Copyright 2011 by Geoffrey Ivar
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cover art by Natalie Parisi
“The Hole” first appeared in New Young Writers, September, 1938
“The Man Who Held His Breath” first appeared in Detective Stories, July, 1931
“Solitude” first appeared in Free-form Writing, December, 1932
“Moths” first appeared in the Osaka Daily News, October 25th, 1923
“The Soldier Who Vanished Into Thin Air” first appeared in The New Collection of True Ghost Stories, 1938
“The Secret of the Fish” first appeared in The Complete Collection of Japanese Ghost Stories, 1934
“Abandoned Money” first appeared in The Literary Front, January, 1927
“Traveling Alone” first appeared in Soul Poems, September, 1934
“Mother” first appeared in the Warera Monthly Literary Review, November, 1931
“Rebellion” first appeared in Japan Proletarian Collection #23: The Third Collection of Female Writers, November, 1987.
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
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Special thanks to Aozora Bunko.
About the Authors:
Ikujirou Ran
(1913 – 1944)
Ikujirou Ran was born in Tokyo. He studied electrical science and graduated from Tokyo Technical College. Influenced by his mother’s interest in science fiction, he published various stories in science fiction magazines while still a student. He debuted publicly in 1931 when his story, “The Man Who Held His Breath,” was published in a compilation of short stories. He died in an airplane crash in 1944.
Kotarou Tanaka
(1880 – 1941)
Kotarou Tanaka was born in the southern prefecture of Kouchi to a pair of shipwrights. He studied literature and spent his early career as a substitute teacher and journalist. He later moved to Tokyo, where he joined the writing community and continued to practice with his contemporaries.
He is most known for his biographies, travelogues, romances, and stories of the supernatural.
He returned to his birthplace in 1939 and died of illness shortly thereafter, not far from the home of his youth.
Toriko Wakasugi
(1892 – 1937)
Toriko Wakasugi was born to her father and his illegitimate mistress in Tokyo in 1892. When she was one year old, she was taken to Ibaraki prefecture and adopted by a geisha house. She began her literary studies early, and became a reporter for the Chuou Newspaper by age 16.
In the mid-1920s Wakasugi’s publications began to take on a more confrontational tone, and she produced many works in support of the Japanese communist movement and working women.
She was detained in 1933 for violating the Peace Preservation Act, and died of illness in 1937 at the age of 45.
Tsuseko Yada
(1907 – 1944)
Tsuseko Yada was born in Akita, Japan. She began her career as a modern writer, but then shifted her style towards more classical, fine literature. She was a famous writer in her time — known for being an accomplished storyteller as well as an exceptional beauty.
About the Translator:
Geoffrey Ivar
Geoffrey Ivar studied Japanese and English Literature at the University of Virginia. He moved to Japan on the JET Programme to teach English, improve his Japanese, and gain a greater appreciation for Japanese literature. Although he has returned to live in America, he still travels frequently between Japan and the U.S.
A Collection of Japanese Short Stories:
Volume I
Ikujirou Ran
The Hole
The Man Who Held His Breath
Solitude
Kotarou Tanaka
Moths
The Soldier Who Vanished Into Thin Air
The Secret of the Fish
Toriko Wakatsugi
Abandoned Money
Traveling Alone
Mother
Tsuseko Yada
Rebellion
The Hole
A depressing, seemingly never-ending rain falls from the gray sky like rice – it was that kind of scenery I gazed at during every dawn of the rainy season. I had just started my guard shift by seeing off the first train of the morning with a tired gaze. Sighing, I sluggishly made my way back to the guard post along with my superior, Yoshimura. It was just then that the rainy season’s Eastern sky started to lighten, as if white pigment was dissolving in diluted ink, and for a long time I could not help but stare at the moisture that the sky had left on the inside of the guardroom’s glass door. The wall phone called out ring, ring, ring, snapping me back to reality. Yoshimura, who was next to the phone, picked it up.
“Hm? What? A junk, eh? Hmm, where? Yes… understood. We’re going,” he said, then hung up the receiver with a clank.
“Hey, they said there’s been a junk. The guard said he just found the body. Seems like he was done in by the last train of the day yesterday,” he said with a rotten face. This word, this junk, this was how we in the railroad business referred to those who were killed by being run over. I had just graduated from school last year, immediately took, and blessedly passed, the railroad company exam. In the end, I was hired rather quickly and started working in the fall. And now, with the advent of the rainy season, only half a year had passed since I started. Nevertheless, there had already been about three or four junks on my section of track. The worst was definitely when I saw a young girl get hit – at that moment, it felt as though my motivation to do my job plunged to my feet. It was a terribly vivid sight. The train ran her over at the neck and right between her thighs and her buttocks. All that connected her legs to her thighs was a thin strip of skin. I could not stop seeing images of it dangling there meaninglessly, and images of her trying to keep down the hem of her kimono right until the awful moment it happened. The images were especially bad when I would be at my guard shift alone. For two or three days afterwards I could not eat and it felt as if there was a stinging pain at the base of my tongue. The pain was so bad that I could do nothing but spit constantly.
–On another occasion–although I only heard about it secondhand–there was a junk of an eighteen or nineteen year old girl. For the autopsy they had to collect the scattered pieces of her body, but she lost her right hand in the accident. No matter how much or how long my colleagues searched the area, the hand was nowhere to be found. Various possibilities were investigated, such as looking for a stray dog that could have run off with the hand, but nothing turned up. Too late, the train involved in the accident was thoroughly looked at and it wasn’t until my colleagues rotated the train’s wheels that they found it. Her hand, which seemed oddly more like a glove, was found grasping one of the train’s wheels tightly.
–Truly, it sounded like a terrifying sight. The Chief Inspector first thought that it was a work glove that someone had left there. When they tried to remove it, the joints completely disconnected from the rest of the hand. What hung out from the blood covered stump was a pure white tendon of about two or three inches in length. As for why the hand ended where it did, they suggested that she, in a panic and in excruciating pain from the impact, probably thought it best to grasp tightly to the train’s wheels. The hand was eventually removed, carefully, finger by finger. The Inspectors treated the hand with the utmost reverence. All in all, a terrifying story.
Excuse the substantial digression. So, after hearing about the junk at dawn, myself, Yoshimura, and three other night workers drove to the scene of the accident. The train involved was one on the Chuo line that had left Higashinakano station bound for Tachigawa–which, I might add, was a fairly rare direct route. The train had just turned the corner after Tachigawa station and was continuing on to Hino City, so the accident happened right in between Tachigawa station and Hino City. Oh, I forgot to add this, but I was working at the guard station at Tachigawa that day. I mentioned we had gone to the scene of the accident by car, correct? Well, at times I thought the speeds we were travelling at made the car seem more like a train and accordingly, we had to hold on for our lives. With the lack of sleep and the light rain coming down, a certain melancholy also thoroughly enveloped us. Then, one of the workers spoke up as if he suddenly remembered something,
“Hey, around this time last year, didn’t Kura’s wife also...”
And then another said,
“That’s right, just a little past here. That was horrific too.”
The worker said in acknowledgement. This Kura that they referred to was a veteran worker, a muscular giant of a man with the absurd strength to easily carry two bags of cement in his arms. In terms of physical power, none of his coworkers could compare. Furthermore, he was a terrible drunk, and whenever he drank his wife never allowed him to return straight home afterwards. His wife always resented his ways and his strain on the family’s money. In the end, perhaps also spurred on by the fact that she had recently contracted tuberculosis, she committed suicide by jumping onto the tracks. All this happened before my time, but I had heard the story in full from the other workers. Oh, sorry, I digressed again. Anyway, the car was moving along. Then, the dense forest surrounding the track ended suddenly, and all that remained was the gleaming track that continued on in the direction of the Tama River. Due to the fact that the forest ended abruptly and the car was now exposed to the elements on all sides, I felt like I was being assailed by the cold. Then, the worker who spoke up before said,
“Wait, no way. Hey, today is the seventeenth, right? That’s the same day that Kura’s wife got junked…”
No one said anything in response. Yoshimura whispered to me,
“They say that it happened right around here.”
Just when he had finished murmuring that to me, the car slowed down and then stopped altogether. I reflexively looked out a couple of paces in front of us and saw the body of a man in a darkish kimono at the side of the road. He must have rolled out after the impact. Not saying a word, we all filed out of the car to view the body. From the precision of the cuts on the neck and thighs, he must have been sleeping on the tracks.
“Geez, there’s no head—” said one of the workers, bending at the waist to examine the body.
“Oh, there it is over there.”
I looked out and saw it, the head. It seemed more like an ornament propped up on the gravel of the road,
“Bleh,” said a worker as he went to pick up the head, but then suddenly,
“Gah!” he exclaimed as he ran back, arms flailing, to where we were waiting.
“It’s… it’s… Kura.….”
His hand shook terribly as he pointed back to the head.
“What? Kura?”
Exchanging glances, everyone felt the same chill of the rain on their necks. What made it worse was that we had just talked about Kura. Even the faces of the brawny workers quickly turned white. After a little while passed and we finally gathered enough resolve to collect the head, we confirmed with our own eyes that it was Kura. Moreover, he seemed to be pained by more than the pain of being junked. His face seemed more like a mask, with the sheer terror of seeing something horrible etched into it. Just seeing that face would be enough to send shivers down your spine. Just seeing it made me sick. About forty inches away from the head was what seemed to be a Japanese rat snake that was run over and ripped to shreds. Startled, I felt all the blood drain from my head. Yoshimura and the others must have noticed it right away as they seemed to be averting their gaze from it on purpose. One of the workers opened his mouth and from his dry lips blurted out,
“M- Mrs. Kura, don’t curse us.”
I exchanged looks with the other workers with a heavy and exhausted sigh. Each one of them had a face as white as paper and as pale as Kura’s freshly severed head.
We finally got a chance to catch our breath when we returned to the guard station. We also heard the accounts of the driver of yesterday’s last train, and the driver of this morning’s first train. From their recollections, it would seem the corpse was there by the time this morning’s driver was on his route. That was the only reasonable explanation as the train was pulled off the track for a few hours before the body was found. The conductor also attested to this fact.
Even so, the driver of yesterday’s last train swore up and down that the junk wasn’t there during his run. First, since the scene of the accident was right where the forest cut out and one side became an open field, if there was a man on the road, the driver should have certainly seen him. Moreover, the night conductor pointed out that they would have felt the shock of hitting such a burly man. However, he did admit that from the window of the last section of the train, in the bit of light that leaked out from the carriage, he saw the figures of people outside. What’s more, those figures were walking around. On the right side of the track was the figure of a man wearing a darkish kimono, and on the left side was the thin figure of a woman. The conductor said that the sight surprised him, and he thought about going to check it out, but he didn’t have a headlight. Then, as he considered what to do the carriage light went out.
Hearing this, the color drained from the lips of all those who had seen the remnants of the rat snake. Why would Kura, who really had no reason to kill himself, wander out to that section of the track in the middle of the night while off-duty? How could he be junked at a section of track with perfect visibility? And lastly, why would that rat snake slither out from the middle of the fields to lie on the rails only to be run over? What were the odds that this would happen today, just as I learned of Kura’s wife’s sad life and death? Could it have been the regret over his wife’s death that led Kura to take his life on the same day and in the same place his wife took hers? And, what possessed the rat snake to join him in a double suicide? Thinking about all of that along with the conductor’s story of the figures in the dark was too much. The vivid image of Kura’s blood drenched eyeball stuck in horrific gaze also weighed heavily on me. My skin broke out in goose bumps as I shivered under my damp shirt.
We held a wake later on that night. As Kura had no other relatives in the area, we coworkers held one for him. The wake was as mysterious as his death. The religious custom of the area is to bury a body with its relatives, so we asked a gravedigger to dig a plot near the body of Kura’s wife. But, even though it had only been about a year since her death, and no matter how deep he dug, the gravedigger could not locate her coffin. He eventually reached the spot where Kura’s wife’s body should have been laid to rest, but she was not there. All that there was in the dirt was a small, hollow cavity. From where her body should have been up to the surface was nothing but a large, freshly dug hole. In the end, all we could do was stand petrified and speechless while the rain drizzled.
The Man Who Held His Breath
Although every man has his own peculiar habits, Mizushima’s habit was particularly eccentric. You may not believe what I’m telling you, but his habit was to hold his breath.
When I first heard about it from a friend, I thought he was joking and I didn’t believe it. The friend explained it one day when I went to visit his house, and I remember laughing while listening to him. However, his eyes were deadly serious. I thought that holding one’s breath as a habit was a bit odd, so I asked my friend why someone would do such a thing. My friend would say no more; he just stood there shaking his head.
Even though my friend would say no more, I had to know. My curiosity had been piqued by such an oddity and I decided to learn everything possible about this habit. I eventually caught up with Mizushima, and he explained it all while laughing as much as I had when I first heard.
“People always ask me about this, but they always start laughing like idiots when I try to explain it to them so I don’t really like to talk about it. Rather than talk about it, how about I show you? I don’t think the first twenty or thirty seconds will be anything special, but by the end, the pulsation of the veins at my temples will reverberate all the way to the center of my head. And when my lungs completely empty, my heart will race with nervous excitement. Finally, just when it becomes intolerable, I will take a deep breath and it will feel like all the grime in my lungs has been expelled completely; and my heart, whose suffering I had ignored, will feel like it has been born again with a new rhythm.
I love that feeling of excitement in my chest, almost to the point of tears. The sound I make when I take my long-awaited deep breath is the sound of a joyous heart. There’s nothing better than savoring that ecstasy.”
That is what Mizushima said. I listened to that strange description and wondered if I could take it seriously. I would have to test him to make sure. He looked at me and then started talking again.
“But, lately I’ve been worried about something. It’s like someone addicted to drugs… Ah, actually, let me not use that example. Let’s say it’s like someone who starts smoking or drinking; I think my habit is a lot like that. You start doing it, and before you know it, it brings about feelings of pure ecstasy. And with these habits, you have to take more and more every time to be satisfied. It’s been like that for me. At first, after the first forty-five seconds to a minute, my entire body would tingle with an indescribable pleasantness, even though I was in utter agony. Then it took five minutes, then ten minutes, and now, I’m fine without breathing for more than fifteen minutes and never the tiniest bit worried. For this spectacular ecstasy, my life seems like the appropriate chip to gamble. I’m sure that female shell divers have to suffer similar pain in their training. I’ve heard that they have to endure being submerged in water for extended periods. I used to wonder why women would engage in such terrible work, but now I think it’s because the deep breath they take as they finish a dive holds such allure.
Mizushima was smiling broadly at me.
I still just could not believe it. Honestly, holding your breath to experience ecstasy! It sounded like an absurd lie to me, but for some reason I felt that it could be true. But really, he said he would be fine after holding his breath for more than fifteen minutes…
Seeing my expression of disbelief, Mizushima said, as if speaking to a child,
“So you think I’m lying, eh? Well, just about everyone thinks that at first. How about if we test whether it’s true or not then?”
I tried, politely, not to seem over-eager, but Mizushima persisted.
“Well, check the clock,” Mizushima said.
And like that, he grabbed a chair and took a seat.
With him being so nonchalant about it, I felt my curiosity start to take hold of me again.
“One second. Ok, it’s 3:38 right now, so let’s start when it hits forty past.”
And, as per usual, Mizushima answered casually with a “Yeah,” and lightly closed his eyes. My curiosity had risen to its maximum at this point.
“Alright, it’s forty past.”
I said as my heart leapt with excitement. At the same time, Mizushima took a large gasp of air and furiously blinked his eyes like a mischievous child.
I started to feel uneasy around the fifteen minute mark. An unbearable silence and an oppressive atmosphere filled the room. The color of Mizushima’s face closely resembled that of a tombstone then, there were bluish black tapeworm-like veins on his forehead, and death’s shadow seemed to be hovering about the bluish-white cavity underneath his protruding cheekbones.
I could not stand the cave-like hollowness that had developed, and I stood up from my chair and moved closer to Mizushima as if to drive that hollowness away. I took out a mirror that I had taken from a container of Jintian lozenges, and held it close to his mouth much like a pathologist would. The mirror did not cloud, meaning that he had completely stopped breathing. I withdrew to my chair and sat down.
Four o’clock. Already twenty minutes had passed. At that moment, an ominous thought passed through the back of mind and left intense distress in its wake. I wondered if he had committed suicide. He was a fairly eccentric person, so could it be the case that he had planned to commit suicide in the presence of a companion, namely me, as his last great performance? The terrible thought that I was actually staring at the stages of death made me lightheaded.
His face had warped into something unnatural, and that awful, warped face began to convulse. Using the utmost of my strength and energy, I tried to calm myself down. In the end however, the oppressive atmosphere became too much for me to bear. The convulsions of death and the anguish of passing is what I witnessed. I could take no more, I threw my chair aside and held Mizushima in my arms. I shook him with all my might and yelled his name as if to wake him from sleep, and then…
Did my actions reach through to this madman? Did they have an effect? Gradually, blood made its way back into his bluish-white face. A short time after, when he could talk again, he spoke with a dry and gravelly voice and scolded me,
“Goddammit, you bastard. Just when I had entered the final ecstasy too…” He glared at me with blank eyes. It didn’t matter what he said, though; his words were fleeting. All I cared about was that he was alive, and a wave of relief began washing over me.
After that absurd test concluded, my interest in Mizushima’s habit returned quickly. Whenever I had free time, I would find myself over at Mizushima’s place. God only knows how long I would spend over there, but it didn’t matter.
Then there was this one day. I visited Mizushima, like always, and came by just when he was entering his mysterious “sleep.” The expression I saw that day certainly seemed like one of sheer happiness. Seeing his peaceful, sleeping face, I wondered if this was the same face of death that had worried me so deeply last time.
Much like last time however, I felt panic starting to rise and worry setting in as he went on, but I stayed absolutely quiet and observed him at length. After a while he opened his eyes.
He had held his breath for around twenty minutes, and spoke of the marvelous visions he had seen. It was quite the story.
“You may think I’m lying, but just hear me out. When I hold my breath, I travel through many wondrous worlds. For example, when I hold my breath and enter ‘sleep’ I enter a state where I cut off all stimuli from the physical world. Actually, each and every person has a lot of experience with this odd state while they ‘sleep’; however, people, the good little soldiers they are, never think too deeply about it. Do you even know how many worlds are just wriggling around in this ‘sleep’? And also, how many times have you solved unsolvable problems when you’ve been asleep? Or, how many splendid novel plots have popped into your mind? Or, how many times have you felt this thing people call ‘inspiration’? I believe you’ve experienced it. However, even though you and many others feel it, no one breaks past this second level. There is something that connects this ‘sleep’ to the real world. That connection is breath. People cannot spend time in the other world because they breathe. But I, I can cut that one and only connection.
Everyone certainly spends time in the other world inside the womb. Then, during their time in the other world, they receive life and come to this world to become scholars, artists, or criminals.
There is not just one other world. For example, there is a world of pure serenity, and also a world of unspeakable pain. A long time ago, Buddha taught that both paradise and hell exist in the next world. With all that I have seen, I cannot help but wonder if Buddha was like me, and also spent his days wandering the various worlds…”
Solitude
Youjirou had taken a liking to a small café, named “Gondola,” that he had found on a small street in Ginza. It is tough to say when exactly it happened, but he quickly became one of Gondola’s regular customers. It was not as if he expressly left his house to get to the café, but he did find reasons to go to Ginza just about every day, and when he went to Ginza, he definitely had to stop at Gondola.
Gondola was in a small building and inside was nothing but booths and tables. Each table was sturdy, jet black, and massive. Perhaps it was because there were only a few customers at any given time, but Youjirou really fell in love with the fact that no matter how long he was there, he would never spot a disagreeable face.
Youjirou couldn’t help himself. He couldn’t help but love the feeling of holing up in a nook of the café, sipping coffee and indulging in various fanciful daydreams.
When dusk approached he would make his way into the busy streets and into a sea of neon lights. In that sea, he always noticed a tiny, floating, faintly lit neon sign that said “Gondola.” He found the sign pitiful and endearing.
Today, however, something unexpected happened. Something that had never happened in the time that Youjirou had been going to Gondola. Today, a man he did not know had talked to him. The man seemed to be a regular at Gondola, or at least someone who had been going to Gondola well before Youjirou. And when he thought about all the time he had spent there, Youjirou remembered that the first time he came to Gondola to be alone in deep contemplation, he hazily saw the figure of this man floating somewhere off in his periphery.
This man—he called himself Gen—was extremely eloquent, much more so than the tight-lipped Youjirou. Gen went on about many things. To a casual onlooker, Youjirou must have seemed a little uncomfortable in this situation.
But, for reasons unknown, Youjirou gradually became more comfortable as he continued listening
“Wow, this guy’s a bit out there,” thought Youjirou. The man’s conversation was indeed odd. Even so, Youjirou never laughed, and took a good deal of it seriously.
“You seem to come here quite a bit. Do you always meet the same people on the way?”
This was the way the man called Gen talked.
“Well, now that you mention it, I don’t think I do.”
“It seems pretty strange to me when I think about it. Day in and day out, on trains, on buses, and traversing the city, you see thousands upon thousands of people, but you only see each of those people for but a fleeting moment. However, before you know it, the moment passes, and everyone disappears and returns to a place where you can no longer see them.
“But, over a span of ten or twenty years, you’d surely run into some of the same people more than once, right?”
“That is a possibility, but I wonder if you would be able to remember when and where you last saw those people. If you were in the countryside, where there are not that many people, and you were only there for a week, you could certainly see many of the same people over and over. Anonymity is a city’s curse.”
“Then, there must be some special meaning to the fact that we can see each other here all the time. Just like me, you seem to be here every day.”
“Yes, that must be right. I am indebted to you. In a sea of unrecognizable faces, it is extremely reassuring to know that I will be able to see you every day,” Gen said, offering a cigarette. He recommended the brand highly, perhaps overdoing it a bit.