Read Online Kusamakura by Natsume Sōseki - Free Book Online Page B

The footsteps stop before my room, then one person wordlessly retreats. The sliding door opens, and I guess it will be the woman I saw earlier that morning, but in fact it’s the maid of the previous evening who enters. I register a touch of disappointment.
    “I’m sorry this is so late.” She sets down the tray table containing my lunch. There is no explanation for the lack of breakfast. The tray contains a plate with a grilled fish and a garnishment of greenery, and when I lift the lid of the bowl beside it, a red and white prawn is revealed nestling there in a bed of fresh fern shoots. I gaze into the bowl, savoring the colors.
    “Don’t you like it?” asks the maid.
    “No, no, I’m just about to have it,” I reply, but in fact it looks too beautiful to eat. I once read somewhere an anecdote about the artist Turner at a banquet, remarking to his neighbor as he gazed at the salad piled on the plate before him that this cool fresh color was the sort he himself used. I would love to show Turner the color of these fern shoots and prawn. Not a single Western food has a color that could be called beautiful—the only exceptions I can think of are salad and radishes. I’m in no position to speak of its nutritional value, but to the artist’s eye it is a thoroughly uncivilized cuisine. On the other hand, artistically speaking, everything on a Japanese menu, from the soups to the hors d’oeuvres to the raw fish, is beautifully conceived. If you did no more than gaze at the banquet tray set before you at an elegant restaurant, without lifting a chopstick, and then go home again, the feast for the eyes would have been more than sufficient to make the visit worth your while.
    “There’s a young lady in the household, isn’t there?” I inquire as I put down the bowl.
    “Yes.”
    “Who is she?”
    “She’s the young mistress.”
    “Is there an older mistress here as well?”
    “She died last year.”
    “What about the master?”
    “Yes, he’s here. She’s his daughter.”
    “You mean the young lady?”
    “Yes.”
    “Are there any other guests?”
    “No one.”
    “I’m the only one?”
    “Yes.”
    “How does the young mistress spend her days?”
    “Well, she sews . . .”
    “What else?”
    “She plays the shamisen. ”
    This is a surprise. Intrigued, I continue. “And what else?”
    “She visits the temple,” replies the maid.
    This is also surprising. There’s something peculiar in this visiting temples and playing the shamisen .
    “She goes there to pray?”
    “No, she visits the priest.”
    “Is the priest learning the shamisen, then?”
    “No.”
    “Well, why does she go there?”
    “She visits Mr. Daitetsu.”
    Ah yes, this must be the same Daitetsu who did the framed piece of calligraphy above my door. To judge from its content, he’s clearly a Zen priest. That volume of Hakuin’s sermons in the cupboard, then, must be her personal property.
    “Who normally uses this room?”
    “The young mistress is normally here.”
    “So she would have been here until I arrived last night?”
    “Yes.”
    “I’m sorry I’ve turned her out. So what does she go to Mr. Daitetsu’s place for?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “What else, then?”
    “Sorry?”
    “What else does she do?”
    “Um, various things . . .”
    “What sort of things?”
    “I don’t know.”
    The conversation comes to a halt. I finish my meal, and the maid withdraws the tray table.
    When she slides open the door to leave, suddenly there beyond, on the second-floor balcony across the shrubs of the little inner garden, I see revealed the head of that same woman, under its ichogaeshi curves of hair. Her cheek rests elegantly upon a raised hand, and her gaze is directed downward like the enlightened figure of the “Willow Branch” Kannon bodhisattva. 4 In contrast to my earlier sight of her that morning, she now presents a deeply serene figure. Doubtless it’s because her face is lowered and her eyes do not so much as