Beauty in Disarray. Harumi Setouchi
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the platform. Lined up in front were seats for the headmaster and his assistant and for the new appointee too. As if everyone had been waiting impatiently for these three persons to sit, the ceremony began.
Tsuji was no longer that young to feel nervous in being exposed to the glances of several hundred girl students. Born in 1884, he was twenty-eight according to the Japanese way of counting, but since he had dropped out during his second year of middle school, he had come through some unusual difficulties, studying English by himself while frequently changing jobs. What with being forced to endure a hard life from the age of twelve or thirteen, he had never known what it was to be young. Marked somewhere on his face was a dark shade of pessimism, and he was apt to be thought older than he actually was.
The strange odor which had pierced his nostrils the moment he had entered the hall had increased in intensity so that he felt more and more nauseous, every pore on his skin seemingly impregnated. He thought the smell a mixture of the body odor of the girls crowded into the auditorium and the aroma from their hair oil.
"Well, it's inevitable you'll feel nauseated by that female smell for a week. So do your utmost to prepare for it."
As Nakano, his friend who had helped get him into the school, had said, Tsuji was experiencing that "female smell." While Tsuji wondered during the formalities of the ceremony how long he would continue as a teacher in the midst of this female odor, he experienced a sensation like the sudden nausea one feels before taking up chopsticks in front of a plate piled high with food.
It was to support his mother, brother, and sister rather than for the sake of earning a living that he had sought a job as a teacher at a private school when he was nineteen by the Japanese way of counting, and at twenty he had become an elementary school instructor with a special license to teach one course, several years having followed in an instant. His beginning monthly salary of nine yen had been no more than a trifle, even though an additional salary for long service had been attached. This girls' high school was privately run, and it would probably be a somewhat leisurely place, his monthly stipend almost forty yen. Attracted only for these reasons and not for any real love of devoting his life to teaching, he had transferred to this school. If possible, he wanted to confine himself all day in his study, to bury himself among his favorite books of all times and places, to immerse himself in them from morning till night.
Ever since he could remember, he had loved books. His mother Mitsu, born at Kuramae in Asakusa as the daughter of a distributor of rice to retainers of the daimyo class, had been raised with extraordinary care and training, at the time of her marriage bringing among her possessions from her parents' home many kinds of ezōshi, illustrated storybooks flavored with Edo culture. The moment Tsuji began to understand what was going on around him, he was drawn into the world of these strange fascinating stories of the ezōshi, and from the age of seven or eight, when he was able to read, he was infatuated with the extraordinary adventures in Saiyuki, a long novel set in Ming dynasty China. Both the ezōshi and Saiyuki expanded the boy's dreams infinitely. At the end of a period of random omnivorous reading, the romantic lad of twelve or thirteen was a precocious peevish type whose favorite book was Tsurezuregusa, a collection of short sketches, anecdotes, and essays.
His father Rokujiro, once a vassal of the shogunate, had been an apprenticed law student and had become a minor government official. He had served in the legal division of the Tokyo municipal government and, when Tsuji was seven or eight, was working in the Mie prefectural office. In Tsuji's tenth year his father's duties were again shifted to Tokyo, the family living on Sakumacho in Kanda, and there the father suddenly died. Left behind in addition to Tsuji were a younger sister and brother. The mother, raised in luxury since her birth, was weak at managing the family budget after her marriage, and with the death of her husband no funds remained in reserve.
Having withdrawn in his second year from Kaisei Middle School, Tsuji found himself the sole support of his family, maintaining his mother, brother, and sister when he was fourteen or fifteen. Even while he had to work, he attended Athenée Français and the People's English Academy; furthermore, he commuted to lectures at the Liberty English Academy at Hitotsubashi in Kanda. By listening there to the lectures of Yubi Aoyagi and Inazo Nitobe, Tsuji became acquainted with the names of Carlyle and Goethe, and his eyes opened to translated works of literature. His random reading was shifted from Japanese and Chinese literature to European works. Saiyuki was transformed into Baudelaire, extended to Hoffmann, and drawn on to Poe. Tsurezuregusa became Lao-tze and Chuang-tsu, shifted to the Bible, turned into Stirner and Sterne, and from Senancour extended to the heights of Leopardi. Besides reading, Tsuji tried his hand at short stories and made some secret attempts at translating. At the same time, it was inevitable that he would be concerned with the current trend toward socialism, which in those days was advancing like surging waves. He read whatever he could lay his hands on, from anarchistic to Marxist literature, and he was a devoted reader of the Heimin Shinbun, edited by Shusui Kotoku. As a new appointee at Ueno Girls' High School, Jun Tsuji was already a young literary enthusiast with an erudition born from this kind of spiritual background and with many complicated folds of a nihilistic mentality.
After the tedious greetings and admonitory comments of the headmaster and guests, a girl stood up in the front row diagonally across from Tsuji. The assistant principal's voice was heard, indicating the congratulatory address was to be given by the student-body representative.
The girl, short and plump, her cocoa-brown cheeks flushed and shining against her downy hair, was staring straight ahead with pitch-black pupils one would instinctively wish to peer into, both ends of her full lips raised as she walked with long strides toward the freshmen students.
Almost all the pupils, ribbons in their low pompadours, were dressed in maroon hakama skirts with crested black cotton haori, the uniform for ceremonial days.
She was the only girl who wore her hair in foreign style, gathering it together simply at the nape, the ribbonless hair strikingly black and abundant. Something slovenly and unrefined was evident in the way she had joined the neckband of her kimono and had put on her hakama.
She turned stiff as she delivered her short commonplace message of congratulations, and concluding by saying she was Noe Ito, representing all the students, she swept back to her seat. Apparently relieved at having finished her task, Noe was even more flushed, the pupils of her eyes moist and glittering.
Tsuji had paid no attention to the contents of Noe's prosaic remarks, but he had quite agreeably attuned himself to the beauty of her tense penetrating voice.
As she sat down, their eyes happened to meet. Noe made her dark eyes widen and, as if astonished, looked Tsuji straight in the face. Her eyes frankly communicated the drift of a mind full of curiosity, Tsuji parrying that lively movement with the vitality of one observing a fresh piece of fruit. The eyes of the girl, which were so voluptuous they reflected the pure childish curiosity and excitable sensitive agitation he had lost long ago, were softly tantalizing Tsuji's breast with a velvet-like touch. After the formal reply by the representative of the new students, which was twice as long as Noe's address, the principal introduced Jun Tsuji as the new teacher of English.
As he stood and walked toward the stage, he had a strange and vivid sensation of being stared at from behind by Noe's dark passionate eyes.
In no time at all Tsuji became an object of student adoration. Even those students who at the start had spoken ill of him as wavering and feminine suddenly and easily changed into devotees once they attended the new teacher's classes. Tsuji's English pronunciation was completely different from that of the old principal, who had been instructing them until then. When the young Tsuji read from the very same English textbook, he conveyed to them for the first time exotic and musical sounds. He wrote on the blackboard some of Poe's poetry which was not in their book and had them copy it. Noe and her fifth-year classmates, in ecstasy over "Annabel Lee" and "The Raven," learned the poems by heart.
At first Tsuji was surprised that the Noe he saw from his position as teacher was so poor in English. He expected she would be quite capable in all subjects since she had read the congratulatory address as the student-body representative, but her command of English was below the class average. Noe, small in stature, sat in the front row near the teacher's platform, and observing him as if her jet-black pupils were