The Wild Geese Read online

  THE WILD GEESE

  Ogai Mori (1862-1922) stands in the foremost rank of modern Japanese novelists. His professional success as an army surgeon was outstripped by his even more brilliant ascent in the literary world of the Meiji and Taisho eras. His work is characterized by a strong humanistic element, a romantic quality effectively tempered by realism, and a lucid style that often rises to lyric intensity, as in the closing passages of The Wild Geese .

  THE

  WILD

  GEESE

  Ogai Mori

  Translated by

  Kingo Ochiai

  and

  Sanford Goldstein

  TUTTLE PUBLISHING

  Tokyo • Rutland, Vermont • Singapore

  Published by Tuttle Publishing, an imprint of Periplus Editions (HK) Ltd., with editorial offices at 364 Innovation Drive, North Clarendon, Vermont 05759 U.S.A. and 61 Tai Seng Avenue, #02-12, Singapore 534167.

  Copyright © 1959 Charles E. Tuttle Publishing Company Limited.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior written permission from the publisher.

  LCC Card No. 59-14087

  ISBN 978-4-8053-0884-4

  First edition, 1959

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  Contents

  Introduction ................................................................... 7

  Chapter One ............................................................... 13

  Chapter Two ............................................................... 19

  Chapter Three ............................................................. 23

  Chapter Four ................................................................ 25

  Chapter Five ................................................................ 31

  Chapter Six .................................................................. 35

  Chapter Seven ............................................................. 41

  Chapter Eight .............................................................. 47

  Chapter Nine ............................................................... 55

  Chapter Ten ................................................................. 61

  Chapter Eleven ............................................................ 65

  Chapter Twelve ............................................................ 75

  Chapter Thirteen ......................................................... 81

  Chapter Fourteen .......................................................... 87

  Chapter Fifteen ............................................................ 93

  Chapter Sixteen ........................................................... 99

  Chapter Seventeen .................................................... 105

  Chapter Eighteen ....................................................... 111

  Chapter Nineteen ...................................................... 115

  Chapter Twenty ......................................................... 123

  Chapter Twenty-one .................................................. 133

  Chapter Twenty-two .................................................. 141

  Chapter Twenty-three ............................................... 147

  Chapter Twenty-four ................................................. 153

  Introduction

  MORE THAN half a century ago the author of The Wild Geese recognized the difficulty of solving one of Japan's major problems, the adoption of Western values and the preservation of her own. He lived at a time when Japan was becoming increasingly aware of external influences; he was to reflect those influences in his career as a major figure in modern Japanese literature.

  In 1870, the third year of Emperor Meiji's reign, the precocious Rintaro Mori (1862–1922), who was later to adopt the pen name Ogai Mori, was learning Dutch, a language regarded at that time as indispensable to a knowledge of Western medicine. The tutor was Ogai's father, a physician to a feudal lord. That study of language started Ogai on a lifelong interest in the West. His father took him to Tokyo in 1872 to learn German at a private school, and two years later the boy of twelve, recording his age as fourteen, entered the preparatory course of Tokyo Medical College, soon to become the Medical Faculty of Tokyo University. For a period of time at the end of his college career, Ogai lived in the Kamijo, the boarding house frequently mentioned in The Wild Geese .

  Graduating at nineteen, Ogai assisted his father for several months in his practice and then decided to become an army surgeon. In 1884 the army sent Ogai to Germany to study military hygiene. During his four-year stay, successively at the Universities of Leipzig, Munich, and Berlin, he wrote and published several theses in German which undoubtedly strengthened his understanding of the scientific method and perhaps helped him form the basis for the logical structure of his later works of fiction.

  His travels abroad had profound effects, for the year after Ogai's return to Japan in 1888, he translated and published an anthology of French and German poems, and at one time or another during his career he brought to Japan's literary public selections from Hans Christian Andersen, Goethe, Ibsen, Wilde, Shakespeare, and many other European novelists and dramatists. Except for an unsuccessful first marriage that ended in divorce, all seemed to be going well with Ogai. He established himself as an important writer, received an advanced degree in medicine, and earned promotions as Director of the Military Medical College and as Chief of the Medical Staff to the Imperial Guard Division.

  Then, in 1899, Ogai was transferred to an army medical post in Kyushu. The change, a radical one in which his creative activity declined, made him think of his tour of duty as a period of exile. “The writer Ogai,” he wrote, “died there.” But the military man served without complaint. Perhaps the Kyushu period had its positive aspect in helping Ogai define “resignation,” a key word in his vocabulary and one especially important in The Wild Geese . To Ogai, the word means serenity of mind which enables one to calmly observe the world and one's self. The three-year “exile” undoubtedly gave Ogai time for introspection, but a more active life awaited him when, in 1902, he returned to Tokyo to assume other duties and then, two years later, when he served at the front during the Russo-Japanese War. Yet he was shortly to figure as a leading writer standing against a growing tendency—one, ironically enough, that originated in Europe.

  In the first decade of the twentieth century, often called the period of naturalism in modern Japanese literatu
re, Zola and Maupassant were models for young Japanese writers who exploited the sordid both in society and in their own private lives. One might have expected Ogai to join the new school, but along with the gifted writer Soseki Natsume (1867–1916), Ogai objected to the subordinate role of reason, of intelligence, in the deterministic philosophy of the naturalists. Natsume stimulated Ogai to further creativity, and in 1909 Ogai began his own literary journal, The Pleiades . In three years, in addition to essays and translations, he wrote no fewer than thirty stories and plays, of which two major works, Vita Sexualis and A Youth , present markedly Ogai's criticism of naturalism.

  Ogai's antagonism toward this new movement perhaps deepened his recognition of the richness of his own culture. Born into a samurai family, raised from early childhood in Confucian and feudal culture, Ogai, who began the study of Chinese classics at the age of four, had no particular reason to revolt against tradition. At an early age he had been given the opportunity to investigate the West. The new might have easily overwhelmed him. His return from abroad found him sensitively alert to the powerful influences of the West. His natural perspicacity, his linguistic proficiency, his serious intellectual pursuits in Germany—all these contributed to his understanding. Yet, unlike many of those who had been to Europe, he was not content to be simply a retailer of new knowledge. With new thoughts assimilated into the complex of his own personality, he tried to awaken and enlighten his backward country. He saw the chaos in Japan, the chaos of the old and new in collision everywhere, and he attempted, through science and literature, to give his country the harmony, the order, it needed.

  Earlier he had written stories of contemporary life; in the last decade of his career he was to shift his focus to stories of the past. In 1912, on the funeral day of the great Emperor whose reign was characterized by the adoption of things Western, Ogai completed the first of his historical novels. He concentrated on little-known personalities, men and women who subordinated personal interest to some transcendent cause, one they obeyed humbly.

  Gan or The Wild Geese , a long story first published in twelve issues (1911–1913) of The Pleiades , focuses on a usurer and his wife, a poor old man and his daughter, a student and a mistress. Duty seems to submerge the individual soul, symbolically represented by the unrestrained flock of birds. But not all wild geese can fly, and in Ogai's novel there are several that cannot.

  For the Japanese concerned with the traditions of his own culture, The Wild Geese recaptures the earlier Tokyo, the old Edo in the beginning decades of Meiji. But even Western readers will appreciate the detailed route of Okada's walks, the environs of the old Tokyo University, the lonely slope called Muenzaka. Ogai records the activities of university students, their boarding house lives, their bookstore browsing, their moments of escape. Storekeepers, strolling performers, servants, geisha, policemen—Ogai gives his readers glimpses of these, genre paintings of nineteenth-century Japan, portraits past and even present.

  For Ogai that external world is important; its psychological counterpart is equally so. Ogai watches his main characters, orders their movements, records their problems. His line of reasoning goes ahead, falls back, remains suspended in mid-air: what to say to one's daughter, when to repay an obligation, how to guard one's thought. This inner world struggles with the questions of silence and communication, duty and freedom, restraint and compulsion. Ogai's vision is unmistakably Japanese; on the other hand, the problems of the expected and unanticipated, of tradition and emancipation, of pattern and change, concern men everywhere.

  The eyes of Ogai Mori are gifted ones. They observe, sometimes with affection, sometimes with irony, but always accurately. And the main impression they leave behind is that of the writer's sensitive compassion for man. That no simple answers emerge in the narrative, that no problems are solved, that the story comes full circle on the wings of dilemma, that more is implied than stated, that the novel's “uneventfulness” is nevertheless part of a world of tension and conflict—these are major elements in the art with which Ogai Mori accomplished this mature work.

  KINGO OCHIAI

  Niigata University

  SANFORD GOLDSTEIN

  Purdue University

  Chapter One

  THIS STORY happened long ago, but by chance I remember that it occurred in 1880, the thirteenth year of Emperor Meiji's reign. That date comes back to me so precisely because at the time I lodged in the Kamijo, a boarding house which was just opposite the Iron Gate of Tokyo University, and because my room was right next to that of the hero of the story. When a fire broke out inside the house in the fourteenth year of Meiji, I was one of those who lost all of their possessions when the Kamijo burned to the ground. What I'm going to put down, I remember, took place just one year before that disaster.

  Almost all the boarders in the Kamijo were medical students, except for the few patients who went to the hospital attached to the university. It's been my observation that a residence of this kind is controlled by one of its members, a lodger who rises to a position of authority because of his money and shrewdness. When he passes through the corridor before the landlady's room, he always makes it a point to speak to her as she sits by the square charcoal brazier. Sometimes he'll squat opposite her and exchange a few words of gossip. Sometimes he seems to think only of himself when he throws saké parties in his room and puts the landlady out by making her prepare special dishes, yet the truth is that he takes care to see that she gets something extra for her troubles. Usually this type of man wins respect and takes advantage of it by having his own way in the house.

  The man in the room next to mine was also powerful in the Kamijo, but he was of a different breed.

  This man, a student called Okada, was a year behind me, so he wasn't too far from graduating. In order to explain Okada's character, I must speak first of his striking appearance. What I really mean is that he was handsome. But not handsome in the sense of being pale and delicately thin and tall. He had a healthy color and a strong build. I have hardly ever come across a man with such a face. If you force me to make a comparison, he somewhat resembled the young Bizan Kawakami, whom I got to know later than the time of this story, and who became destitute and died in misery. Okada, a champion rower in those days, far surpassed the writer Bizan in physique.

  A good-looking face may influence others, but it alone does not carry weight in a boarding house. Personal behavior must also be considered, and I doubt if many students lived as well-balanced a life as Okada did. He wasn't a bookworm who worked greedily for examination marks each term and who wanted to win a scholarship. Okada did the required amount of work and was never lower than the middle of his class. And in his free time he always relaxed. After supper he would take a walk and would return without fail before ten. On Sundays he rowed or set off on a long hike. Except for periods of living with his crew before a match or of returning to his home in the country for summer vacations, the time never varied when he was in or out of his room. Often a boarder who had forgotten to set his watch by the signal gun at noon went to Okada's room to find out the time. And occasionally even the office clock in the Kamijo was put right by Okada. The more we observed him, the stronger became our impression that he was reliable. Even though Okada didn't flatter the landlady or spend much money above his room and board, she began to praise him. Needless to say, the fact that he paid his rent regularly was one of the reasons for her attitude.

  She often said: “Look at Mr. Okada!”

  But, anticipating her words, some of the students would say: “Well, we can't all be like him.”

  Before anyone realized it, Okada had become a model tenant.

  Okada had regular routes for his daily walks. He would go down the lonely slope called Muenzaka and travel north along Shinobazu Pond. Then he would stroll up the hill in Ueno Park. Next he went down to Hirokoji and, turning into Naka-cho—narrow, crowded, full of activity—he would go through the compound of Yushima Shrine and set out for the Kamijo after passing the gloomy
Karatachi Temple. Sometimes he made a slight variation in a particular route, such as a right turn at the end of Naka-cho, so that he would come back to his room along the silence and loneliness of Muenzaka.

  There was another route. He occasionally entered the university campus by the exit used by the patients of the hospital attached to the medical school because the Iron Gate was closed early. Going through the Red Gate, he would proceed along Hongo-dori until he came to a shop where people were standing and watching the antics of some men pounding millet. Then he would continue his walk by turning into the compound of Kanda Shrine. After crossing the Megane-bashi, which was still a novelty in those days, he would wander for a short while through a street with houses on only one side along the river. And on his way back he went into one of the narrow side streets on the western side of Onarimichi and then came up to the front of the Karatachi Temple. This was an alternate route. Okada seldom took any other.

  On these trips Okada did little more than browse now and then in the second-hand bookstores. Today only two or three out of many still remain. On Onarimichi, the same shops, little changed from what they formerly were, continue to run their businesses. Yet almost all the stores on Hongo-dori have changed their locations and their proprietors. On these walks Okada hardly ever turned right after leaving the Red Gate because most of the streets narrowed so much that it was annoying. Besides, only one second-hand bookshop could then be found along that way.

  Okada stopped in such shops because, to use a term now in vogue, he had literary tastes. In those days the novels and plays of the new school had not yet been published; as for the lyric, neither the haiku of Shiki nor the waka of Tekkan had been created. So everyone read such magazines as the Kagetsu Shinshi , which printed the first translation of a Western novel. In his student days Okada read with interest the happenings of the new era written in the style of classical Chinese literature. This was the extent of his literary tastes.