It was a cloudy winter evening. I was sitting in the the second-class train car at the edge of one seat. The train was about to leave Yokosuka for Tōkyō and I was waiting for the whistle to blow, not thinking much about anything.
There were no passengers except for me in the car, which was already lit because of the lateness of the hour. That was unusual. A crowded train car was a much more common occurrence.
Looking out at the platform, I didn’t see any people who’d come to see the train off. There was only a little dog barking sadly in a cage.
Strangely, the bleak scene suited my mood at the time. Inexplicable fatigue and weariness cast shadows in my mind like the cloudy sky overhead that was threatening to snow.
I kept both my hands in my overcoat pocket; I didn’t have the energy to even to take out the evening newspaper to read.
And then, a whistle blew to signal the train’s departure.
The sound set me a little more at ease. I placed my head against the window frame, expecting in a disinterested kind of way to see the station before my eyes start moving backward in space.
Before the train began to move, I heard a loud noise of wooden clogs from the gate, which was accompanied by the conductor’s voice. He was in a state of high dudgeon, by the sound of it. A moment later, a girl in her early teens opened the door of my train car and came in hurriedly. The train swayed heavily, then moved off the platform slowly.
The pillars supporting the train platform, a water-wagon for a locomotive looking as if it was being left behind,1 a porter thanking his customer for a tip—the images of these lingered, but they were obscured by the smoke blown against the windows.
Feeling a deep sense of relief, I opened my heavy eyelids and got my first real look at the girl seated in front of me. I lit a cigarette and gave her a once-over.
She looked like a typical country bumpkin. Her hair was styled in two buns at the back of her head in an butterfly coiffure: the kind of style that court ladies wore a thousand years ago or so. The hair might have pretensions to grandeur, but it appeared dry. Her cheeks were so flushed that she appeared ill.
The girl draped a spring-green woolen muffler over her knees, then placed a package on top of the muffler. The package was wrapped in plain paper. She clasped it tightly in her frostbitten hands. A corner of the ticket for the third-class car peeked out of one closed fist.
I disliked her vulgar looks. I was disgusted by her dirty clothes. And I was displeased by her senselessness of not being able to tell the second-class car from the third-class car.
After I lit a cigarette, I took the newspaper out of my pocket and spread it on my knees, attempting to forget about her.
Suddenly, the light hitting the newspaper changed. The train was wrapped in darkness as it passed through the first of the tunnels on the Yokosuka Line, so the only illumination on the train came from the overhead lamps. My eyes took a moment to adjust to the electric lighting, but then I could see clearly.
The stories in the newspaper were all of the mundane sort. That suited my mood. I ran my eyes over the dreary articles almost mechanically as the train passed through the tunnel.
However, I could not help but be aware of the girl sitting in front of me, personifying vulgar reality.
This train passing through the tunnel, this country girl, this evening newspaper filled with humdrum articles— weren’t they all symbols? Didn’t they all symbolize pointlessness, baseness and the utter boredom of life?
I felt like everything was worthless, and put away the half-read newspaper. I closed my eyes as if I were dead. I dozed fitfully with my head against the window frame.
Several minutes passed.
I jerked to wakefulness when I felt the presence of some threat. I looked around in spite of myself and found the girl, who had changed her seat from my opposite to my side. She was trying desperately to open my window.
But the window was heavy, and it seemed that she wasn’t able to get it open. Her chilblained cheeks became more and more flushed. She sniffled, a pathetic sound, and her breathing picked up from exertion.
The sight of her provoked some sympathy in me.
The train had come out of the tunnel and was about to enter another. There were mountains on both sides of the train at the moment. Patches of dry grass blew in the evening wind, illuminated by the thin light of twilight.
I could see no reason why the girl wanted to open the window so badly. Was it a whim? An affectation?
My previous hostility toward her returned. I watched her struggle, cold-hearted, and made no move to help. Her frostbitten hands beat helplessly against the pane, and I found myself wishing that she would never succeed in getting the window open.
Then the train rushed into the tunnel with an appalling noise. At that exact moment, the young woman slid the window down.
Foul air as dark as melted soot wafted in through the square window. Suffocating, thick smoke filled the train car.
My throat is sensitive to smoke, especially smoke so thick, and I failed to put a handkerchief over my face in time. The smoke surrounded me; I coughed so hard that I could scarcely breathe.
But the young woman seemed not to care about me. She looked hard in the direction the train was going, extending her neck out the window. Her dark hair blew loose in the wind.
I saw her standing in the smoke and the electric light. It was getting brighter and brighter outside the window. The wintry smell of soil, dry grass and water whooshed in, dispelling the worst of the smoke. I would have scolded the strange woman without waiting for her excuse and ordered her to close the window if the smoky atmosphere had persisted much longer.
Finally, my coughing subsided. The train exited the other side of the tunnel and was near a railroad crossing on the outskirts of a poor town. The mountains came once more into view on either side of the train, along with the hardy winter grass.
Near the railroad crossing, there were a few small shabby houses with thatched and tiled roofs. A white flag, fluttering listlessly in the breeze, was waved by the town’s gateman to signal that it was all right for the train to pass through.
I thought the train had passed all the way through the tunnel and was well on its way to its final destination when I caught sight of three red-cheeked boys standing close together in a line behind the fence of the railroad crossing. They were all as short as if they were being held down by the cloudy sky. The boys all wore kimono that were the same color as the gloomy scenery of the rest of the town.
The boys raised their hands at the same time as the train passed. They turned their faces to the sky, letting out incomprehensible cries.
Then it happened.
The girl leaned half her body out the
window. She stretched out her frostbitten hand and shook it vigorously.
Then some five or six mandarins--beautifully sunny-orange colored,
the color of happiness--showered down on the boys who had come to see the
train off.
The unexpected scene took my breath away. I understood everything at once.
The young woman was likely on the way to her new employer. She was throwing some mandarins out of her kimono pocket for her brothers, who’d come all the way to the railroad crossing to see her off. They might not see one another again for a long time.
The three boys cheered like little birds as the bright-colored mandarins fell all around them. They were gone in a flash: there one moment, and then lost to speed and distance.
Lost to view was not lost to memory. The scene was imprinted on my memory strongly. It caused me pain, but it it also instilled a sort of hopefulness that made me cheerful.
I raised my head and gazed at the girl as if she were another person entirely. She was sitting in the seat across from me again with her chapped cheeks buried in her spring-green woolen muffler. She clasped her ticket and her paper-wrapped package close to her body.
As I sat there, I forgot for a while my own fatigue and weariness at the the pointlessness, baseness and the utter boredom of life.
THE END
1 This refers to a tank of water on another steam
train that is standing still at the train station. Trains of this era mostly
ran on steam, and water was carried in separate wagons and carts for fueling
purposes.↩
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