seriously he should interpret their works as depictions of our common humanity.

I felt the book showed a lot of promise in the early stages when Yozo describes how his value judgments were based upon beauty and he didn't even give a thought to utility.  Yozo was too beautiful, too much of an "angel," and that is what drove him to vice.  But the narration gets tangled up in his dealings with women, which fans of Dazai may find enjoyable, but really did not make for a well-threshed out character.

There have been numerous variations of this type of story and NLH added little that was new.  For a much better written and more erotic presentation of similar material try Confessions of a Mask by Mishima.

  'So you see, boys and girls, that is why some have called it a river, while others see a giant trace left by a stream of milk.  But does anyone know what really makes up this hazy-white region in the sky?'
  The teacher pointed up and down the smoky white zone of the Milky Way that ran across a huge black starmap suspended from the top of the blackboard.  He was asking everybody in the class.  Campanella raised his hand, and at that, four or five others also volunteered.  Giovanni was about to raise his hand, but suddenly changed his mind.
  Giovanni was almost sure that it was all just made up of stars.  He had read that in a magazine.  But lately Giovanni was sleepy in class nearly every day, had no time to read books and no books to read, and felt, for some reason, that he couldn't properly follow anything anymore.
  The teacher noticed this instantly. 'Giovanni, you know what it is, don't you?'  Giovanni stood up courageously.   But once on his feet, he wasn't able to give a clear answer.  Zanelli, sitting in the seat in front of him, turned around and giggled at him.
  Giovanni was flustered, blushing from one ear to the other.
  The teacher spoke once again.
  'If you were to take a close look at the Milky Way through a big telescope, what would you find it made of?'
  Giovanni was now absolutely sure that you'd find stars, but just like the moment before, he couldn't get his answer out.
  The teacher, perplexed, finally turned his gaze to Campanella.
  'Well, what about you, Campanella?'
  Campanella, who had raised his hand so readily a moment ago, just stood in his place fidgeting, unable to answer the question.  The teacher, now more surprised than ever, stared for some time at him, then said, pointing at the star map...
  'All right, then, fine.  When you look at this hazy-white Milky Way through a good big telescope, the blur is resolved into a great number of tiny stars.  Isn't that right, Giovanni?'
  Giovanni, now red as a beet, nodded, and before he knew it his eyes were filled with tears and he thought...
  That's right, I knew it all along, and so does Campanella, because it was all in a magazine that we once read together at Campanella's father's house, and he's a scholar!
  Campanella leafed through that magazine and went straight into his father's library, brought a thick book from the shelf, opened it to MILKY WAY, and we spent forever together looking at the lovely photograph of white specks that covered the pitch-black page.
  The reason why Campanella didn't answer the teacher right away, even though there was no reason at all for him to forget, is because he feels sorry for me because I have to work hard before and after school and then I feel too down-in-the-dumps to play with everybody or even to talk with him very much.

  When Giovanni thought about how Campanella had deliberately not answered out of sympathy for him, he felt indescribably sad both for himself and for Campanella.
  The teacher began again.  'So, if we think of the Milky Way as the Celestial River, then each and every one of these tiny little stars may be seen to be a grain of sand or pebble on the bed of that river.  If we imagine it to be a giant stream of milk, then it's even more like a river, and the stars become minute fatty globules floating inside the white liquid.
  'Now, ask yourself, what does this liquid actually do, and you will see that it transmits light at a given speed through the void of space, and our Sun and Earth are both floating inside it too.  So, you see, we are all living in the liquid of the Celestial River, and when we gaze out from where we are, just as water appears bluest at its deepest spots, so will the places with the most stars look to us the whitest and haziest.  That is where the sky's river bed is the densest and most far-reaching.  Now look at this model.'
  The teacher pointed to a large lens that was convex on both sides.  Inside the lens were countless grains of sand, all gleaming.
  'This very much resembles the shape of the Milky Way.  You can think of all these glittering grains of sand as stars, all radiating their own light just as our Sun does.  Our Sun lies some distance from the centre to the edge and the Earth is very close by it.  But imagine yourself inside this lens at night, looking out.   Through this thinner part of the lens you will see only a few grains...stars, I mean...shining.
  'But if you look in this direction and in this one, where the glass is thickest, you will see any number of shining grains...stars, I mean...and the farther you look directly into it the more blurry milky-white everything will appear.  That is how we see the Milky Way today.  As for the actual size of the lens and the various stars inside it, class time is over now so we'll discuss it all again in our next science lesson.
  'And as tonight is the Milky Way Festival, I hope that you will all go outside later and take a good close look at the sky.  That's all.  Please put away your books and notebooks.'   For a while the whole classroom was filled with the sounds of books being stacked and desktops being creaked open and slammed down.  In a moment all stood up as straight as arrows, bowed to the teacher and left.

These poems are a mental sketch as formed
Passage by passage of light and shade
Maintained and preserved to this point
Brought together in paper and mineral ink
From the directions sensed as past
For these twenty-two months
(the totally flickers in time with me
all sensing all that I sense coincidentally)

As a result people and galaxies and Ashura and sea urchins
Will think up new ontological proofs as they see them
Consuming their cosmic dust... and breathing in salt water and air
In the end all of these make up a landscape of the heart
I assure you, however, that the scenes recorded here
Are scenes recorded solely in their natural state
And if it is nihil then it is nothing but nihil
And that the totality is common in degree to all of us
(just as everything forms what is the sum in me
so do all parts become the sum of everything)

These words were meant to be transcribed faithfully
Within a monstrous accumulation in the brightness of time
In the confines of the present geological era
Yet they have gone ahead and altered their construct and quality
In what amounts to a spark of sharply contrasted light
(or alternatively a billion years of Ashura)
Now it is possible that both the printer and I
Have been sharing a certain turn of mind
Causing us to sense these as unaltered
In all probability just as we are aware of our own sense organs
And of scenery and of people's individuality through feeling

And just as what is is but what we sense in common
So it is that documents and history... or the earth's past
As well as these various data
Are nothing but what we have become conscious of
(at the root of the karmic covenant of space-time)
For all I know in two thousand years from now
A much different geology will be diverted
With fitting proofs revealed one after another from the past
And everyone will surmise that some two thousand years before
The blue sky was awash with colourless peacocks
And rising scholars will excavate superb fossils
From regions glittering of iced nitrogen
In the very upper reaches of the atmosphere
Or they might just stumble
Upon the giant footsteps of translucent man
In a stratification plane of Cretaceous sandstone

The propositions that you have before you are without exception
Asserted within the confines of a four dimension continuum
As the nature of the mental state and time in themselves
 

That is the sort of person
I want to be.

Kitchen: "Beauty that seems to infuse itself into the heart."

                                       by Caitlin Howell

In this paper, I would like to discuss the novel Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto.   In preparation for this paper, I read Kitchen in English and reread parts of it in Japanese.  I would like to discuss major themes and characteristics of Kitchen and how my perceptions of the novel changed when I read it in Japanese and in English.

The overriding theme of Kitchen is an extremely important one: the idea that we should experience both the painful and enjoyable aspects of life.   Kitchen is divided into two stories about people coping with the deaths of loved ones, "Kitchen" and "Moonlight Shadow."  By dealing with death and loss, the characters are able to appreciate the sacredness of life.

Because this theme and correlating ideas are related to us through the thoughts of a main female character in both stories, I suspect that Yoshimoto uses characters like these to express her own philosophy.  Or perhaps, because I agree so strongly with this philosophy, I want to believe that Yoshimoto takes it as seriously as I do.

The tone of "magic realism" that this novel takes is one that I had neither seen nor expected to see in a Japanese novel.  I am more accustomed to seeing this sort of plot treatment from some of my favorite American novelists, like Tom Robbins and John Irving.  The juxtaposition of miraculous events with daily life in Kitchen and similar novels reveals a view of life that is more existential than fatalistic.  That is, they stress the the unpredictability of life over the destiny of the characters.  Until Kitchen, many of the Japanese novels we had read were rather unrealistic because they were neat, episodic, and the characters were shallow stereotypes.   This is the first Japanese novel we've read that has characters that realize that the world does not exist for their benefit (E 81) ("Sekai wa betsu ni watashi no tame ni aru wake ja nai." J 124)

The episodes that contribute to the novel's existential impression never seem entirely impossible, just unexpected.  In part one of "Kitchen," Yuichi, a mere acquaintance of Mikage's until her grandmother's funeral, knocks on her door and offers to let her stay with him and Eriko (E 6)  Later, Yuichi and Mikage share the same dream (E 39)  In part two of "Kitchen," we learn that Eriko beats her murderer to death with a barbell minutes before she dies (E 44-45)  Before "Kitchen" ends, Mikage happens upon a famous katsudon shop late at night, and takes a meal by taxi to Yuichi and climbs the outside of the hotel to his window to give it to him (E 95-102)  These unexpected events continue to pop up in the second part of the novel.  In "Moonlight Shadow," Urara "appears" behind Satsuki on the bridge where she is resting (E 115)  Later in the story, Urara seems to discover Satsuki's phone number by magic.  "I just say to myself, 'I must get this phone number,' and it just naturally comes to me" (E 126).  In the climactic scene of "Moonlight Shadow," Satsuki sees the ghost of her deceased boyfriend, Hitoshi, as she stands on the bridge with Urara (E 145).

The translation we read in class, by Megan Backus, was overall a very good translation.  However, certain things did not come through in the English version as well as they did in the original Japanese.  For example, there is no easy way to translate the formalities of Japanese speech into English, and the Japanese way of speaking says a lot about the relationship between the people holding the conversation.  When Mikage first meets Eriko, Eriko speaks to Mikage informally, and Mikage speaks to Eriko entirely in the formal "desu/masu" form.  This gives us a clue about Eriko's open, friendly character, and indicates that Mikage feels slightly awkward and intimidated by Yuichi's beautiful mother (J 17-18).  Later in the novel, in the conversation beginning "It's not easy being a woman"(E 41).  ("Onna ni naru no mo taihen yo ne" J 65).  Mikage and Eriko both speak to each other informally, indicating that they've grown closer, and have a relationship more like family members. ....
 

[The full version of the essay is available: http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~caitlin/papers/kitchen.html]

  When the elephant disappeared from our town's elephant house, I read about it in the newspaper.  My alarm clock woke me that day, as always, at six-thirteen.  I went to the kitchen, made coffee and toast, turned on the radio, spread the paper out on the kitchen table, and proceeded to munch and read.  I'm one of those people who read the paper from beginning to end, in order, so it took me a while to get to the article about the vanishing elephant.  The front page was filled with stories on S.D.I. and the trade friction with America, after which I plowed through the national news, international politics, economics, letters to the editor, book reviews, real-estate ads, sports reports, and finally the regional news.
  The elephant article was the lead story in the regional section.  The unusually large headline caught my eye: "ELEPHANT MISSING IN TOKYO SUBURB," and, beneath that, in type one size smaller, "CITIZENS' FEARS MOUNT.  SOME CALL FOR PROBE."  There was a photo of policemen inspecting the empty elephant house.  Without the elephant, something about the place seemed wrong.  It looked bigger than it needed to be, blank and empty like some huge, dehydrated beast from which the innards had been plucked.
  Brushing away my toast crumbs, I studied every line of the article.  The elephant's absence had first been noticed at two o'clock on the afternoon of May 18th--the day before when men from the school-lunch company delivered their usual truckload of food (the elephant mostly ate leftovers from the lunches of children in the local elementary school).  On the ground, still locked, lay the steel shackle that had been fastened to the elephant's hind leg, as though the elephant had slipped out of it.  Nor was the elephant the only one missing.  Also gone was its keeper, the man who had been in charge of the elephant's care and feeding from the start.
  According to the article, the elephant and keeper had last been seen sometime after five o'clock the previous day (May 17th) by a few pupils from the elementary school, who were visiting the elephant house, making crayon sketches.  These pupils must have been the last to see the elephant, said the paper, since the keeper always closed the gate to the elephant enclosure when the six-o'clock siren blew.
  There had been nothing unusual about either the elephant or its keeper at the time, according to the unanimous testimony of the pupils.  The elephant had been standing where it always stood, in the middle of the enclosure, occasionally wagging its trunk from side to side or squinting its wrinkly eyes.  It was such an awfully old elephant that its every move seemed a tremendous effort--so much so that people seeing it for the first time feared it might collapse at any moment and draw its final breath.
  The elephant's age had led to its adoption by our town a year earlier.  When financial problems caused the little private zoo on the edge of town to close its doors, a wildlife dealer found places for the other animals in zoos throughout the country.  But all the zoos had plenty of elephants, apparently, and not one of them was willing to take in a feeble old thing that looked as if it might die of a heart attack at any moment.  And so, after its companions were gone, the elephant stayed alone in the decaying zoo for nearly four months with nothing to do--not that it had had anything to do before.
  This caused a lot of difficulty, both for the zoo and for the town.  The zoo had sold its land to a developer, who was planning to put up a high-rise condo building, and the town had already issued him a permit.  The longer the elephant problem remained unresolved, the more interest the developer had to pay for nothing.  Still, simply killing the thing would have been out of the question.  If it had been a spider monkey or a bat, they might have been able to get away with it, but the killing of an elephant would have been too hard to cover up, and if it ever came out afterward the repercussions would have been tremendous.  And so the various parties had met to deliberate on the matter, and they formulated an agreement on the disposition of the old elephant:
  (1) The town would take ownership of the elephant at no cost.
  (2) The developer would, without compensation, provide land for housing the elephant.
  (3) The zoo's former owners would be responsible for paying the keeper's wages.
  I had had my own private interest in the elephant problem from the very outset, and I kept a scrapbook with every clipping I could find an is I had even gone to hear the town councilﾕs debates on the matter, which is why I am able m give such a full and accurate account of the course of events.  And whole my account may prove somewhat lengthy, I have chosen m sec it down here in case the handling of the elephant problem should bear directly upon the elephant's disappearance.
  When the mayor finished negotiating the agreement--with its provision that the town would take charge of the elephant--a movement opposing the measure boiled up from within the ranks of the opposition party (whose very existence I had never imagined until then).   "Why must the town take ownership of the elephant?" they demanded of the mayor, and they raised the following pointy (sorry for all these liars, but I use them to make things easier to understand):
  (1) The elephant problem was a question for private enterprise--the zoo and the developer; there was no reason for the town to become involved.
  (2) Care and feeding costs would be too high.
  (3) What did the mayor intend to do about the security problem?
  (4) What merit would there be in the town's having its own elephant?
  "The town has any number of responsibilities it should be taking care of before it gets into the business of keeping an elephant--sewer repair, the purchase of a new fire engine, etc," the opposition group declared, and while they did not say it in so many words, they hinted at the possibility of some secret deal between the mayor and the developer.
  In response, the mayor had this to say:
  (1) If the town permitted the construction of high-rise condos, its tax revenues would increase so dramatically that the cost of keeping an elephant would be insignificant by comparison; thus it made sense for the town on the care of this elephant.
  (2) The elephant so old that it neither ace nor was likely to pose a danger to anyone.
  (3) When the elephant died, the town would take full possession of the land donated by the developer.
  (4) The elephant could become the town's symbol.
  The long debate reached the conclusion that the town would take charge of the elephant after all.  As an old, well-established residential suburb, the town boasted a relatively affluent citizenry, and its financial footing was sound.  The adoption of a homeless elephant was a move that people could look upon favorably.  People like old elephants better than sewers and fire engines.
  I myself was all in favor of having the town care for the elephant.  True, I was getting sick of high-rise condos, but I liked the idea of my town's owning an elephant.
  A wooded area was cleared, and the elementary school's aging gym was moved there as an elephant house.  The man who had served as the elephant's keeper for many years would come to live in the house with the elephant.  The children's lunch scraps would serve as the elephant's feed.  Finally, the elephant itself was carted in a trailer to its new home, there to live pot its remaining years.
  I joined the crowd at the elephant-house dedication ceremonies.  Standing before the elephant, the mayor delivered a speech (on the town's development and the enrichment of in cultural facilities); one elementary-school pupil, representing the student body, stood up to read a composition ("Please live a long and healthy life, Mr. Elephant"); there was a sketch contest (sketching the elephant thereafter became an integral component of the pupils' artistic education); and each of two young women in swaying dresses (neither of whom was especially good-looking) fed the elephant a bunch of bananas.  The elephant endured these virtually meaningless (for the elephant, entirely meaningless) formalities with hardly a twitch, and it chomped on the bananas with a vacant score.  When it finished eating the bananas, everyone applauded.
  On in right rear leg, the elephant wore a solid, heavy-looking sled cuff from which there stretched a thick chain perhaps thirty feet long, and this in turn was securely fastened to a concrete slab.  Anyone could see what a sturdy anchor held the beast in place: the elephant mold have snuggled with all ha might for a hundred years and never broken the thing.
  I couldn't tell if the elephant was bothered by in shackle.  On the surface, at least, it seemed all but unconscious of the enormous chunk of metal wrapped wound in leg.  It kept its blank gage fixed on some indeterminate point in space, its ears and the few white hairs on its body waving gently in the breeze.
  The elephant's keeper was a small, bony old man.  It was hard to guess his age; he could have been in his early sixties or late seventies.  He was one of those people whose appearance is no longer influenced by their age after they pass a certain point in life.  His skin had the came darkly ruddy, sunburned look both summer and winter, his hair was stiff and short, his eyes were small.  His face had no distinguishing characteristics, but his almost perfectly circular ears stuck out on either side with disturbing prominence.
  He was not an unfriendly man. If someone spoke to him he would reply, and he expressed himself clearly.  If he wanted to he mold he almost charming--though you always knew he was somewhat ill at ease.  Generally, he remained a reticent, lonely-looking old man.  He seemed to like the children who visited the elephant house, and he worked at being nice to them, but the children never really warmed to him.
  The only one who did that was the elephant.  The keeper lived in a small prefab room attached to the elephant house, and all day long he stayed with the elephant, attending its needs.  They had been together for more than ten years, and you could sense their closeness in every gesture and look.  Whenever the elephant was standing there blankly and the keeper wanted it to move, all he had to do was stand next to the elephant, tap it on a front leg, and whisper something in its ear.  Then, swaying in huge bulk, the elephant would go exactly where the keeper had indicated, take up in new position, and continue staring at a point in space.
  On weekends, I would drop by the elephant house and study these operations, but I could never figure out the principle on which the keeper-elephant communication was based.  Maybe the elephant understood a few simple words (it had certainly been living long enough), or perhaps it received in information through variation in the taps on in leg.  Or possibly it had some special power resembling mental telepathy and mold read the keeper's mind.  I once asked the keeper how he gave his orders to the elephant, but the old man just smiled and aid, "We've been together a long time."

  And so a year went by.  Then, without warning, the elephant vanished.  One day it was there, and the next it had ceased to be.
  I poured myself a second cup of coffee and read the story again from beginning to end.  Actually, it was a pretty strange article the kind that might excite Sherlock Holmes.  "Look at this, Watson," he'd say, tapping his pipe.  "A very interesting article. Very interesting indeed."
  What gave the article its air of strangeness was the obvious confusion and bewilderment of the reporter.  And this confusion and bewilderment clearly came from the absurdity of the situation itself.  You could see how the reporter had struggled to find clever ways around the absurdity in order to write a "normal" article.  But the struggle had only driven his confusion and bewilderment to a hopeless extreme.
  For example, the article used such expressions as "the elephant escaped," but if you looked at the entire piece it became obvious that the elephant had in no way "escaped."  It had vanished into thin air.  The reporter revealed his own conflicted state of mind by saying tint a few "details" remained "unclear," but this was not a phenomenon that could be disposed of by using such ordinary terminology as "details" or "unclear," I felt.
  First, there was the problem of the steel cuff that had been fastened to the elephant's leg.  This had been found still locked.  The most reasonable explanation for this would be that the keeper had unlocked the ring, removed it from the elephant's leg, locked the ring again, and run off with the elephant--a hypothesis to which the paper clung with desperate tenacity despite the fact that the keeper had no key!  Only two keys existed, and they, for security's sake, were kept in locked safes, one in police headquarters and the other in the firehouse, both beyond the reach of the keeper or of anyone else who might attempt to steal them.  And even if someone had succeeded in stealing a key, there was no need whatever for that person to make a point of returning the key after using it.  Yet the following morning both keys were found in their respective safes at the police and fire stations.  Which brings us to the conclusion that the elephant pulled its leg out of that solid steel ring without the aid of a key--an absolute impossibility unless someone had sawed the foot off.
  The second problem was the route of escape.  The elephant house and grounds were surrounded by a massive fence nearly ten feet high.  The question of security had been hotly debated in the town council, and the town had settled upon a system that might be considered somewhat excessive for keeping one old elephant.  Heavy iron bars had been anchored in a thick concrete foundation (the cost of the fence was borne by the real-estate company), and there was only a single entrance, which was found locked from the inside.  There was no way the elephant could have escaped from this fortresslike enclosure.
  The third problem was elephant tracks.  Directly behind the elephant enclosure was a steep hill, which the animal could not possibly have climbed, so even if we suppose that the elephant somehow managed to pull its leg out of the steel ring and leap over the ten-foot-high fence, it would still have had to escape down the path to the front of the enclosure, and there was not a single mark anywhere in the soft earth of that path that could be seen as an elephant's footprint.
  Riddled as it was with such perplexities and labored circumlocutions, the newspaper article as a whole left but one possible conclusion: the elephant had not escaped.  It had vanished.
  Needless to say, however, neither the newspaper nor the police nor the mayor was willing to admit--openly, at least--that the elephant had vanished.  The police were continuing to investigate, their spokesman saying only that the elephant either "was taken or was allowed to escape in a clever, deliberately calculated move.  Because of the difficulty involved in hiding an elephant, it is only a matter of time till we solve the case."  To this optimistic assessment he added that they were planning to search the woods in the area with the aid of local hunters' clubs and sharpshooters from the national Self-Defense Force.
  The mayor had held a news conference, in which he apologized for the inadequacy of the town's police resources.  At the same time, he declared, "Our elephant-security system is in no way inferior to similar facilities in any zoo in the country.  Indeed, it is far stronger and far more fail-safe than the standard cage."  He also observed, "This is a dangerous and senseless anti-social act of the most malicious kind, and we cannot allow it to go unpunished."
  As they had the year before, the opposition-party members of the town council made accusations.  "We intend to look into the political responsibility of the mayor; he has colluded with private enterprise in order to sell the townspeople a bill of goods on the solution of the elephant problem."
  One "worried-looking" mother, thirty-seven, was interviewed by the paper.  "Now I'm afraid to let my children out to play," she said.
  The coverage included a detailed summary of the steps leading to the townﾕs decision to adopt the elephant, an aerial sketch of the elephant house and grounds, and brief histories of both the elephant and the keeper who had vanished with it.  The man, Noboru Watanabe, sixty-three, was from Tateyama, in Chiba Prefecture.  He had worked for many years as a keeper in the mammalian section of the zoo,ﾊ and "had the complete trust of the zoo authorities, both for his abundant knowledge of these animals and for his warm, sincere personality."  The elephant had been sent from East Africa twenty-two years earlier, but little was known about its exact age or its "personality."  The report concluded with a request from the police for citizens of the town to come forward with any information they might have regarding the elephant.
  I thought about this request for a while as I drank my second cup of coffee, but I decided not to call the police--both because I preferred not to come into contact with them if I could help it and because I felt the police would not believe what I hadﾊ to tell them.  What good would it do to talk to people like that, who would not even consider the possibility that the elephant had simply vanished?
  I took my scrapbook down from the shelf, cut out the elephant article, and pasted it in.  Then I washed the dishes and left for the office.
  I watched the search on the seven-o'clock news.  There were hunters carrying large-bore rifles loaded with tranquillizer darts, Self-Defense Force troops, policemen, and firemen combing every square inch of the woods and hills in the immediate area as helicopters hovered overhead.  Of course, we're talking about the kind of "woods" and "hill" you find in the suburbs outside Tokyo, so they didn't have an enormous area to cover.  With that many people involved, a day should have been more than enough to do the job.  And they weren't searching for some tiny homicidal maniac: they were after a huge African elephant.  There was a limit to the number of places a thing like that could hide.  But still they had not managed to find it.  The chief of police appeared on the screen, saying, "We intend to continue the search."  And the anchorman concluded the report, "Who released the elephant, and how?  Where have they hidden it?  What was their motive?  Everything remains shrouded in mystery."
  The search went on for several days, but the authorities were unable to discover a single clue to the elephant's whereabouts.  I studied the newspaper reports, clipped them all, and pasted them in my scrapbook--including editorial cartoons on the subject.  The album filled up quickly, and I had to buy another.  Despite their enormous volume, the clippings contained not one fact of the kind that I was looking for.  The reports were either pointless or off the mark: "ELEPHANT STILL MISSING," "GLOOM THICK IN SEARCH HQ," "MOB BEHIND DISAPPEARANCE?"  And even articles like this became noticeably scarcer after a week had gone by, until there was virtually nothing.  A few of the weekly magazines carried sensational stories one even hired a psychic--but they had nothing to substantiate their wild headlines.  It seemed that people were beginning to shove the elephant case into the large category of "unsolvable mysteries."  The disappearance of one old elephant and one old elephant keeper would have no impact on the course of society.  The earth would continue its monotonous rotations, politicians would continue issuing unreliable proclamations, people would continue yawning on their way to the office, children would continue studying for their college-entrance exams.  Amid the endless surge and ebb of everyday life, interest in a missing elephant could not last forever.  And so a number of unremarkable months went by, like a tired army marching past a window.
  Whenever I had a spare moment, I would visit the house where the elephant no longer lived.  A thick chain had been wrapped round and round the bars of the yard's iron gate, to keep people out.  Peering inside, I could see that the elephant-house door had also been chained and locked, as though the police were tying to make up for having failed to find the elephant by multiplying the layers of security on the now empty elephant house.  The area was deserted, the previous crowds having been replaced by a flock of pigeons resting on the roof.  No one took care of the grounds any longer, and thick, green summer grass had sprung up there as if it had been waiting for this opportunity.  The chain coiled around the door of the elephant house reminded me of a huge snake set to guard a ruined palace in a thick forest.  A few short months without its elephant had given the place an air of doom and desolation that hung there like a huge, oppressive rain cloud.
  I met her near the end of September.  It had been raining that day from morning to night--the kind of soft, monotonous, misty rain that often falls at that time of year, washing away bit by bit the memories of summer burned into the earth.  Coursing down the gutters, all those memories flowed into the sewers and rivers, to be carried to the deep, dark ocean.
  We noticed each other at the party my company threw to launch its new advertising campaign.  I work for the P.R. section of a major manufacturer of electrical appliances, and at the time I was in charge of publicity for a coordinated line of kitchen equipment, which was scheduled to go on the market in time for the autumn wedding and winter-bonus seasons.  My job was to negotiate with several women's magazines for tie-in articles--not the kind of work that takes a great deal of intelligence, but I had to see to it that the articles they wrote didn't smack of advertising.  When magazines gave us publicity, we rewarded them by placing ads in their pages.  They scratched our backs, we scratched theirs.
  As an editor of a magazine for young housewives, she had come to the party for material for one of these "articles."  I happened to be in charge of showing her around, pointing out the features of the colorful refrigerators and coffeemakers and microwave ovens and juicers that a famous Italian designer had done for us.
  "The most important point is unity," I explained.  "Even the most beautifully designed item dies if it is out of balance with its surroundings.  Unity of design, unity of color, unity of function: this is what today's kit-chin needs above all else.  Research tells us that a housewife spends the largest part of her day in the kit-chin.  The kit-chin is her workplace, her study, her living room.  Which is why she does all she can to make the kit-chin a pleasant place to be.  It has nothing to do with size.  Whether it's large or small, one fundamental principle governs every successful kit-chin, and that principle is unity.  This is the concept underlying the design of our new series.  Look at this cooktop, for example...."
  She nodded and scribbled things in a small notebook, but it was obvious that she had little interest in the material, nor did I have any personal stake in our new cooktop.  Both of us were doing our jobs.
  "You know a lot about kitchens," she said when I was finished.  She used the Japanese word, without picking up on "kit-chin."
  "That's what I do for a living," I answered with a professional smile.  "Aside from that, though, I do like to cook. Nothing fancy, but I cook for myself every day."
  "Still, I wonder if unity is all that necessary for a kitchen."
  "We say "kit-chin," I advised her.  "No big deal, but the company wants us to use the English."
  "Oh. Sorry.  But still, I wonder.  Is unity so important for a kit-chin?  What do you think?"
  "My personal opinion?  That doesn't come out until I take my necktie off," I said with a grin.  "But today I'll make an exception.  A kitchen probably does need a few things more than it needs unity.  But those other elements are things you can't sell.  And in this pragmatic world of ours, things you can't sell don't count for much."
"Is the world such a pragmatic place?"
  I took out a cigarette and lit it with my lighter.
"I don't know--the word just popped out," I said.  "But it explains a lot.  It makes work easier, too.  You can play games with it, make up neat expressions: 'essentially pragmatic,' or 'pragmatic in essence.'  If you look at things that way, you avoid all kinds of complicated problems."
  "What an interesting view?"
  "Not really.  It's what everybody thinks.  Oh, by the way, we've got some pretty good champagne. Care to have some?"
  "Thanks. I'd love to."
  As we chatted over champagne, we realized we had several mutual acquaintances.  Since our part of the business world was not a very big pond, if you tossed in a few pebbles one or two were bound to hit a mutual acquaintance.  In addition, she and my kid sister happened to have graduated from the same university.  With markers like this to follow, our conversation went along smoothly.
  She was unmarried, and so was I.  She was twenty-six, and I was thirty-one.  She wore contact lenses, and I wore glasses.  She praised my necktie, and I praised her jacket.  We compared rents and complained about our jobs and salaries.  In other words, we were beginning to like each other.  She was an attractive woman, and not at all pushy.  I stood there talking with her for a hill twenty minutes, unable to discover a single reason not to think well of her.
  As the party was breaking up, I invited her to join me in the hotel's cocktail lounge, where we settled in to continue our conversation.  A soundless rain went on falling outside the lounge's panoramic window, the lights of the city sending blurry messages through the mist.  A damp hush held sway over the nearly empty cocktail lounge.  She ordered a frozen Daiquiri and I had a Scotch-on-the-rocks.
  Sipping our drinks, we carried on the kind of conversation that a man and woman have in a bar when they have just met and are beginning to like each other.  We talked about our college days, our tastes in music, sports, our daily routines.
  Then I told her about the elephant.  Exactly how this happened, I can't recall.  Maybe we were talking about something having to do with animals, and that was the connection.  Or maybe, unconsciously, I had been looking for someone--a good listener--to whom I could present my own, unique view on the elephant's disappearance.  Or, then again, it might have been the liquor that got me talking.
   In any case, the second the words left my mouth, I knew that I had brought up one of the least suitable topics I could have found for this occasion.  No, I should never have mentioned the elephant.  The topic was--what?--too complete, too closed.
  I tried to hurry on to something else, but, as luck would have it, she was more interested than most in the case of the vanishing elephant, and once I admitted that I had seen the elephant many times she showered me with questions--what kind of elephant was it, how did I think it had escaped, what did it eat, wasnﾕt it a danger to the community, and so forth.
  I told her nothing more than what everybody knew from the news, but she seemed to sense constraint in my tone of voice. I had never been good at telling lies.
  As if she had not noticed anything strange about my behavior, she sipped her second Daiquiri and asked, "Weren't you shocked when the elephant disappeared?  It's not the kind of thing that somebody could have predicted."
"No, probably not," I said.  I took a pretzel from the mound in the glass dish on our table, snapped it in two, and ate half.  The waiter replaced our ashtray with an empty one.
  She looked at me expectantly.  I took out another cigarette and lit it I had quit smoking three years earlier but had begun again when the elephant disappeared.
  Why 'probably not'?  You mean you could have predicted it?"
  "No, of course I couldn't have predicted it," I said with a smile.  "For an elephant to disappear all of a sudden one day--there's no precedent, no need, for such a thing to happen.  It doesn't make any logical sense."
  "But still, your answer was very strange.  When I said, 'It's not the kind of thing that somebody could have predicted,' you said, 'No, probably not.'  Most people would have said, 'You're right' or 'Yeah, it's weird, or something.  See what I mean?"
  I sent a vague nod in her direction and raised my hand to call the waiter.  A kind of tentative silence took hold as I waited for him to bring me my next Scotch.
  I'm finding this a little hard to grasp," she said softly.  "You were carrying on a perfectly normal conversation with me until a couple of minutes ago at least until the subject of the elephant came up.  Then something funny happened.  I can't understand you anymore.  Something's wrong.  Is it the elephant?  Or are my ears playing tricks on me?"
  There's nothing wrong with your ears," I said.
  "So then it's you.  The problem's with you."
  I stuck my finger in my glass and stirred the ice.  I like the sound of ice in a whiskey glass.
  I wouldn't call it a 'problem,' exactly.  It's not that big a deal.  I'm not hiding anything.  I'm just not sure I can talk about it very well, so I'm trying not to say anything at all.  But you're right--it's very strange."
  "What do you mean?"
  It was no use: I'd have to tell her the story.  I took one gulp of whiskey and started.
  "The thing is, I was probably the last one to see the elephant before it disappeared.  I saw it after seven o'clock on the evening of May 17th, and they noticed it was gone on the afternoon of the eighteenth.  Nobody saw it in between, because they lock the elephant house at six."
  "I don't get it.  If they closed the house at six, how did you see it after seven?"
  "There's a kind of cliff behind the elephant house.  A steep hill on private property, with no real roads.  There's one spot, on the back of the hill, where you can see into the elephant house.  I'm probably the only one who knows about it."
  I had found the spot purely by chance.  Strolling through the area one Sunday afternoon, I had lost my way and come out at the top of the cliff.  I found a little flat open patch, just big enough for a person to stretch out in, and when I looked down through the bushes there was the elephant-house roof.  Below the edge of the roof was a fairly large vent opening, and through it I had a clear view of the inside of the elephant house.
  I made it a habit after that to visit the place every now and then to look at the elephant when it was inside the house.  If anyone had asked me why I bothered doing such a thing I wouldn't have had a decent answer.  I simply enjoyed watching the elephant during its private time.  There was nothing more to it than that.  I couldn't see the elephant when the house was dark inside, of course, but in the early hours of the evening the keeper would have the lights on the whole time he was taking care of the elephant, which enabled me to study the scene in detail.
  What struck me immediately when I saw the elephant and keeper alone together was the obvious liking they had for each other something they never displayed when they were out before the public.  Their affection was evident in every gesture.  It almost seemed as if they stored away their emotions during the day, taking care not to let anyone notice them, and took them out at night when they could be alone.  Which is not to say that they did anything different when they were themselves inside.  The elephant just stood there, as blank as ever, and the keeper would perform those tasks one would normally expect him to do as a keeper: scrubbing down the elephant with a deck broom, picking up the elephant's enormous droppings, cleaning up after the elephant ate.  But there was no way to mistake the special warmth, the sense of trust between them.  While the keeper swept the floor, the elephant would wave its trunk and pat the keeper's back.  I liked to watch the elephant doing that.
  "Have you always been fond of elephants?" she asked. "I mean, not just that particular elephant?"
  "Hmm . . . come to think of it, I do like elephants," I said.   "There's something about them that excites me.  I guess I've always liked them.  I wonder why."
  "And that day, too, after the sun went down, I suppose you were up on the hill by yourself, looking at the elephant.  May what day was it!"
  "The seventeenth.  May 17th at 7 P.M.  The days were already very long by then, and the sky had a reddish glow, but the lights were on in the elephant house."
  "And was there anything unusual about the elephant or the keeper?"
  Well, there was and then wasn't.  I can't say exactly.  It's not as if they were standing right in front of me.  I'm probably not the most reliable witness."
  "What did happen, exactly?"
  I took a swallow of my now somewhat watery Scotch.  The rain outside the windows was still coming down, no stronger or weaker than before, a static element in a landscape that would never change.
  "Nothing happened, really.  The elephant and the keeper were doing what they always did cleaning, eating, playing around with each other in that friendly way of theirs.  It wasn't what they did that was different.  It's the way they looked.  Something about the balance between them."
  "The balance?"
  "In size.  Of their bodies.  The elephant's and the keeper's.  The balance seemed to have changed somewhat.  I had the feeling that to some extent the difference between them had shrunk."
  She kept her gaze fixed on her Daiquiri glass for a time.  I could see that the ice had melted and the water was working its way through the cocktail like a tiny ocean current.
  "Meaning that the elephant had gotten smaller?"
  "Or the keeper had gotten bigger.  Or both simultaneously."
  "And you didn't tell this to the police?"
  "No, of course not," I said.  "I'm sure they wouldn't have believed me.  And if I had told them I was watching the elephant from the cliff at a time like that I'd have ended up as their Number One suspect."
  "Still, are you certain that the balance between them had changed?"
  "Probably.  I can only say 'probably.'  I don't have any proof, and, as I keep saying, I was looking at them through the air vent.  But I had looked at them like that I don't know how many times before, so it's hard for me to believe that I could make a mistake about something as basic as the relation of their sizes."
  In fact, I had wondered at the time whether my eyes were playing tricks on me.  I had tried closing and opening them and shaking my head, but the elephant's size remained the same.  It definitely looked as if it had shrunk so much so that at first I thought the town might have got hold of a new, smaller elephant.  But I hadn't heard anything to that effect, and I would never have missed any news reports about elephants.  If this was not a new elephant, the only possible conclusion was that the old elephant had, for one reason or another, shrunk.  As I watched, it became obvious to me that this smaller elephant had all the same gestures as the old one.  It would stamp happily on the ground with its right foot while it was being washed, and with its now somewhat narrower trunk it would pat the keeper on the back.
  It was a mysterious sight.  Looking through the vent, I had the feeling that a different, chilling kind of time was flowing through the elephant house--but nowhere else.  And it seemed to me, too, that the elephant and the keeper were gladly giving themselves over to this new order that was trying to envelop them--or that had already partially succeeded in enveloping them.
  Altogether, I was probably watching the scene in the elephant house for less than half an hour.  The lights went out at seven-thirty--much earlier than usual--and, from that point on, everything was wrapped in darkness.  I waited in my spot, hoping that the lights would go on again, but they never did.  That was the last I saw of the elephant.
  "So, then, you believe that the elephant kept shrinking until it was small enough to escape through the bars, or else that it simply dissolved into nothingness. Is that it?"
  "I don't know," I said.  "All I'm trying to do is recall what I saw with my own eyes, as accurately as possible.  I'm hardly thinking about what happened after that.  The visual image I have is so strong that, to be honest, it's practically impossible for me to go beyond it."
  That was all I could say about the elephant's disappearance.  And, just as I had feared, the story of the elephant was too particular, too complete in itself to work as a topic of conversation between a young man and woman who had just met.  A silence descended upon us after I had finished my tale.  What subject could either of us bring up after a story about an elephant that had vanished--a story that offered virtually no openings for further discussion?  She ran her finger around the edge of her cocktail glass, and I sat there reading and rereading the words stamped on my coaster.  I never should have told her about the elephant.  It was not the kind of story you could tell freely to anyone.
  "When I was a little girl, our cat disappeared," she offered after a long silence.  "But still, for a cat to disappear and for an elephant to disappear--those are two different stories."
  "Yeah, really.  There's no comparison.  Think of the size difference."
  Thirty minutes later, we were saying goodbye outside the hotel.  She suddenly remembered that she had left her umbrella in the cocktail lounge, so I went up in the elevator and brought it down to her.  It was a brick-red umbrella with a large handle.
  "Thanks," she said.
  "Good night," I said.
  That was the last time I saw her.  We talked once on the phone after that, about some details in her tie-in article.  While we spoke, I thought seriously about inviting her out for dinner, but I ended up not doing it.  It just didnﾕt seem to matter one way or the other.
  I felt like this a lot after my experience with the vanishing elephant.  I would begin to think I wanted to do something, but then I would become incapable of distinguishing between the probable results of doing it and of not doing it.  I often get the feeling that things around me have lost their proper balance, though it could be that my perceptions are playing tricks on me.  Some kind of balance inside me has broken down since the elephant affair, and maybe that causes external phenomena to strike my eye in a strange way.  It's probably something in me.
  The papers print almost nothing about the elephant anymore.  People seem to have forgotten that their town once owned an elephant.  The grass that took over the elephant enclosure has withered now, and the area has the feel of winter.

Station 24 - Dewagoe
 
  Turning away from the high road leading to the provinces of Nambu, I came to the village of Iwate, where I stopped overnight.  The next day I looked at the Cape of Oguro and the tiny island of Mizu, both in a river, and arrived by way of Naruko hot spring at the barrier-gate of Shitomae which blocked the entrance to the province of Dewa.  The gate-keepers were extremely suspicious, for very few travellers dared to pass this difficult road under normal circumstances.  I was admitted after long waiting, so that darkness overtook me while I was climbing a huge mountain.  I put up at a gate-keeper's house which I was very lucky to find in such a lonely place.  A storm came upon us and I was held up for three days.
 
  Bitten by fleas and lice,
  I slept in a bed,
  A horse urinating all the time
  Close to my pillow.
 
  According to the gate-keeper there was a huge body of mountains obstructing my way to the province of Dewa, and the road was terribly uncertain.  So I decided to hire a guide.  The gate-keeper was kind enough to find me a young man of tremendous physique, who walked in front of me with a curved sword strapped to his waist and a stick of oak gripped firmly in his hand.  I myself followed him, afraid of what might happen on the way.  What the gate-keeper had told me turned out to be true.  The mountains were so thickly covered with foliage and the air underneath was so hushed that I felt as if I were groping my way in the dead of night.  There was not even the cry of a single bird to be heard, and the wind seemed to breathe out black soot through every rift in the hanging clouds.  I pushed my way through thick undergrowth of bamboo, crossing many streams and stumbling over many rocks, till at last I arrived at the village of Mogami after much shedding of cold sweat.  My guide congratulated me by saying that I was indeed fortunate to have crossed the mountains in safety, for accidents of some sort had always happened on his past trips.  I thanked him sincerely and parted from him.  However, fear lingered in my mind some time after that.

For further study, go to Stephen Kohl (University of Oregon, USA)'s Basho's World

  I dreamed the following dream:

I was sitting beside a woman who was lying on her back.  In a calm voice, she told me she was dying.   She didn't appear to be dying at all.  She was lying in bed, her long hair beneath her.  Though her soft oval face was pale, there was still some rosy color in her cheeks; and of course her lips were red.  But the woman told me clearly and calmly that she was dying.
  "Is that so?" I asked her, looking into her eyes.
  "Are you really dying?"
  "With certainty!" she answered, opening her eyes brightly.  She had intensely black eyes, beady and wet, with long eyelashes.  I could see my own reflection clearly in the depth of her pupils. Looking at the transparent, dark luster in her eyes, I wondered if she was truly dying.  So I asked her again, softly, close to her ear,
  "You're not really going to die, are you?  Are you all right?"
  Then, opening her sleepy dark eyes, she answered in a calm voice, "Regretfully, that's my fate.   I can't resist it."
  "Can you see my face?" I asked her, leaning forward urgently.
  "Why come closer?" she said, smiling. "I can see you clearly."
  I sat straight again without a word, folded my arms across my chest, and wondered if she was truly dying.
  "Bury me when I'm dead," she told me.  "Dig a hole with the shell of a large pearl oyster.  For my tombstone, use a fragment of a fallen star.  Then wait for me, beside my grave.  I'll come see you later."
  "When are you coming?" I asked her.
  "The sun will rise and then set, and it will rise again, and set once again.  If the red sun rises and sets again and again,  can you still wait for me?"
   I nodded silently.
  "Then, wait a hundred years for me," the woman ventured calmly.
   "Sit beside my grave and wait for me a hundred years.  I'm sure to come."
  I told her that I would be waiting.  Then, in the pupils of her dark eyes, my reflection began to fade.  No sooner did that happen, like a ripple on still water, than she shut her eyes.  A tear welled out from behind her long eyelashes and coursed down her cheek.  She was already dead.  I went out to the garden and dug a hole with an oyster shell, large and smooth but sharp-edged.  Each time I scooped out some of the moist and fragrant soil, reflected moonlight glittered from the inner surface of the shell.   After a while the hole was finished.  I carried the woman to the grave, her body still warm against my arms and chest.  I placed her gently in the grave and buried her.  Moonlight shone on the inner surface of the oyster shell.  Then I found a fragment of a star, and put it softly on her grave.  The star fragment was round, worn smooth during its long fall from the sky, I supposed.   I sat on the moss-covered ground, thinking about the hundred years to come, waiting for the woman, watching the round tombstone, arms folded across my chest.  Before long, the sun rose in the east as the woman had said it would.   It was a big red sun, and it set in the west just as she had said it would.
  I counted, "One."
  After a while, the deep red sun rose silently again, and set the same as before.
  I counted, "Two."
  And so it continued, and I went on counting, but I couldn't remember how many red suns I had seen.  The red sun passed overhead so many times that I could hardly count them.  Even then, a hundred years was far in the future.
  At last, looking at the mossy gravestone, I wondered if the woman had deceived me.  Then, from beneath the tombstone, a green plant began to grow, slanting toward me.  Growing quickly, it stopped at the height of my chest.   Next a long, slim bud appeared at the top of the stem and blossomed, swinging from its own weight.  Then, from somewhere above, a single drop of moisture fell on the flower.  Cold dew dripped from the blossom as I bent to kiss it.  When I stepped back from the lily, I saw the morning star twinkling in the distant sky.
  "A hundred years has already passed," I said to myself, in sudden realization.