Beauty in Disarray. Harumi Setouchi
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to him that the realization of their ideals was even more remote. His three-mat study and bamboo shakuhachi which would not inconvenience anyone were satisfying enough, a handful of happiness for the young nihilist. He had been blessed. To become entangled in the destiny of a girl from the country whose soiled neckband smelled would have been unbearable. He was by nature, he thought, a wanton, like water. Water conforms to the shape of its container and without a moment's delay swerves into the slightest opening. Was not the strategy of water that of escape? To escape made one the victor.
While playing with perfect clarity a classical melody, Jun Tsuji found sufficient justification in his heart to leave Noe to her unhappy fate.
That summer day in 1911 in which Noe for the first time in her life was immensely troubled as she stood at a crucial turning point in her destiny was a memorable day worthy of special mention in the history of women in Japan. While Noe was suffering from the oppression of her family and their lack of understanding, some people in an obscure corner of Tokyo were steadily beginning preparations by which they would ignite the signal fires for the liberation of women, allowing them to extricate themselves from long-established customs and live freely as human beings. With Raicho Hiratsuka as chief editor several young women were bustling about in a terrible sweat under a scorching August sun for the publication of the women's literary magazine Seito.
It was several days after Noe had visited Jun Tsuji, the third day of the new month of September. Having spread out the morning papers on his bed as usual, Jun Tsuji raised his head with a cry. In the advertisement section on the front page of the Asahi, his eyes had come across a notice for a strange magazine jammed in between announcements of such famous journals as Chuokoron, Taiyo, and Nihon Oyobi Nihonjin.
Seito immediately reminded Tsuji of the word bluestocking, which had its origin in the salon of Lady Montagu in the fashionable world of eighteeth-century London. Someone had once translated the word bluestocking as aotabi, or Japanese-style blue stocking. The advertisement had declared it the only female literary magazine in Japan. Tsuji felt something fresh and intellectual in the spirit of the women editors who, anticipating the sneers and taunts of the world, had called themselves "bluestockings."
Tsuji promptly purchased a copy of Seito, which appeared in the bookstores several days later. It was unmistakably a magazine for women's liberation though literature so fresh and bold it was much more than he had anticipated or hoped for. He immediately surmised that its editor Raicho Hiratsuka was Haruko Hiratsuka, who three years earlier in a suicide attempt with Shohei Morita had created quite a stir in the incident labeled "Wandering in the Snow at Shiobara." Tsuji, who was by nature a feminist, believed himself interested in and warmly sympathetic to Haruko Hiratsuka's speech and behavior since that incident three years ago. He also remembered the moment on the last day of August three years ago when he had opened his Asahi and had read on the society page an article under a large headline extending over several columns:
CULMINATION OF NATURALISM
GENTLEMAN AND LADY
SUICIDE ATTEMPT
LOVER A BACHELOR OF ARTS
AND NOVELIST
MISTRESS A GRADUATE OF A
WOMEN'S COLLEGE
[omission]
CAUSE OF THEIR DARING ATTEMPT
Bachelor of Arts Morita had graduated two years earlier, gained distinction as a talented student, and become well known after publishing a few novels. Though he had a young wife and child at home, he happened to be a colleague of Haruko (written with a different Chinese character) at a certain high school for girls, and so they had become ill-fated lovers, and due to their having the same literary tastes, they had reached a point of inseparable intimacy with one another. On the other hand, it was impossible to live together openly since he had a wife and child, and with real bitterness against their ties in this floating world, they resolved to commit their double suicide. First, Bachelor of Arts Morita, after eliminating his major difficulty by leaving his wife and child in her hometown, departed from Tokyo with Haruko in search of a place where the two could die, but luckily or not, they were unable to find one and were finally apprehended by the police. Though there have been many love-suicides from ancient times, it is actually unprecedented for a man and woman who had received an education at the highest academic institutions to imitate the foolishness of common people. It must be said that it is a news event that represents the ultimate in naturalism and gratification of the passions. And yet was it not madness that when the two lovers were seized by the police at the summit of Obana Pass, the man declared, "My conduct demonstrates the sacredness of love. I have done nothing wrong in the sight of God and man."
Such was the tone of the article, all newspapers imitating it and violently censuring the "folly" of the two lovers. Yet the chance encounter of these two people was different from the newspaper's account, for they had become acquainted at the Women's Literary Circle sponsored by Choko Ikuta, with Sohei the lecturer and Haruko a member of the audience. Though a talented student of Soseki, Sohei Morita was almost consigned to social oblivion because of this affair, yet it was due to Soseki's kindness that from January the following year Smoke, a confessional I-novel dealing with this event, was published serially in the Asahi. In Sohei's novel, in which he tried to show the truth of the affair so erroneously conveyed by this article and others, the relationship of the two persons remained to the very last platonic. As heroine, Haruko is portrayed as a completely different type from women seen up to that time, a woman aroused by the demands of a modern ego, her excessive self-consciousness of speech and behavior often strange, eccentric. Her abrupt and unexpected conduct in everything took on a fresh charm and made the hero look upon Haruko as an enigmatic, sphinxlike woman.
In the novel the hero finds himself dragged along by a woman who will never say she loves him, and finally, even while realizing the woman will never love him, he attempts a double suicide with her on a snow-filled mountain. The woman is so overly self-conscious that even before this confrontation with death, she writes a suicide note: "I have carried out the plan of my life. I perish through my own will. No one can interfere with me."
Smoke resurrected Sohei as a literary figure, but readers found the affair even more incomprehensible, and Soseki himself, all things considered, treated it contemptuously as no more than an idle love story. Haruko Hiratsuka wrote a severe rebuttal of Smoke, but it was almost totally ignored.
It was through this event that Jun Tsuji recognized in the unknown Haruko Hiratsuka the possibility of a new woman awakened to an ego that had not been seen in any of her sex up to that time, Tsuji cherishing his interest in and sympathy for Haruko, whom he had never met.
It required little intelligence to know that an unmarried woman so scandalously written up in the newspaper and so thoroughly struck down by the world was already no better than someone put to death by society. Now, however, three years later, that woman, the common butt of a public scandal, had proudly lifted her head to bring forth a splendid magazine. With the unexpected feeling of wanting to applaud her, Tsuji found himself turning over Seito's pages.
In the table of contents lined up with the name of the well-known writer Akiko Yosano were the names of Shige Mori, wife of Ogai, and Haruko Kunikida, wife of Doppo, and also cited was Toshiko Tamura, who had just made a brilliant debut in January that year by having her work named the best novel in a contest sponsored by the Osaka Mainichi newspaper. Also listed were such unknowns as Ikuko Araki and Kazue Mozume. From Tsuji's point of view all the compositions were immature, all in forms impossible to classify as literary. Nevertheless, he felt in them a tense and passionate sincerity that forcefully moved him:
Rambling Thoughts
The day has come when these mountains move.
Though I say so, no one believes me.
For only a short while have mountains been dozing.
In days of old
Mountains moved, burning in flame.
Still, this you need not believe.
All women who have been dozing are now awakened and moving.
I wish I might write solely in first person singular