The Miner Read online

  Just then, from beyond the bridge—but I should point out that beyond the bridge there were no houses of any kind, just the mountain straight ahead and the forest on either side. (Actually, it had never occurred to me until my feet hit the bridge that all signs of human habitation would disappear so suddenly.) From the direction of the empty mountain, a solitary boy appeared. He was thirteen or possibly fourteen and he wore shabby straw sandals. At first, I could barely make out his face. He came down the slightly brighter swath cut through the gloomy forest by the rock-strewn road, moving toward us with quick, small steps. I had no idea where he had come from or how he had gotten there. Perhaps, because the single path beneath the dark trees took a sharp curve some hundred yards ahead, disappearing from view, the road functioned as a device for making unexpected entrances and exits, but the time and place being what they were, I was somewhat startled by him. Holding my fourth potato to my lips, I forgot to move my jaw as I watched him for a while. By “for a while” here, I mean something like twenty seconds, that’s all. I’m sure I started chewing again right away.

  Whether or not the sight of us had startled the boy, I couldn’t tell for certain; he approached us without hesitation. When he had come within some thirty feet or so, I saw that he had a round head, a round face, a round nose. Everything about him was put together round—and with a quality of workmanship far superior to that of the red blanket. He made as if to pass us by, apparently unconcerned that the three of us were blocking the way from the bridge to the path. He seemed utterly relaxed.

  Chōzō called out to the boy, “Hey, young fella.”

  “What?” the boy answered without the least show of fear, coming to a sudden halt. I was amazed at his confident manner, but perhaps it was to be expected from a young boy who comes down from the mountains alone at sundown. When I was his age, I was a little frightened to cut through Aoyama Cemetery at night—and that’s in the middle of Tokyo.

  I was thinking to myself what an admirable little fellow this boy was, when Chōzō said, “How would you like some sweet potatoes?” and generously dangled two of the uneaten ones in front of the boy’s face. The boy immediately yanked them from Chōzō’s hand and, without a word of thanks, started eating one of the potatoes. Taking in the remarkable swiftness of his every move, I sensed, with renewed admiration, that a boy who would come down alone from the mountain like this had to be more than a little different from myself. Unaware of my feelings, the boy went on eating with total abandon. And because he swallowed each mouthful with barely a wetting of saliva, his throat seemed to make little gulping sounds. I thought he would have an easier time of it if he’d eat a bit more slowly, but my concern was wasted on him. He went on gulping down mouthfuls as if to say that it was not as painful as it might look. True, he was eating sweet potatoes, nothing hard. They wouldn’t injure his throat, no matter how he wolfed them down. But his throat was crammed full of potatoes, and until they passed down the food pipe, there was some fear that he could suffocate. The boy himself had no such fear. His throat twitched with one gulp after another, as if each swallow of potato were chasing the previous one down to his stomach. His two potatoes were especially big ones, but they quickly disappeared, and the boy himself evidenced no ill effects. The three of us stood around him, watching him eat, but until he was through, no one said a word. I felt there was something slightly comical about him, but I also found him rather sad. This was not merely out of sympathy. It had only been a few minutes earlier that I had felt hungry enough to ask Chōzō for sweet potatoes, which meant that my memories of hunger were still pitifully fresh, but to watch this boy eat, he was two or three times hungrier than I had ever been.

  “Good?” Chōzō finally asked him. Having myself gone so far as to thank Chōzō for the potatoes before I even put my hand out for them, I assumed that the boy would say something once he was through eating, but he offered not a word. He just stood there in silence. Then he turned and looked toward the darkening mountain. Only later did I realize that the boy was entirely a creature of the wild; he did not know how to express thanks. Once I learned that, it didn’t bother me too much, but at the time I thought him an unfriendly little brute, in contrast to his appearance. When he tilted that round face of his, though, and gave an odd, long look toward the peak of the gradually blackening mountain, I again found him touchingly sad. I also found him a little disturbing, though I’m not sure why. Perhaps some deep, fatal bond linked the small boy, the tall mountain, the dusk, and the mountain town. I haven’t read much poetry or other literary stuff, but I suspect it’s written by making a big deal out of this kind of bond between things. That way, you can come up with a poem or a story in the most unlikely places. Wandering all over the country for years now, I’ve sometimes encountered such links and found myself reacting to them with a sense of something uncanny. Usually, though, if I think about it calmly, the mystery is solved. Probably this boy was, for me, an imperfect embodiment of the ghostly “little boy who flew down from the mountain” in the song I knew from childhood.11 Enough on that subject. I won’t bother thinking about it any more deeply than this. All that matters is that the boy was staring at the black mountain peak with a strange look on his face.

  Chōzō asked him, “Hey, where you going?”

  The boy quickly turned his gaze from the black mountain and replied, “Ain’t goin’ nowhere.” His unfriendly tone did not match his face.

  Chōzō took it calmly. “Heading home, then?” he asked.

  The boy was equally calm. “Ain’t goin’ home,” he said.

  The more I heard of this dialogue, the more disturbed I felt. This young boy was a drifter. I had never in my life imagined the existence of such a small, lonely drifter—and one so self-possessed. So while I realized that he was a drifter, I found that the feelings of pity that normally go along with an ordinary drifter naturally tended to give way to a sense of dread. Chōzō seemed to have no such reaction to him. Probably all he cared to know was whether the boy had a home or not. Having heard that the boy was bound nowhere in particular, Chōzō said to him, “Well, then, come along with us. I’ll show you how you can make some money.”

  And the boy, without a moment’s reflection, said, “OK.”

  I was amazed at the amusing speed with which Chōzō’s “negotiations” could be concluded, whether with the red blanket or with the boy. If we human beings were put together this simply, life would be a lot easier for all of us. But even as I say this, I have to recall that I was no more difficult to win over than the red blanket or the boy. Funny. I was shocked to witness the boy’s casual acceptance of Chōzō’s offer, but at the same time I came to see that there were a considerable number of people on this earth who, like me, would follow wherever led, satisfied to drift along with the flow. In Tokyo, people are dizzyingly mobile, but even as they move, their roots are firmly planted. About the only one in the whole place whose roots happened to work loose, probably, was me, at which point I took off from Senju with my skirts tucked up, which is why I was feeling twice as hopeless as anyone else. But then, in this town, I had unexpectedly gained the company of the red blanket. And before another twenty minutes passed, I had gained the company of the boy. And both their roots were far looser than mine. With traveling companions coming to me like this, one after another, I could be headed up to the mountains or down to a river or anywhere at all: it didn’t much matter. For better or worse, I had been born into a family of more than middling means, and until nine o’clock the night before, I had lived as the classic pampered son. My anguish had been the pampered son’s anguish, and the flight I attempted when that anguish reached its peak was the flight of a pampered son. And so, whether or not I was attaching some exaggerated significance to this flight of mine, I did consider it one of the great turning points in my life. I thought of it as the parting of the ways between life and death. Which is to say that, in a world seen through the eyes of a pampered son, there has never been such a flight—or, at least, nowhere bu
t in the newspapers. But flights in the newspapers are two-dimensional, ink on paper, nothing you can sink your teeth into. They’re like phone calls from another world. You listen and say “Yes, yes,” and that’s the end of them. Your own flight, then, comes to seem like the only true, authentic one, and you feel pleased with yourself. Meanwhile, mine was a simple case of anguish and flight. Having read little poetry or other prettified writing, I was free of the pretensions it takes to view your own situation as a novel, to go dashing back and forth across the novelistic landscape making a great show of your pain and sorrow, all the while observing your own pitiful state from a place apart and gushing over how terribly poetic it is. When I say that I was attaching disproportionate value to my particular flight, I am merely pointing to the fact that, as a result of my inexperience, I was overly impressed with and bewildered by things that really didn’t deserve such exaggerated attention. And it was the boon of experience, finally, that was responsible for the sudden dilution of my bewilderment when I met the red blanket and the boy and saw how confidently they handled themselves. I must confess that both of them now seem far more admirable to me than I do myself when I look back and see what we were like at the time.

  It was nothing at all for Chōzō to win over the red blanket and then the boy. Not that I put up much of a struggle, either. Come to think of it, Chōzō’s job wasn’t exactly one of fruitless perseverance and exertion. “Hey, you can be a miner.” “I can? I’ll do it!” I had been assuming that the only one in this big, wide world stupid enough to go along with him so easily was me, who had run off at night with his skirts tucked up. It would follow from this that, in such an undemanding line of work as Chōzō’s, the whole of Japan could be covered by one man, and if he was going to make a living, that one man would have to have been born with the good fortune to bump into me. By rights, then, Chōzō should have been attacking his work in full recognition of the fact that it was going to take a lot more patience than catching a three-foot carp from the river bank, but he wore an expression that all but said such determination was unnecessary, and he blithely went on collaring men on the street as if it were the most ordinary work in the world, something that carried the official sanction of society. Miraculously, the collared men themselves went along with him, no questions asked. His success could almost make you wonder if, in fact, this was the most ordinary work in the world. Any business this successful needed more than one practitioner for the whole country. There should be lots of them. Chōzō himself probably thought so. I know I did.

  And so the four of us—the happy-go-lucky Chōzō, the happy-go-luckier boy and red blanket, and I, who, by following their example, was learning to be enormously happy-go-lucky—crossed the bridge and took the path to the left. Chōzō cautioned us to walk with care now that we would be climbing along the stream. Having just eaten the sweet potatoes, I was no longer hungry. My legs were exhausted from walking since the night before, but they could still carry me if they had to. I followed Chōzō and the red blanket with all the care I could muster, as Chōzō had suggested. Since the path was not very wide, we could not walk four abreast, which is why I fell behind. As the smallest in the party, the boy followed along one step behind me, sticking close.

  What with my heavy belly and heavy legs, I didn’t feel much like talking. Chōzō, too, fell silent once we had crossed the bridge. The red blanket had not had much to say from the time Chōzō approached him in front of the eatery, and now, for some reason, he spoke even less. The most uncommunicative of all was the boy, whose only sound was the slapping of his straw sandals against his heels.

  Now that we had stopped talking, a stillness hung over the mountain path. The darkness of night gave the place an especially desolate air. Of course, the “night” had barely begun, the sun having just set. I could at least make out the path. Maybe it was my imagination, but the water rushing down to our left seemed to shine a little now and then. Not a brilliant glow, no. It was just that something dark and moving out there looked as though it had a shine to it. The water crashing against the rocks was fairly clearly white, and it made a continuous rushing sound. It was very noisy, and that made the night feel all the more desolate.

  Before long, the narrow path seemed to be climbing gradually upward. The slight incline by itself was no great trouble, but the ground was all pits and bumps. Probably the same scattering of rocks that littered the bottom of the stream continued on up into the path and raised sudden obstructions or left hollows in the surface of the ground. My geta caught on these pits and bumps. The worst trip-ups made my innards bounce. It became a major ordeal. Chōzō and the red blanket seemed to be used to climbing mountain paths. They walked along through the darkness under the trees without the slightest hesitation. This was only to be expected, but the boy—the boy was downright spooky. He hopped easily over the dark pits and bumps, his straw sandals flapping all the while. And he never said a word. It wouldn’t have bothered me so much during the day, but in this gloomy place the slapping of the sandals against his heels was preying on my nerves. I felt as though I was walking with a bat.

  Soon the path became steeper and steeper. Before I knew it, the stream was far away. I was out of breath. The pits and bumps were growing worse by the minute. Suddenly my ears started ringing. If this had been some hike in the woods, I would have made a fuss long before, but I was running away, after all, and this was supposed to be the first step toward death for someone who had failed at suicide. I could hardly start bringing my complaints to someone just because it hurt a little. And whom would I have complained to? There was only me. All right, maybe there was somebody else besides me, but I didn’t have the guts to open my mouth. And they wouldn’t have listened to me anyhow. They weren’t having any trouble. They just went zipping along. They didn’t even talk. There was no way for me to approach them. All I could do was follow them passively, in silence, though my ears were ringing and I was out of breath. I had known the word “passive” since I was a kid, but now its meaning became clear to me for the first time in a moment of enlightenment. If that was the beginning and end of my enlightenment, it could have been something to laugh at, but once it began, this enlightenment continued for some time, reaching its pinnacle in the mine. Once you attain the ultimate passivity, even tears that ought to flow hold back and remain unshed. People often say that so-and-so brought tears to their eyes, but if you can cry, you’ve got nothing to worry about. As long as you have tears to shed, you can certainly still laugh.

  Strange that anyone who was so overwhelmed by passivity should have recovered from it as completely as I have. There’s nothing remotely passive about me anymore. In fact, I’m considered to be rather arrogant. If Chōzō could see me now, after the way I put myself in his hands back then, he’d say I’ve gotten too big for my britches. Meanwhile, if my present friends could see what I was like back then, they might say I was pitiful. But so what? It’s only natural for the passive creature of yesteryear to become arrogant today. That’s just the way people are. You can try forcing someone to remember how he felt in winter and keep shivering after summer comes, but it won’t work. A person might not be able to eat beef while he’s sick, but nobody can order him to give it up for the rest of his life. You hear about people warning others not to forget what they’ve done for them in their hour of need, but of course they’re going to forget. Swearing otherwise is just a lie. This may sound like some kind of rationalization, but it’s not at all. I’m telling the honest truth. The trouble with people is they think they’re solid as a rock. They don’t look at another person’s surroundings but try to force him into some predetermined slot. They assume it’s perfectly reasonable to treat others this way, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard of anyone who was happy to squeeze himself in where he doesn’t fit. If you go at everything like this, you’re going to have to run away from the three-dimensional world to one that’s perfectly flat. People who loudly accuse others of bad faith or dishonesty or a change of heart are duly regist
ered citizens of Flatland, raising their battle flags at the sight of printed hearts. There are lots of this type among the ranks of the pampered sons and daughters, scholars, innocents, and great lords, most of whom have no idea how things really work. If I hadn’t run away back then, if I had calmly entered adulthood as my family’s sweet little sonny boy, if I had grown up unaware that my heart is constantly on the move, convinced that it doesn’t move, doesn’t change—mustn’t move, would be a sin to change—if I had been satisfied to go to school, collect a salary, have a tranquil home life and ordinary friends, never feeling the need for introspection—never knowing the lively mental metamorphoses that make introspection possible—if pain and poverty and homelessness and wandering and weariness and agony and winning and losing and possession and deprivation had not bestowed on me this experience of mine and given me, finally, the ability to dissect my experience with an open mind and to evaluate each little piece of it (and, thank goodness, I do have this great gift)—then I would never make such drastic pronouncements. Not that drastic pronouncements are anything to boast about. I’m just describing things as they are. And, things being what they are, there’s no telling when the passive one who became arrogant might change from arrogant to passive.