I Am A Cat. Natsume Soseki
be too busy to call for some long time, dropped in.
“Are you composing a new-style poem or something? Show it to me if it’s interesting.”
“I considered it rather impressive prose, so I thought I’d translate it,” answers my master somewhat reluctantly.
“Prose? Whose prose?”
“Don’t know whose.”
“I see, an anonymous author. Among anonymous works, there are indeed some extremely good ones. They are not to be slighted. Where did you find it?”
“The Second Reader, ” answers my master with imperturbable calmness.
“The Second Reader? What’s this got to do with the Second Reader?”
“The connection is that the beautifully written article which I’m now translating appears in the Second Reader.”
“Stop talking rubbish. I suppose this is your idea of a last minute squaring of accounts for the peacocks’ tongues?”
“I’m not a braggart like you,” says my master and twists his mustache. He is perfectly composed.
“Once when someone asked Sanyo whether he’d lately seen any fine pieces of prose, that celebrated scholar of the Chinese classics produced a dunning letter from a packhorse man and said,‘This is easily the finest piece of prose that has recently come to my attention.’ Which implies that your eye for the beautiful might, contrary to one’s expectations, actually be accurate. Read your piece aloud. I’ll review it for you,” says Waverhouse as if he were the originator of all aesthetic theories and practice. My master starts to read in the voice of a Zen priest, reading that injunction left by the Most Reverend Priest Daitō. “‘Giant Gravitation,’” he intoned.
“What on earth is giant gravitation?”
“‘Giant Gravitation’ is the title.”
“An odd title. I don’t quite understand.”
“The idea is that there’s a giant whose name is Gravitation.”
“A somewhat unreasonable idea but, since it’s a title, I’ll let that pass.
All right, carry on with the text. You have a good voice. Which makes it rather interesting.”
“Right, but no more interruptions.” My master, having laid down his prior conditions, begins to read again.
Kate looks out of the window. Children are playing ball. They throw the ball high up in the sky. The ball rises up and up. After a while the ball comes down. They throw it high again: twice, three times. Every time they throw it up, the ball comes down. Kate asks why it comes down instead of rising up and up. “It is because a giant lives in the earth,” replies her mother. “He is the Giant Gravitation. He is strong. He pulls everything toward him. He pulls the houses to the earth. If he didn’t they would fly away. Children, too, would fly away. You’ve seen the leaves fall, haven’t you? That’s because the Giant called them. Sometimes you drop a book. It’s because the Giant Gravitation asks for it. A ball goes up in the sky. The giant calls for it. Down it falls.
“Is that all?”
“Yes, isn’t it good?”
“All right, you win. I wasn’t expecting such a present in return for the moat-bells.”
“It wasn’t meant as a return present, or anything like that. I translated it because I thought it was good. Don’t you think it’s good?” My master stares deep into the gold-rimmed spectacles.
“What a surprise! To think that you of all people had this talent. . .
Well, well! I’ve certainly been taken in right and proper this time. I take my hat off to you.” He is alone in his understanding. He’s talking to himself. The situation is quite beyond my master’s grasp.
“I’ve no intention of making you doff your cap. I translated this text simply because I thought it was an interesting piece of writing.”
“Indeed, yes! Most interesting! Quite as it should be! Smashing! I feel small.”
“You don’t have to feel small. Since I recently gave up painting in watercolors, I’ve been thinking of trying my hand at writing.”
“And compared with your watercolors, which showed no sense of perspective, no appreciation of differences in tone, your writings are superb. I am lost in admiration.”
“Such encouraging words from you are making me positively enthusiastic about it,” says my master, speaking from under his continuing mis-apprehension.
Just then Mr. Coldmoon enters with the usual greeting.
“Why, hello,” responds Waverhouse, “I’ve just been listening to a terrifically fine article and the curtain has been rung down upon my moat-bells.” He speaks obliquely about something incomprehensible.
“Have you really?” The reply is equally incomprehensible. It is only my master who seems not to be in any particularly light humor.
“The other day,” he remarked, “a man called Beauchamp Blowlamp came to see me with an introduction from you.”
“Ah, did he? Beauchamp’s an uncommonly honest person, but, as he is also somewhat odd, I was afraid that he might make himself a nuisance to you. However, since he had pressed me so hard to be introduced to you. . .”
“Not especially a nuisance. . .”
“Didn’t he, during his visit, go on at length about his name?”
“No, I don’t recall him doing so.”
“No? He’s got a habit at first meeting of expatiating upon the singularity of his name.”
“What is the nature of that singularity?” butts in Waverhouse, who has been waiting for something to happen.
“He gets terribly upset if someone pronounces Beauchamp as Beecham.”
“Odd!” said Waverhouse, taking a pinch of tobacco from his gold-painted, leather tobacco pouch.
“Invariably he makes the immediate point that his name is not Beecham Blowlamp but Bo-champ Blowlamp.”
“That’s strange,” and Waverhouse inhales pricey tobacco-smoke deep into his stomach.
“It comes entirely from his craze for literature. He likes the effect and is inexplicably proud of the fact that his personal name and his family name can be made to rhyme with each other. That’s why when one pronounces Beauchamp incorrectly, he grumbles that one does not appreciate what he is trying to get across.”
“He certainly is extraordinary.” Getting more and more interested, Waverhouse hauls back the pipe smoke from the bottom of his stomach to let it loose at his nostrils. The smoke gets lost en route and seems to be snagged in his gullet. Transferring the pipe to his hand, he coughs chokingly.
“When he was here the other day, he said he’d taken the part of a boatman at a meeting of his Reading Society, and that he’d gotten himself laughed at by a gaggle of schoolgirls,” says my master with a laugh.
“Ah, that’s it, I remember.” Waverhouse taps his pipe upon his knees. This strikes me as likely to prove dangerous, so I move a little way farther off. “That Reading Society, now. The other day when I treated him to moat-bells, he mentioned it. He said they were going to make their second meeting a grand affair by inviting well-known literary men, and he cordially invited me to attend. When I asked him if they would again try another of Chikamatsu’s dramas of popular life, he said no and that they’d decided on a fairly modern play, The Golden Demon. I asked him what role he would take and he said, ‘I’m going to play O-miya.’ Beauchamp as O-miya would certainly be worth seeing. I’m determined to attend the meeting in his support.”
“It’s going to be interesting, I think,”