away from her. At the same time, however, Noe's misfortune and anguish in being sacrificed to a kind of marriage of convenience and her inability to study freely as she wished due to her family's poverty, which was like his own, aroused in Tsuji a sympathy and compassion he would not have felt about another person's affair.
Noe became so emotionally stirred by the mere fact of Tsuji's mother serving her tea and cake that she began shedding even larger tears.
Inside this house with rooms of only six, four-and-a-half, and three mats, Noe's words, which continued their emotional complaint, could be heard perfectly by Tsuji's mother and sister. After Tsuji had seen Noe off and come back, he found his mother Mitsu sitting on the very cushion Noe had used only a moment ago in his three-mat study.
"Poor thing, isn't she? And still a child."
"Yes, but it can't be helped."
"That child, she likes you, doesn't she?"
"Well, I don't know."
"She's quite unsophisticated, but she's a little charmer."
"You think so? She has the blood of the old Kumaso clan in her. If you touch her carelessly, you may get burned."
"You ought to be settling down."
No longer willing to pursue the subject, Tsuji reached over for his favorite bamboo flute and turned his back to his mother. Before he put his lips to the mouth of the instrument, he waited impatiently while she cleared away the tea things and went out of the room. The piece he played was the famous "Bell of Emptiness," one of the three great traditional melodies for the shakuhachi.
His fascination with the sound of the flute had started from his seventh or eighth year. Next door to their house, which belonged to the Mie prefectural government his father was working for, there lived at that time a junior official who was quite good on the shakuhachi. His Kyoto wife could play ballads on the samisen, and Tsuji's mother Mitsu, who had rigorously acquired during her childhood the knack of playing nagauta, the long epic songs, frequently visited her neighbor to perform together. On those occasions Tsuji went with her and listened in rapt attention to the neighbor's flute. During Tsuji's middle school days when he was back in Tokyo, he found a cheap shakuhachi at a secondhand shop in Shitaya, and by following the neighbor's example he somehow came to be able to produce a few notes. It took him a month to make some flutelike sounds and about half a year to accomplish something like the passage of a song the way he thought it ought to go. Neglecting his studies, he lost himself in playing the flute from morning till night. His mother, who from the first loved songs accompanied by the samisen, suggested, "If you like the bamboo flute so much, why not take lessons regularly from a teacher?" The person Mitsu chose for her son was Chikuo Araki, the famous shakuhachi master of the Kinko School. In a tight-sleeved kimono patterned in white and blue splashes, Tsuji called on him one day to boldly ask for permission. Chikuo, who was already past seventy, allowed this unusual boy to become his disciple.
All of Chikuo's students ranked above the middle class, some of them even belonging to the peerage. In no time at all Chikuo clearly perceived that this poverty-stricken newcomer, his youngest disciple, whom he had allowed on a whim to enter his school, had unexpected genius. Immediately Tsuji became the disciple Chikuo loved beyond all others. But when this young prodigy expressed the desire to establish himself as a shakuhachi performer, the master flatly opposed him. "After all, shakuhachi is a dying art. Someone as young as you are shouldn't spend his entire life on that kind of thing. Do it as a hobby."
Tsuji eagerly went to Chikuo's home for his lessons on each day of the month with a three or an eight in it. Those lessons continued without interruption until Chikuo moved to Imado and it became too difficult for Tsuji to make the trip.
With his father's death it was impossible to play the shakuhachi at leisure, as Tsuji was continually driven to earn a living, but he again went back to the flute when he was twenty-one. At that time he was so highly praised as a performer that he was invited to give concerts at various places far and near.
His favorite instrument for the present was one made by Chikuo's most distinguished disciple, Kado, Tsuji's second master.
While Tsuji listened to the tones he produced on the shakuhachi, the agitation from Noe's visit that had so disturbed his peace of mind gradually subsided.
The night wind passing over the wooded area and meadow sparsely dotted with human habitations swept into this quiet home on a hill at Somei. The heat of the afternoon was at last gone, and before Tsuji realized it, the cries of insects were coiled round the sounds of his flute.
Tsuji had set himself free on the wind of night, his mind lucid as water. The serenity of tranquillity—which could not be violated by anyone at this very moment—was a handful of happiness, which he had at last acquired at twenty-eight years of age. Though this was a rented house with only three rooms in which three persons lived, his mother and her children, Tsuji was satisfied with it. Probably because the owner was a gardener, he had been careful, even though the house was small, to select timber of the finest quality when he built it, Tsuji's three-mat study at the back of the house having been made into a detached room in tea-ceremony style surrounded on all sides by a veranda.
Hanging in the alcove was an India ink drawing of the Goddess of Mercy Kannon by Chikuden, and adorning the opposite wall a portrait of Spinoza framed in lignitic Japanese cedar, and below the picture a desk. On it were only a few books, some European works, and some Japanese and Chinese classics. Tsuji's personal needs and meals were sufficiently looked after by his mother and sister. Though his remuneration from the high school was by no means large, his income was the highest in his life until then and the most reliable. If he desired a woman, he could easily buy an ignorant yet gentle prostitute with the money from his side jobs.
He had long lost any interest in making his life successful. Nor was he concerned any more about social reform. A mere glance at the ominous silence and icy indifference of the social reformers since the trials for high treason had made it quite evident 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
