A Late Chrysanthemum: Twenty-one Stories from the Japanese by Lane Dunlop

Author:Lane Dunlop [Dunlop, Lane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 080481578X
Publisher: Tuttle Publishing
Published: 2016-02-03T05:00:00+00:00

DAZAI OSAMU

[1909-1948]

Memories

At dusk, I was standing in the gateway with my aunt. She must have had a baby on her back, because she was wearing a nursery coat. I have never forgotten the dim quietness of the street at that hour. Our Lord has hidden Himself, my aunt told me, adding: “He was a living god.” After that, I must have said something disrespectful. My aunt upbraided me, saying you mustn’t say that sort of thing, you must say: “He has hidden Himself.” “Where did He hide Himself,” I asked purposely, although I knew where. I remember it made my aunt laugh.

I was born in the summer of 1909, so at the time of the Emperor’s demise, I was a little over four years old by the Japanese count.* It was about the same time, I think, that my aunt took me on a visit to the house of relatives in a village about five miles from ours. I’ve not forgotten the waterfall I saw there. It was on a mountain near the village. From a green, moss-grown cliff, a broad cascade plunged whitely. Piggyback on the shoulders of a strange man, I gazed at it. There was a shrine on the bank there, and the man showed me the votive pictures of horses inside. But I felt more and more lonely, and after a while burst out crying. I screamed for my aunt. My aunt, with the relatives in a distant hollow where they’d laiddown a carpet, was enjoying herself. At the sound of my crying voice she quickly stood up. She must have got her feet caught in the carpet, because she then staggered as if she were making a deep bow. Seeing that, the others made fun of her, saying she was drunk. Looking down on this from far up the mountain, I felt a rage of frustration and bawled and squalled louder than ever. Then one night, I dreamed my aunt had abandoned me and was leaving the house. Her breasts were stuck fast in the side door of the entryway. From those big, redly swollen breasts, beads of sweat dripped. My aunt was harshly muttering: “I don’t like you anymore.” Placing my cheek against the breasts of my aunt, I begged her not to go. My tears flowed. When my aunt shook me awake, I pressed my face into her bosom in the bed and cried. Even when I was awake, I still felt heartbroken and sobbed and sniffled a long time. But I did not tell my aunt or anyone else about the dream.

Although I have various memories of my aunt, unfortunately I don’t happen to have any recollection of my mother and father at the time. We were a large household—my great-grandmother, grandmother, father, mother, three elder brothers, four older sisters, one younger brother, my aunt, and her four daughters—but it would be true to say that except for my aunt, until the age of five or six, I knew almost nothing of the others.

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