Crackling Mountain and Other Stories. Osamu Dazai

      A busy man, my father was seldom at home. Even when he was, he usually didn’t bother about his children. I once wanted a fountain pen like his, but was too afraid to ask for one. After wrestling with the problem, I fell back on pretending to talk in my sleep. Lying in bed one evening, I kept murmuring, Fountain pen ... fountain pen ... Father was talking with a guest in the next room, and my words were meant for him. Needless to say, they never reached his ear, let alone his heart.

      Once my younger brother and I were playing in the large family storehouse piled high with sacks of rice when Father planted himself in the doorway and shouted, Get out of here! Get out, you monkeys! With the sunlight at his back, father loomed there like a dark shadow. My stomach turns even yet when I recall how frightened I was.

      I didn’t feel close to Mother, either. I was first raised by a nursemaid, then by my aunt. Until the second or third year of grade school, I didn’t really get to know my mother. Some years later, as she lay in her bedding next to mine, Mother noticed how my blanket was moving about. What was I up to? she asked suspiciously. Well, two of the manservants had taught me something, and Mother’s question put me on the spot. I managed to say that my hip was sore, however, and that I was rubbing it. You needn’t be so rough about it, Mother replied. Her voice sounded drowsy. I massaged my hip awhile, without saying anything.

      My memories of Mother are mostly dismal ones. There was the time I got my older brother’s suit from the storehouse and put it on. Then, strolling among the flower beds in the garden out back, I hummed a mournful tune that I had made up and then shed a few tears besides. Suddenly I felt that, while wearing this particular outfit, I might try fooling around with the student who did our household accounts. So I sent a maid to call him. He didn’t come, though, even though I waited a long time. In my anxiety I ran the tip of my shoe along the bamboo fence. Finally my patience gave way and, with both fists thrust into my pockets, I let out a wail. When Mother found me, she got me out of that suit and, for some reason or other, gave me a good spanking. I felt utterly ashamed.

      Even as a child I wanted to be well dressed. My shirts had to be made of white flannel, and I wouldn’t even wear one unless it had buttons on the cuffs. My undershirt collar must be white too, for I let it show an inch or two above my shirt collar. During the Full Moon Festival⁵ the students in the village all dressed up in their Sunday best for school. I always chose my flannel kimono with the wide brown stripes for this occasion. Arriving at school, I would glide along the corridor with tiny steps, just like a girl. I made sure no one was around, since I didn’t want people knowing what a fop I was.

      Everyone kept saying that I was the ugliest boy in the family. And if they had known how fussy I was about clothes, they would surely have had a good laugh at my expense. I pretended not to care about my appearance, and this seemed to do the trick. I gave the impression of being dull and uncouth, no doubt about it. At mealtime my brothers and I sat on the floor, a tray before each of us. Grandmother and Mother were also present. It was awful hearing them remark over and over how ugly I was.

      Actually I was quite proud of myself. I’d go down to the maids’ quarters and ask offhandedly who was the best boy in the family. The girls usually said that my oldest brother was. Then they added that Shūcha—that’s me—was second best. I resented being second, but blushed to hear it all the same. Indeed, I wanted them to say I was better than my oldest brother.

      It wasn’t just my looks that displeased Grand-mother. I was clumsy as well. At every meal she cautioned me about holding my chopsticks properly. She even said that the way I bowed made my rump stick out indecently. I had to sit properly in front of her and make one bow after another. No matter how often I tried, she never once complimented me.

      Grandmother was a headache for me in other ways too. When a theater troupe came from Tokyo to celebrate the opening of our village playhouse, I went to every performance without fail. My father had built the playhouse, so I always had a good seat for nothing. Each day when I got home from school, I hurriedly changed into a soft kimono. Then I ran off to the playhouse, a narrow chain dangling from my sash with a pencil attached to the end. That’s how I first got to know about Kabuki. While watching the performances, I would shed one tear after another.

      Even before this time I had been something of a performer myself. I really enjoyed calling the manservants and maids together and telling old stories or else showing films and slides. After the Tokyo troupe had left, I rounded up my younger brother and my cousins to put on my own show. I arranged three Kyogen pieces for the program—Yamanaka Shikanosuke, The House of the Dove, and a comic dance known as Kappore. The first had a teahouse scene set in a valley, during which Shikanosuke gains a follower named Hayakawa Ayunosuke. Adapting the scene from a text in a young peoples’ magazine, I took infinite pains to cast the words in Kabuki rhythms: “Your humble servant/A man known to the world as/Shikanosuke.” From The House of the Dove, a long novel that I had read over and over (and never without crying), I selected an especially pathetic section to render as a two-act play. Since the Tokyo troupe always ended its program with the entire cast performing Kappore, I decided to include the dance as well.

      With five or six days of rehearsing over, we scheduled our first performance for that evening. We had set up the stage on the wide veranda before the library-storehouse, with a small curtain suspended in front. It was still broad daylight when Grandmother came by, but she didn’t notice the wire. When her jaw got caught on it, she cried out, You pack of river bums!⁶ Stop it! That wire could’ve killed me.

      Despite this incident, we gathered ten or so manservants and maids for the evening performance. The memory of Grandmother’s words weighed heavily upon me. While performing the title role in Yamanaka Shikanosuke and that of the boy in The House of the Dove, and even while dancing Kappore, I felt isolated and completely listless. Eventually I put on such plays as The Rustler, The House of the Broken Plate, and Shuntoku Maru, but Grandmother always looked disgusted.

      Though I didn’t much care for Grandmother, I was grateful to her on sleepless nights all the same. From the third or fourth year of grade school, I had suffered from insomnia. Midnight would be long past, and I would still be lying awake in bed. Since I cried so often at night, the family tried to come up with remedies for my insomnia. Lick sugar before bed, I was told, or else count the ticking of the clock. I tried other suggestions, like cooling my feet in a pan of water or placing a leaf from the “sleeping tree” under my pillow. But nothing seemed to work. A bundle of nerves, I would anxiously turn over one thing after another in my mind. This only made falling asleep more difficult. I had a succession of bad nights after secretly playing with Father’s pince-nez and cracking the lens.

      The notions shop two doors away handled several kinds of books and magazines. One day I was looking at the illustrations inside the front cover of a ladies journal, one of them a watercolor of a yellow mermaid. I wanted this illustration so badly that I decided to steal it. I had quietly torn the page out when the young manager sharply called out my boyhood name, Osako! Osako! I flung the magazine to the floor and rushed home. Blunders such as this one kept me awake for nights on end.

      Sometimes I’d lie in bed needlessly worrying that a fire might break out. I wondered, What if the house burned down? and after that I couldn’t sleep at all.

      One evening I was heading for the toilet just before bedtime. The room where the family accounts were kept was right across the hallway from my destination. The room was dark, and the student who kept the accounts was running a movie projector. The picture on the sliding door hardly seemed bigger than a matchbox, but I could make out a polar bear about to plunge off an ice floe into the sea. Observing this, I sensed something unbearably sad about the student. Back in bed, I thought about the movie scene and reflected as well on the life of this student, my heart pounding all the while. What would I do if the film caught fire? I wondered. Beset by these worries, I couldn’t get to sleep until almost dawn. On nights such as this, I would feel especially grateful to my grandmother.

      Around eight o’clock in the evening, a maid would come to my room and lie next to me until I fell asleep. Since I felt sorry for her, I would lie still with my eyes closed. As soon as she left, I’d start praying that I could fall asleep. I would toss and turn until almost ten o’clock, then break into a whimper and get up. By