Nekohachitranslated from the Japanese

"Oi, boss," came the call, and Nekohachi lifted his eyes from the Kōdan Club he had been buried in and turned them toward the voice. He knew by the voice who it was, and that put him at his ease,

• the Kōdan Club he had been buried in: Kōdan Club was a popular monthly magazine of serialized storytelling and historical tales. Nekohachi is reading it for trade, not for study.

"Well, Sensei!" putting on a vacant look on purpose. "Fancy meeting you on this tram, eh? So then, some fine nest has turned up round this way, eh?"

"What, a Sugamo nest, that's all!"

"…" That got him straight off, one down. But by now all the passengers around were pricking up their ears, so he called back into himself the feeling from the kōza he had just come off with his hands free. And with all the passengers starting to look like his own customers to him, he felt here he would have to give something back somehow. "That would be it, eh," putting on a suddenly solemn face, and just then with a sidelong glance catching their tram passing in front of the lunatic hospital he made it into material,

• the feeling from the kōza he had just come off: A yose is a variety hall for rakugo, mimicry and other acts; a kōza is its raised stage. For Nekohachi the tram has turned into a hall, with the other passengers as his customers.
• their tram passing in front of the lunatic hospital: Sugamo then held Tokyo's lunatic asylum, by which the tram passed. The joke turns a pun on nest into a slur on the district, then on himself.

"In a place like Sugamo there is nothing living but madmen or monsters like Nekohachi, eh."

"ha, ha, ha," somebody laughed, and so even in a place like this he got the response he always got. He thought of the place and tried to hold back any further wisecracks on top of it, but somehow his mouth seemed unwilling to agree to it.

"Now, now, keep yourself quiet, eh," he was telling himself under his breath as he looked at the other's face. This was Takami, who had asked him along once or twice for some affair, and he was keeping that good-natured silent grin going on his sleepy face with a touch of drink in it. "Oi, little Buddha of little Nara" came right up to his throat, but he gulped it back down, thinking the man was no fellow performer to say that to. Then what looked like harmless words came rattling out. "Had your one already? This slump and all, Sensei looks to be doing pretty well for himself — let me have a bit of it, what do you say? Me, I'm off home now, if I'm lucky I might get something hot — though whether the missus has got it ready I don't know."

"ha, ha, ha!" The man holding his seat across the way and staring this way laughed again.

So long as he heard people laughing it rang pleasant in him, and yet it was strange that there was nothing funny to himself at all. If you wanted the comedian's logic for it, there was plenty and to spare. That to make people laugh there is no effect in laughing yourself is one of them. And yet, though he held off even from the drink people like, to protect this voice he uses for the trade, when he faced people he still had to make it look as if he drank. Could there be such hardship in any other work. People think a comedian just breezes along with no troubles in the world, but let them try being the man himself. He is thick with troubles people know nothing of. A man like himself is as if made out of a lump of trouble.

Still, for one pleasure, he had pulled out the back fence of his row-house lodgings, and from there rented cheap from long back the open ground that lay beyond, and grew vegetables there. And when they came up plenty, not only did his own family eat them, he shared them out to the neighbours round about as well. Just to see the neighbours pleased was another pleasure in itself.

The green caterpillars and black worms that get on the leaves of little turnips and daikon, you dig a ditch along the ridges, and shake the leaves toward it, and they all come rolling down. Then you stamp them all at once, or the children prod them with the end of a stick, and kill them.

Of late he had set out cucumber and eggplant seedlings as well, so the cutworms had to be watched. Like thieves, like us, the things do their work only by night, so hunt for them by day and you never see a sign of them. Tonight, he was thinking, the moment supper was done he would strip to his loincloth and have a child hold the lantern for him out in the field, and make a thorough job of doing for the cutworms.

Then the little-Buddha Sensei opened his eyes wide. "No more work tonight, I suppose?"

"Yes, I have got my two kōza behind me, but —" That did not feel like answer enough, so catching what the other was driving at, "Might I tag along with you somewhere tasty, eh?"

"Oh, if it is only home to bed for you, why not come along with me?"

"I will come — on your orders, anywhere." Even to Kegon Falls, the song says — the words came unbidden to his lips.

"It is a study group of writers, you know, no harm in listening a while. Come now and it is only two hours to stick out. Afterwards I will make it your world."

"That sounds fun, eh, I'll come along too, to learn a thing or two, eh." He answered light enough, but he was fretting whether the load he had just set down would be loaded on his back again tonight. For him there was no time when body and mind felt lighter than in the tram on the way home after doing his union turn each night. From what he had heard he could not get home for at least another two or three hours. And in that time those cutworms might have cut through the roots of two or three of the seedlings in his plot, for all he knew.

With that worry on one side of his mind, the tram soon reached the terminus, so he stuffed the Kōdan Club inside his coat and got up after Takami-san, carrying his crippled body hobble hobble toward the exit. For a dozen years and more now his rheumatism had left him all but palsied down one side. Crippled as no one else is, he was thankful, as the saying goes that art saves the man, that he could still keep wife and children fed like anyone else.

Walking along in silence he was apt to sink into earnest thoughts like these, when a fat woman he knew met him and broke them up again.

"Nekohachi-san!" Pushing her fat bulk on ahead of her as if proud of it, she called out to him as they passed, though she need not have, in a gentle voice that did not match the bulk, "Home now?"

"Well, General Oyama!" He just had to tease again, so he teased as he always did. He turned sideways toward her and pulled himself up stiff and solemn to a stop, but she went off laughing, so he let her go out of his sight and chased her with words alone, "I've one more party to do yet, eh."

"That's it," came the answer from behind. "You really are an earner!"

"…" Why, whether it would turn into money or not he didn't know, but with her carrying that body along as if to boast of it, he just wanted to boast of something himself, so he had called the place he was off to now a party.

"A stout-built woman, eh," Takami-san said.

"How so — for all that, her husband dotes on her, so there's no standing against her, you know!"

"Oh —?"

Takami-san was listening in earnest, but he himself knew nothing of the sort in fact. So long as it was a joke that was all he wanted. Thinking this man too was no great talker after all, he changed the subject.

"It's quite hot, isn't it, eh? At this rate will this rainy season be a dry rainy season, eh? That's trouble, eh."

"Why, if it rains the feet coming to the yose will thin out, eh."

"As for customers' feet, I'm seasoned to rubbing little sticks, you know. I've borrowed a bit of another man's ground and I'm growing vegetables. The trouble is that, if the rain doesn't come when it should, they won't do right, eh."

Talking this over as they went, they turned in at the gate of a house. That even here a little patch of cucumbers had been made struck him as genteel.

To get up to the second floor of that house he could only twist his backside up in a queer bobbing way. But when Takami introduced him to the party of six or seven with, "I've brought a rare guest along tonight. I thought we might have him do something for us later. This is the Nekohachi you've heard of," he felt the same pride as always when he cozies up to his customers.

"This should be fun," somebody cried out.

"That 'the' I took to, eh, I'm a performer with a bit of a name myself, you know. So to come out before great literary gentlemen like yourselves, eh, and not feel stage fright like that, that's lucky for me." Saying this he glanced round the party. Some laughed innocently and none seemed to have taken offence, so he took them for people who would generously take his joke. But to make surer still, meaning to make them understand more, "Only let me tell you beforehand, with rheumatism my body doesn't work like other people's. So if I look to be sitting up stiff like this on purpose, that's why it is, eh, it's not exactly that I'm trembling before you gentlemen."

"ha, ha, ha" came, so he felt safe for a start, and thinking they were his now he shut his mouth for a while.

A study of somebody's novel had begun, but as the subject was actors, he pricked up his ears as a performer in something of the same line.

The man who looked to be the master of the house was someone he had often bathed with in the bathhouse two or three years ago and still met on the road now and then, and he said to Takami-san, "We are just now on 'Tiger.'"

"Whose?"

"'Tiger' by Kume. It came out in the May Bunsho Sekai."

"I haven't read it," Takami-san answered.

"Few here have read it either — and as the man who went out of his way to put it forward for the June meeting isn't here tonight, I was thinking of letting it pass without a word."

To the question, "What sort of story is it?" the host answered, "I only glanced through it because he asked me by postcard to bring it up — thin if you call it thin, but neatly put together at its low level. The author can hardly have demanded much of himself, so for that author it will do well enough, I suppose — 'Tiger' is the part the hero, a comic actor, has been cast to play. To quote the original, this actor 'had a child already eight years old. And the child had trodden his first stage last year and had before him a future as a shinpa actor like him, no, more proper than him. He thought he would never make the child a comic.'"

"…" Hearing this reading, Nekohachi felt he had walked into an awful place. He knew himself that this was a bit of an overblown thought, and yet it sounded just as if they were talking about himself. He had four boys, the eldest fourteen in first year of higher primary, the next twelve in fifth year of elementary, both doing well and both monitors. This twelve year old was good at mimicking his father, and had an art even beyond his father's, but for all that he would not make him a second Nekohachi. No, it was just so as not to let the children see their father mimicking cat fights and animal voices and coaxing good humour out of the customers from up on the koza that he had long ago gone out of his way to choose this inconvenient suburb to live in. Cat turned to tiger, there was no great difference in that.

"The part handed him was just the one part of the tiger." What the host was reading seemed to be the text of the story itself. "Not a man's name. Just the one part dressed up as a real beast of a tiger. He had even taken the byname of animal actor, so what wonder now to be handed the tiger to play. And yet he felt a little sad. Used to it as he long was, profession as he thought it, teasing as he knew it to be, he felt the human inside him being made a fool of, and even felt a little angry. The hero is in that sort of situation."

"Quite deftly the point the author was aiming at holds together throughout," put in the man with the face like Tenjin-sama, in an earnest tone.

"…" The English word situation the host had just used stayed in Nekohachi's ears, and he took it to mean something like a painful fix you get caught in. And he himself was in fact fitted into his customers' favour, and had gone and fitted himself right into it, till he was in the state he was in now where he could move neither one way nor the other, so he joked it to himself, quiet. But down underneath he felt the hateful part of the performer's trade all the more.

"There is the place where the leader points it out, eh, says that is just Fukai-kun's fitted part," said the priest-like one, close-cropped, with bumps rising fore and aft like a mountain range, the knowing face.

"And then they tell him the whole act will be eaten clean up by Fukai-kun's tiger, and such," the host went on, "and he got that much proud again even. But being the tiger, with no lines to say, there was no call to turn up for rehearsals even. Glad to make use of the day when the child begged to go to Ueno Zoo, he says, well then shall I show you the much talked of hippo, while in truth he means to go and study how a tiger looks. Then on the way, in the tram, he meets a theatre critic, and is asked where he is off to, so he answers, truth to tell, to the zoo to show the child the much talked of hippo, but the sharp critic has him marked, that is a lie, I have heard it already, it is the tiger really."

"There is a kind of sorrow comes out in a bit like that too," said the Tenjin-sama man.

"…" Nekohachi opened his eyes wide as if for the first time on hearing the word sorrow. It seemed to him more and more as if his own affair had been taken and remade and dug into. With his right hand stuck on the tatami and his left laid on the folded hand towel on his knee, admiring at how human feeling falls to the same place whoever feels it, he leaned his head a little back where he sat sideways and said, "I see! To an unlearned one like me a novel seemed a slapdash made-up thing with eight hundred lies strung together in it — though that may have been rude from the start to Sensei gentlemen like yourselves — but to hear it now, sure enough it aims at the true thing, it does, eh"

"Present-day novels are all like that, of course," the Tenjin-sama man answered, sounding a little angry. "We are different novelists from novelists who write lies and rest satisfied with it!"

"Fu, fun," went the knowledge-face man, laughing through his nose.

"How you do flare up," said the very near-sighted-looking man, smiling as he teased him.

"I am not flaring up in particular, only there are plenty of fools in the world who take slapdash popular novels like Hekirurien's or Tokutomi Roka's for the fine standard and pass low, vulgar criticism."

"Terribly sorry, I am sure," Nekohachi said, keeping a straight face and dipping his head a little, and they all laughed. But this time that alone left him feeling unsatisfied, so he offered up one joke. "I for my part have never yet met a theatre critic in the course of my own researches, no, but once, to study the cry of the earthworm, I squatted up all night in the woods by the Veterans' Home over there, and they took me for a thief and a detective challenged me, he did, eh."

"That too, you know, is the result of a kind of sorrow or earnestness," was all the explanation Tenjin-sama gave, and from no one else came any ha, ha, ha.

"…" Nekohachi felt the wind taken clean out of him, against all expectation. And for the first time it struck him that these were not his customers. As an entertainer he might make people cry or laugh, but he had no room left to cry or laugh himself. These people, though, were a cut above even that, for they seemed to study even the feeling of an entertainer himself who makes people cry or laugh and cannot cry or laugh himself. They were specialists in that line, right enough. At this rate an honest humility rose in him to take off his helmet cleanly and own himself beaten, and he asked, "And what did the actor do after that?" What he wanted to know most was about the child. All the same he had quite made up his mind the fall would be that he pleaded the part unworthy and did not go on the stage, or that at least he did not let the child come to the theatre.

"Just look. You've made a clean confession, haven't you, but if you want to see a tiger you needn't go all the way to the zoo — give anyone a litre or two and he'll turn into one, eh? — Why, shall we go and see that tiger over there? — That won't do. I can't shake this little one off, you see, and he looked back at the child again. There's a passage like that too," the host went on, still with an eye on the book. And everyone forgot Nekohachi and the rest and bent their hearts toward the tiger, but to Nekohachi that tiger was like himself. "For foolishness, Yui's part is much the same. Rather your single tiger part may be the honour, with the popularity gathering on the tiger alone, you know — thinking so I mean to do all I can with all my might, you know — Yes indeed, we for our part are rather counting on your tiger — Much obliged, and Fukai smiled wryly and yet was not a little comforted in his heart."

"That won't do, eh," Nekohachi said, screwing up his face, "to do that situation in a place like that!"

"ufu, fu," a stylish little laugh was heard.

"Before gentlemen like you, for the likes of me to use cheeky English may have been a mistake —" He had thought better of it that this English might come to what they call compromise, but, "anyhow, if that actor they call Fukai lets the critic's puffing talk the decent human thought he had managed to hold in that case clean away, and goes carelessly getting into the swing again, that will be trouble, eh."

"But that is just what makes it interesting, in a way —" the host said.

"But as for me, a thing like that —" he said, turning earnest as if to show he was not fool enough for that, but neither the host nor any of the rest lent him an ear.

"He went to the zoo and did no more than watch the tiger sitting still and yawning, and yet he came home thinking he had got the tiger's feelings better, somehow, than a handsome lover's feelings. When the first day came and the sewn-up tiger came onto the stage and yawned, at that alone there were cries of Fukai, Fukai! from the gallery, and he grew not a little proud. And at the fall of the curtain, when he leapt upon the heroine of the play, gallery first and the whole house with it gave him a great burst of applause."

"Isn't that making fools of people?" It was the words of the much younger man, speaking for the first time.

"That is making a fool of people, right enough," Tenjin-sama put in too, laughing this time.

A grudge rose in Nekohachi too about the way customers treat him on the kōza, enough to make him want to have his say. "From where I stand, it is the spectators he is making fools of, for getting delighted over trifles, and I daresay he is feeling for the actor himself, eh — spectators are the same as yose customers, you know."

"Now, about that," Takami-san put in his first question with a mild look, "is it a work where the author is being ironical — I have not read a scrap of it, so I can hardly have an opinion — but to go by what I have just heard?"

"It is irony, to be sure," the knowledge-face man answered in a set-piece tone, "the question is whether the author can be satisfied with irony of so shallow a degree."

"That is it, I suppose." The near-sighted man spoke, for a near-sighted man, with unexpected crispness. "I have not read this one either, but what that lot write is all neatly put together in a small clever way, and without a scrap of back or depth."

"Just as Nekohachi-kun said," the knowledge-face man went on, "the author's sympathy for the hero is to be seen, but the way that sympathy is shown is exceedingly thin."

"Thin or not, it is not that it has no background of life." That was the host. "Only, one may say he is an author who can give it no more than a thin background. As for T-kun going out of his way to propose this work, as he is not here tonight his true intent is unclear, but I take it he wanted to make a question for debate of the way it is both put together and yet somehow wanting."

"I daresay that is it."

Nekohachi wanted to make them all laugh by saying he did not know what the hell a back or a haikei was, but as what he had said had been taken up as a point he held his nose high and, with a solemn-looking face, "And so, is this novel finished with that, eh — is there no other fall to it?"

ha, ha, ha! Only two or three of them just laughed.

To Nekohachi it felt like the roar had come at a strange place.

"You're no rakugo man," Tenjin-sama had stuck in another unasked word, or so it felt to Nekohachi, but he saw at once his own ignorance was being teased, so he buried his awkwardness in another apology.

"Yes, quite sorry about that."

"There is no ochi, no fall, in a novel, but what Nekohachi would take for a fall is what closes this story, and it is that which keeps the piece, thin as it is, alive. Fukai gets his great applause at the curtain and is going off proud in his sewn-up shape when from the shadow of the dark flats someone cries 'Father' and flings himself upon him. He looks back in surprise and finds his own child crying, child as he is, at the foolish part his father has played. He too cannot help crying, now at last. And then, 'the tiger and the human child wept together for a while in the shadow of the dark background,' that is how it ends."

"The last bit has a good swing to it, eh," the near-sighted man said to them all.

"That without it the whole piece goes slack shows," the knowledge-face man put in, "how feeble a thing this story is, don't you think?"

"That's it, eh," the host answered as if the strength had gone out of his shoulders. "In the end it isn't much of a piece."

"…" Nekohachi made a show of opening his eyes wide, as if thunderstruck, when he came to hear of this last business of weeping together. He could not say he did not know himself that this too was a face put on and exaggerated on purpose, and yet at the same time, before he knew it, what was always kept hidden in the bottom of his heart seemed to have come out upon his face, for the grief over his own trade and the wavering over whether to make his second son into a second Nekohachi had been coaxed out together at once. He tried not to show people a face so ill-suited to his comic trade, but the harder he tried the less the face itself would obey him, quite the other way, and if he saw it in a mirror he thought it must look like a blubbering face. But without patching it up any more, plainly, "Well, I am impressed," he showed his respect as if the story were the very work of the company present. "I've got the same sort of sorrow myself, and it truly struck home, it did, eh. But if I too may be allowed the one, what you gentlemen would call a criticism, this Fukai playing a part against his own wish and letting his child see it, that I think was a grave mistake, eh?"

"That's neither here nor there, it's no question for the author."

"But with me it won't do to let it go at that," he said, hitching himself forward a little on his knees as if he were well and truly joining the debate now, standing up to the Tenjin-sama man. "I've got children myself, you see, my eldest and my second boy go to grade school, and the second, the twelve-year-old, when it comes to copying me he's a genius, so if I'm out sick from my seat he says he'll go in Dad's place, eh"

"Ha, ha," the Tenjin-sama man laughed, in a laugh half as if impressed and half as if making fun.

"Trade it may be, but with the old man already doing fool tricks, I don't want the child laughed at too, so to keep the children from coming near the yose where their dad appears I've gone out of my way to live in this awkward suburb on purpose, eh"

"Something of that sort of feeling does come out in it, too," the host answered him, "but that is not all the story is about, so this is fine as it is, I suppose."

"Don't you despise your own art too much, Nekohachi-kun?" the near-sighted man put the question to him like that.

"Of course," he stuck for a moment, but there was no need to think it over. "There's nothing else for it, eh. Human as I am, such as I am, I've got to make even a tiger's cry to eat my rice, eh"

"But," the other went on, "unlike you, the hero of this piece always takes his child along to the theatre so he can become a performer all the sooner, doesn't he?"

Then came, "What sticks in my craw more than any of that," and he wanted to say here was the Tenjin-sama fellow off on his chatter again, only it kept the same earnest tone as ever, "is this author's flippant attitude. An anonymous monthly review in the Jiji Shinpō abused this piece roundly, saying Kume must be a hopeless fellow to rest satisfied with anything so shallow, so I read it myself in earnest to see how shallow a thing it could be, and to me it did not seem anything to sneer at. But when I asked our host here tonight, it seems that reviewer is Kume himself."

"He's not so flippant as all that, Kume as an author, eh," said the knowledge-face fellow.

"You can tell that from his work up till now, can't you?" That was the near-sighted man.

"If he's a flippant man, it's only natural he makes flippant work. Whether to like it or dislike it is left to the reader's side."

"So it's up to the customer, is it, eh," Nekohachi took the host's argument this way. And growing eager to cozy up to it, "But he's a man with a deal of teasing wit in him, and I think him a great man, eh?"

"There's great and great, you know."

"Wa-ha, ha," two or three of them raised their voices together.

"Sensei," the student-like fellow who had not said a word till now spoke for the first time, his words carrying that nervous tone. "I've not read a thing of Mr Kume's, so I've no right to say anything about the man, but it seems to me a piece of fiction has no depth unless the author's personality is backing it, eh?"

"You always talk like an idealist, but even the realists on the other side would never deny that."

"Then I feel easy about that, but..."

"Only we don't come to a stop at the sort of thing you mean."

"That's just what I can't..." the other said, cocking his head a little to one side.

"Even if the man's character comes out, unless a life of that character comes out with it, it still won't be concrete, will it?"

"…" The nervous student smiled now and made his bow. "Then even I can understand that."

"…" He wanted to say, I haven't the least idea what any of it is about, eh. What they call genjitsu-shugi he didn't understand, and gutai and kuutai and that he didn't understand either, so he only thought of that konnyaku question-and-answer of the rakugo man.

• that konnyaku question-and-answer of the rakugo man: Konnyaku mondō is a rakugo routine of deliberately mismatched questions and answers that goes nowhere. Nekohachi thinks of it because the critical terms sound to him like pure noise.

In the meantime two or three more novels seemed to come up for discussion, but they did not take his interest the way the tiger had, so with his eyes on the Western picture he could make nothing of hanging on the wall to the right of where he sat and on the gilt lettering of the books in the bookcase knocked together out of beer crates to his front left, he bit back the yawns that kept coming. The host did say, We had better give Nekohachi some sake, but, "No, I am more for the katsubushi side," he answered, and had mochi cakes brought out by the host's wife. And as he talked with her about the pleasure of growing vegetables and about the bringing up of each other's children, he got two or three magazines the children looked likely to read.

Then from Takami-san, "Well, let us have you do something, eh."

"…" Now, from here on this was at last my world, he thought, and the damp feeling he had got from the tiger story went off somewhere, and he wanted them to think better of his art than of the tiger. He had righted himself before he knew it, and in his readiness there was the same braced spirit as on the kōza, and before he had yet done anything he could hear his own mimic voice. He bent the little finger of his right hand like a hook and started to carry it to his just opened mouth, then stopped and looked the finger over, half to himself, "Sweaty and short of oil, I wonder if it will go, eh."

After wiping the sweat off the finger once with his hand-towel, keeping his face deadpan, giving nothing away, he went hohokekyo.

"A fine thing, eh," Tenjin-sama blurted straight out in praise, but that jarred.

"That just now was the nightingale in its cage, now the valley-crossing —" kekyo, kekyo, kekyo, hohokekyo! Then straight on the voices of the pine cricket, the bell cricket, the kutsuwamushi. Then crow, skylark, quail. With his joined lips pushed flat out to the front, the voice of the mole-cricket. Saying it might be a bother to the neighbours quieted to sleep by now, the male crane and the female crane told apart in the cry. The grass lark's voice too he let them hear.

To every cry, every cry, the listeners being listeners he could go all out, and they all seemed to be listening quietly, and it went as he wished and he was satisfied, and meaning for a bonus to show them the voice of the earthworm, "What they generally call an earthworm crying, that they say is the voice of the mole-cricket, but the earthworm cries too, eh," with that for a preface giving again a voice something like the mole-cricket, "If with this you do their voice you will see. For that study I once sat up all night in the wood at the Veterans' Home, but when footsteps sound, their voice breaks off for a while. I crouch there and wait a bit and then try it again, and if our voice is exactly like theirs, they answer straight off, and if it is wrong, there is no reply."

"ha, ha, ha!" The host let out a specially loud laugh.

"It's the truth, you know," he pleaded his seriousness. About the 'reply' — that was just his usual joke slipping out.

"Well, abroad there are men who have gone at it on a larger scale and have even studied the language of monkeys."

"If I ever get to learn English or something, I will try it myself, eh —"

"But monkeys do not use English."

"Wa ha, ha," two or three of them came out together.

"…" He felt quite as if his own stock in trade had been taken from him, and his spirits fell a little flat. Just to cover it, "They say on learned grounds that the monkey has turned into man, but in the story here the tiger has turned into a monkey, eh."

"No, we are glad to have it in your animal mimicry too," the host answered.

"That aside," the man with the face like Tenjin-sama, whom he had till now thought a disagreeable fellow, asked him a good question this time. "I want to hear your motive for coming to do such things, eh."

"Motive, you say —?"

"Well, call it the first notion that started it."

"I see, eh — for all you see of me I wasn't a farmer from the first, no, nor any born artiste neither, though I daresay that goes for any of us, eh," he joked, and then he told of old days that held memories even for him. After one arm and one leg had gone useless he had talked it over with his wife and turned candy-seller. But just blowing the Chinese flute and hobbling along, hobbling along, not the snottiest-nosed brat would buy from him. The first day was clean zero and on the second day at last he sold ten sen's worth. He left that one silver coin with the child to please him with it, and child being child, he set it down on the bridge rail and went off to play, and in between another child took it. On the third day too he went out for trade because he went, but this was never going to do, he gave up hope, and stretched his legs out on the Yoshiwara embankment and sat there in a daze, thinking. "It was here I got a heaven-sent idea, and got in me the makings of the performer I would be one day, eh," and having got a small laugh from his hearers with that, he moved on to how he learned the cry of the frogs. "Before I knew it, any number of frogs were crying out in the paddies." As now, he showed how he had turned his eyes that way then, stuck his face a little sideways, and a good deal handier than when he had tried it that time, closing his hand as if round an egg and bringing his mouth to the hole at the top, he let out a little kuk kuk of a cry. "When I tried it myself, out of all those many frogs just six or seven turned round my way. I thought that strange and wondered a while, and then once more," he said, changing to a kak kak of a voice to show them, "when I tried it, this time all the frogs except those six or seven turned to face me, every one of them."

The truth was, he did not suppose it had gone quite so cleanly as all that, but there was no witness who had stood by and seen it at the time, so with an easy mind he made the story pretty. "And what I found was, the first way of crying was the females, and the one after was the males. And there were only six or seven males there, and all the rest were females."

"Interesting!"

"…" He had had the Tenjin-sama's praise, and his own delight welled up still more. "This was my first notion, eh," and then when he went to where the children gathered and showed them the mimicry, the candy sold better than you would think. And from the next day the frog candy-man was waited for wherever he went.

"Sensei, candy is quite a paying thing, eh, with only five sen laid out it came to thirty sen, forty sen at the time."

"What made you give up such a good paying line, then?"

"Why, my hobby got too much for me, eh. Shall I say mimicking the cry of things was in me by nature? I mimic anything. No, whatever cries, if I cannot mimic it I study it till I can. Among my customers there are often orders like cry the firefly or cry the colic-worm, but that not even a genius beyond me could likely do. As for me, nowadays cats fighting and the cries of insects and birds have got common, and I cannot keep up unless I mimic aeroplanes and motorcars too."

"Why, there is carelessness in mimicry too," the host said, "and by that carelessness many things get vulgarised."

"At that rate you will only throw yourself away and go downhill, won't you? Rather than that, why not talk just as you told your own history now, natural and without frills, even when you go to the yose. Wouldn't that be a good deal more natural and interesting?" said the Tenjin-sama-like man again.

"I think that would be good too," the near-sighted man agreed.

"But my life is in making fools of the customers from up on the kōza and showing it, that is where it is."

"That's right, eh," said Takami-san, with his arms round both his knees, as if taking his side. "His offhand sarcasm and heckling when they come, why, they are a treat to hear."

"In return, when I get to a certain point, I make my compromise and my concession, eh. There are times I even cry the firefly and the colic-worm for them. They are things that do not cry in any case, so it does not matter how I do it, see," and then putting on a sharp look, "You don't understand much yourself, eh, can a colic-worm cry? If that will not do for you, I've took your gate money already, so you can get off home quick — only that would be too bare, so at the end I let the other fellow save face too — but you don't want to go home halfway either, do you. Truth is, I don't want to send you home either — that is what I make of it."

"I wonder if that is a kind of ochi too?" asked the near-sighted man, laughing.

"That, I take it, is a kind of conclusion, eh." This was Nekohachi trying to take back what he felt he had fumbled a little earlier over the ending of the Tiger. "But then, when I get called to the princes and the like, why, gyagya-gya," and with that baring his teeth, goggling his eyes, screwing his face into something queer, he showed them cats at it fighting, and set them all off at once. But keeping a straight face himself, he went on, "It is not barnyard fowl, showing you cats kicking at each other is still hardly out of place. When the person before me is a lady, I can well hear the laugh from behind the fan where she hides her noble face. But at times, when I went up to Mr ___ for instance, I was told, they say you are good not only at mimicry but at rakugo too, let our guests hear something funny, so I declined. It is far too awesome for me, I cannot. But I was pressed, so perform a turn I did, perform one I did, and it is a strange thing, from the very start not a bit of it gets across. As we only know our own low-down society, of course the story falls there too. 'Oi, Hachi, are you there,' says I," and with that he showed hitching his backside and sitting on the step at the entrance, "from the first that does not get across what it is about, 'beranmei, bare-arsed you cannot hitch up, eh,' none of that ready wit gets across. Begging pardon for a rude thing to say, there is nothing to bite on, where there ought to come a roar they all sit prim."

• when I went up to Mr ___ for instance,: The blanks are in the source: circles standing for names of noble houses and viscounts. Leaving them blank is itself good manners about great houses.

"It's because the way you live is clean different, you know."

"That would be it, eh." He thought these learned gents were different after all. What he had run up against himself in the flesh and still could not explain, they had made clear for him in a single word. Truly the life of the upper folk and the life of the likes of us is clean different. The way we live is as far apart as the moon and a soft-shell turtle.

Thinking so, he had the back row-houses in mind. First the blacksmith, slow to get going, always getting shouted at by his mountain-goddess. Next the woman hairdresser, no telling how many men she has gone through. Next to her our own place, and next to that the tram conductor, clattering about while folk are still sound asleep and off out to his bell-ringing trade. And right at the dead end the blear-eyed lame clam-seller. In summer they are a near stark-naked society, but of the lot only our place is anything like human. The field work is only my spare-time work, but even so there is an ease there those gaunt craze-driven lot know nothing of. And the daikon and leaf greens I give away free to them at times. For all that we are born-and-bred Edokko who keep no overnight money, I born from a geisha's belly in a famous Asakusa restaurant, my wife first-bathed in Kanda upper water. And with that he wanted to show off a bit of what he knew before them all.

There was a time a grand carriage stopped at the mouth of our row, you see. They must have known well enough how poor we lived, but, "Is this the house of the performer called Nekohachi?" "Yes," and I was a bit put to it by that. "Then is the master himself at home?" "Yes, the master has just gone to the bath and is out," hardly could I step out as the man himself in nothing but a loincloth, eh. "If you will wait a moment, I will go and call him directly," I said, and stepped outside for the moment. I gave my wife a wink, but she made an awkward face. I made as if to leave the house and slipped straight into the blacksmith's by the entrance, told his wife the story and got her to bring a kimono and sash, and putting on the look of a man just back from the bath, with a borrowed towel wetted with water and a soap box in hand, "Sorry to have kept you waiting, I am Nekohachi, what is your business?" Pupil and master with faces not a bit different, no wonder they found it strange. "In fact I have come from the ___ house, and just now your name came up there, and as you are said to do an amusing act you are to come at once, so I was told to come and fetch you," that is what he said.

Just then the near-sighted man said he would be in a fix if it got any later, and stood up. Nekohachi looked up sidelong at that profile and showed a touch of displeasure, but the man never noticed. And on top of that two others stood up too, and went home together with him. If this were the yose, with the gate money already settled, it would be easier to give it up. But when a man has at last settled his heart and keeps on speaking straight, to walk out on him in the middle struck him as real rudeness, and he could not give it up. He wanted to tell them he would come out and haunt them from some dark alley on the way, but with the host among them there were eager listeners still left, so the thread of his talk was hardly broken.

"To come and fetch me at once just because my name happened to come up in talk, that is just like the nobility, eh. Even then, it is not that I will not go, you see, but with an Edokko temper, when they start with money straight off, I get contrary, eh."

"But if it is business, there is no need for that, is there?" the host objected.

"No, business or no business, when they come at me squarely with how much will you come for, well, damn it, do as you please, is how I feel, eh. If it is a contribution then a contribution will do, and if they can pay then let them quietly pay what befits their station."

"That old-fashioned stuff will never do. Better to ask beforehand, no coming unless it is so many yen and more, and an aristocrat, as an aristocrat, to pay far higher than a commoner, that nowadays is rather the sensible way."

"But when money is named it turns dirty, eh."

"That's the old stale smell about performers today!"

"Performers today can't do any new tricks anyway, eh. If they don't come out to fetch you proper, why, I mostly turn them right down flat, eh. One time there I was, naked, lugging a hoe out in my plot, when a messenger from Viscount ___ came all the way to the field, and it got settled for such a day, from such an hour, but when he asks me how much will it take, I broke it off outright. A performer lives on spirit, eh, but then, if the fancy takes me, I'll go for nothing."

"That may not be a bad thing either, but then, what has become of this pig-farming Takami-kun means to start," so saying, the host turned the talk aside. And as if he knew quite well about things wholly apart from novels, talk that way went on a while among them all.

"Just because I am here, no need to talk of nothing but animals, eh," he got the joke said, but he was already pretty well worn out. Likely because he had still not taken the supper he should take, and hunger was coming on.

The other guests were trading easy talk like how the trams had stopped anyway, but he wished they would all go home soon. And as his spirits sank, what strangely kept on his mind was the fee for tonight, if none comes then none will do, but whether it would come from Takami-san, or from the master here, or whether it would end just like this. Plenty here to chatter along with a professional like himself, but none that looked likely to have sense as listeners.

He bore it, thinking it would be clear when this meeting broke up, which would be any moment now. But starting with Takami-san, no one considerately made a move, and to go dully home ahead of the rest would be dull too, so he took the host's wife again for company and talked of his own plot, what till now he had left forgotten. It was nothing he made trade of, particularly, but when talk turned to the plot, whoever he had for his listener, he at times grew so keen he forgot himself, and the spirit came back into him. This, as he had long thought, was his own taste, his pleasure. So,

"Eggplants, cucumbers, they'll be coming ready from here on, so whenever you have need I'll give you some," he said, covering over his own disagreeable face that would keep turning sullen. And the hand he had till now held back a little he put out three times running to the mochi cakes.

It was close on one in the morning, when the cranes crying over at the Veterans' Home came through clear, and everyone got to their feet. He got to his feet too, brisk on purpose, and went down the stairs with the rest, but with the old magazines and the leftover cakes and senbei stuffed in his breast, if that was to take the place of tonight's thanks, it felt silly, and here in secret he wanted to hold that tiger close and cry a while somehow. It was not that he was fretting because he had got no money, that much he knew from the point of being an Edokko — and that too you would know if you saw how his wife, an Edokko herself, gave in to a woman's weak heart and now and then tried to save up overnight money, and he knocked her about till she spent it all — but set beside a farmer's working life, this body of his that had to show people worthless tricks to live on felt sad somehow, all over again.

"It's only a little, you know—" Takami-san, who was not without thought for others, slipped him two yen coins in secret once they were outside, so he could pull himself together a little. And perhaps for that reason he could pay the more respect even to the host who came along behind saying to them all, "I'll see you partway, for a walk." But for himself — perhaps out of a nasty habit — what a stingy spirit, he thought himself mean. And if he could have it, he wanted to quit being a performer from tomorrow.

By now the only thing on his mind was the weather. Wondering when the rain would ever come, he looked up at the sky and hobbled along behind them all, hop hop, pitched to be heard by whoever he could not make out in the dim road,

"Tiger—monkey—pig, tonight it has been nothing but animal talk, eh."

"And your frogs besides," came the answer, and it was the knowledge-face man.

Thinking suddenly of the nervous one from the konnyaku question and answer, he could hear voices chatting away ahead with the Tenjin-sama fellow. Presently they passed the woods of the Veterans' Home, and in another step or two was the mouth of his own row house alley.

"This back in here is where I live, it is a squalid hole, but if you are ever passing please step in," he said, taking his leave of them all. But he had one thing left he wanted to say, so he took one step forward and added, "And my plot, if you peep past the trifoliate orange hedge just there you will see it. It is dark now so you will not see well, but eggplants and cucumbers will be coming on plenty from now, more than the family alone can ever eat,"

"…"

"Well, gentlemen, I will take my leave here."

The row house folk, who seemed already to be waiting even now for the eggplants and cucumbers to come, were all fast asleep. And the only one to greet this Edoya Nekohachi on his way home was the dog kept by the neighbourhood sake shop. But even to himself it seemed rare to be feeling so humble, and so human, as tonight.

The wooded road by the Veterans' Home was so dark that, for the sake of passers turning in from the tram street, he had petitioned some time ago to be allowed to put up a gas lamp with his own name written in it, for his own advertisement. The permission looked as if it would be hard to get, but that no longer mattered to him now. It only came to this, that nobody would needlessly give himself a stomach-ache over it.

It did nag at him, after a fashion, that he had taken this overnight money with his stingy spirit, but whatever he might buy for them the children would surely be fast asleep by now. The toy shops and the food shops along the tram street would surely have their shutters closed too. So he would likely laugh it off as having got, the other way round, what he himself ought to have paid out in school fees.

In any case, resolved to tell his wife at once the story from tonight's novel, and to make her taste it just as he had fully felt there an entertainer's sorrow, he drew near to the door of his own house.