The Youth of Things: Life and Death in the Age of Kajii Motojiro

Lemon

Translations 143 Lemon An unaccountable, sinister lump was constantly pressing onto my heart. What would you call it? Fretfulness? Repugnance? A hangover is sure to follow a drinking bout; if you drink every day, the moment of stupor arrives. And here it was. This was rather unfortunate. What troubled me was not the resultant congested lungs and nervous prostration . And it wasn’t my back-scorching debts. It was the sinister lump that I couldn’t stand. Every beautiful piece of music, each delightful verse of poetry that had once given me so much pleasure, were now unbearable. Even when I made the effort to get out and listen to someone’s gramophone , after only the first couple of bars I felt a sudden urge to get up and leave. Something prevented me from remaining in one place. And so, I was forever drifting from one part of town to another. I don’t know why, but I recall being strongly drawn at the time to run-down, beautiful things. The scenes I liked best were quarters of the city on the point of dilapidation; and even within these quarters, not the forbidding main streets, but backstreets, somehow intimate, with soiled washing hung out to dry, bits and pieces of rubbish scattered around, seedy rooms peeping outwards. Charming neighborhoods with a look of having been gnawed by wind and rain, that would presently return to dust— mud walls crumbling, and lines of houses starting to tilt. Only the plants 144 Kajii Motojirō had any vigor, with the occasional shock of a sunflower, and the canna in bloom. Sometimes, while walking along such a street, I’d try to create the illusion I wasn’t in Kyoto at all, that I’d suddenly arrived in Sendai or Nagasaki or some such place hundreds of miles away. I desperately yearned to flee Kyoto, to end up in a city where I didn’t know a soul. The most important thing is a place to rest: the room of a deserted inn; a clean, pure quilt; the fine smell of a mosquito net, a freshly starched summer kimono. I want to lie there for a month and think of nothing. If only where I am now could suddenly change into that city! Once the illusion finally began to take shape, I went on to apply the assorted pigments of my imagination. It was nothing less than the overlapping of my illusion and the run-down district, and I took great pleasure in watching my real self get lost within it. I also developed a love of fireworks. But more than just that it was bundles of them, garishly colored with various striped patterns of red, purple, yellow, blue; the Shooting Stars of Nakayama Temple, Flower Tangles, the Withered Rice Shoots. And those Spinning Mice, individually coiled and crammed into boxes. Strangely, such things excited me. Other things I came to like were colored glass marbles, embossed with sea bream and flowers, and glass beads too. What inexpressible pleasure it was to lick them. Does anything else possess as faintly cool a taste as those marbles? When still very young, I’d often be scolded by my parents for putting them in my mouth. And yet, perhaps because that sweet memory of infancy has found new life in me now I’ve grown older and gone to seed, a flavor—faint, refreshing, with a somehow poetic beauty—floats right through that taste. You’ve guessed, no doubt, that I was totally broke. And yet, when the sight of such things stirred my heart even a little, I needed to console myself through extravagance. Something to the value of only two or three sen was extravagant enough. Beautiful things—or rather, things that appealed to my enervated antennae—naturally soothed me. One of the places I used to enjoy before my life became worm-eaten was Maruzen. Red and yellow eau de cologne and eau de quinine. Amber and jade-green perfume bottles of tasteful cut-glass workmanship with elegant raised designs in rococo style. Pipes, daggers, soap, tobacco. At times, I’d spend a good hour looking at such things. And finally, my extravagance wouldruntothepurchaseofasinglefirst-classpencil.Butformeatthetime, 145 evenMaruzenhadbecomejustanotheroppressiveplace.Thebooks,thestudents , the cash desks; they all appeared to me like specters of debt collectors. One morning—at that time I...