Sōseki: Ten Nights' Dreams - The Tenth Dream

Ken-san came to tell me that Shoutarou unexpectedly came home that night, seven days after he had been taken off by a woman, and that, his temperature having risen suddenly, he is sick in bed.

Shoutarou is the best-looking young man in our neighborhood and an extremely honest fellow, but he has a favorite pastime that may strike one as odd. When evening comes, he puts on his Panama hat, sits at the door of the fruit shop and looks at the faces of the passing women, which never fail to entertain him. He never seems to want to do anything else.

When there are few women on the street, he turns to look at the fruit instead. All kinds of fruit. Peaches, apples, Japanese fruits, and bananas are beautifully served in baskets, arranged in two rows, so that the customer can easily select one for a present. Shoutarou looks at these baskets and says that they are beautiful. He also says that if he were ever to enter a trade, a fruit shop would be just the thing for him. Nevertheless, he just sits there in his Panama hat and idles his time away.

Occasionally he comments on the fruit, saying the color of that Chinese citron, for example, is nice. Yet he has never bought any fruit, nor does he eat any free. He just extols the color.

That evening a woman had unexpectedly stopped at the entrance of the store. Judging from what she was wearing, she seemed to be a woman of quality. The color of her clothing caught Shoutarou’s fancy. And her face, too, had a quality he found attractive, so Shoutarou saluted her in a courtly way by taking off his precious Panama hat. Then the woman pointed to the largest basket of fruit and asked him for it. Shoutarou quickly took it and handed it to her. When she tried to lift the basket, she remarked that it was a bit heavy for her.

As he was a man of leisure and very open-hearted by nature, Shoutarou offered to carry the basket to her house, and they left the shop together. He had been away ever since.

Easygoing as he always had been, this was going too far. While his friends and relatives were fretting over what they thought as quite serious, Shoutarou suddenly came back on the night of the seventh day after he had gone away. People crowded around him and asked, where have you been, Shou-san? He merely replied that he had taken a train to the mountains.

It must have been a long train ride. According to what Shoutarou said, on getting off the train, he and the woman had come to a field. It was quite a large field, and wherever you looked, you could see only green grass. Walking along the grass they suddenly came to the top of a huge precipice. Then the woman invited Shoutarou to jump off. Peering down, he could see the wall all right, but the bottom of it was too deep down to make out. Shoutarou, doffing his Panama hat, politely declined, again and again. The woman asked him whether he preferred to be licked by pigs, since he would not venture to jump off the precipice. Now Shoutarou hated pigs and Kumoemon the balladeer very much, but he thought that even not saving himself from either of these was worth the price of his life, and so he could not bring himself to jump. Then a pig came grunting along. Shoutarou reluctantly hit the pig on its snout with a thin stick of a betel palm. Giving a yelp, the pig tumbled down to the bottom of the cliff. While Shoutarou was still breathing a sigh of relief, another pig came towards him, rubbing him with its large snout. Shoutarou reluctantly swung the stick. With a yelp, the pig followed the first headlong down to the precipice. Then a third pig appeared. At that moment Shoutarou raised his eyes to discover, on the horizon where the green field ended, tens of thousands of grunting pigs trotting straight at him. He was terrified, but he could not stop tapping the snout of each pig one by one, gingerly, with the betel palm stick. Surprisingly, only a light touch of the stick to each snout sent the pigs easily over the cliff. Looking over the edge, he could see the pigs in an endless line, tumbling headfirst into the bottomless valley below. Thinking how many pigs he had dispatched to the bottom, Shoutarou began to feel afraid, and still the pigs came on and on and on. Like a swarming black cloud which had grown legs, continuously grunting, the pigs thrust their vigorous way through the green grass towards him, in a never-ending horde,.

Shoutarou had tried desperately to keep up his courage, and for seven days and six nights he had gone on tapping pig snouts, until his arms got weak as a konniaku jelly. Then one pig finally succeeded in licking him, and in the end, Shoutarou collapsed.




Ken-san told me that story of Shoutarou and advised me not to stare too much at the women. He is right, too, I find. Ken-san also mentioned that he would like to own Shoutarou’s Panama hat.

It seems Shoutarou will not be saved. His Panama hat will be given to Ken-san.


(Natsume Sōseki)

My comment:

Terrible image of History!

We engage during our life in a chain of events, we manifest our personalities, we manifest our distinctiveness. This way we create History, and here's the image: a chain of ugly fights without any horizon, till we give up.


(Sōseki)