A Little Literary Wandering in Kyoto

Near Kyoto University is a café called Shinshindō.

Inside, Tomihiko sits in a dim nook wiping his hands with a towel. Outside the large window, Imadegawa Street glitters under the blinding August sunshine. The author smokes a cigarette, the look on his face saying, I’m thinking deep thoughts. But he is so concerned with his facial expression that there is little room in his head for thoughts of anything else.

Tomihiko always dreamed of thinking deep thoughts in a café. As a penny-pinching student he had to settle for making coffee inside his 4½ tatami room, which explains why it always had a lingering scorched aroma. Delusions brew up as easily as coffee, but just as coffee brewed too long becomes acrid, so too can youthful years surrounded by delusions become bitter. Living in that 4½ tatami room was a fount of inspiration for Tomihiko, but it also limited his imagination to the space enclosed between those walls.

People often tell Tomihiko that his writing is old-fashioned; they say that he must be a voracious reader because of all the difficult kanji and antiquated turns of phrase he uses. They are all being hoodwinked: appearances can be deceiving. However, it is true that reading did help give rise to Tomihiko’s old-fashioned style.

As a student Tomihiko rarely had the money to buy brand new books, so he often visited used book stores instead. He has never been a devotee of used books: it is simply nice to be able to pick up a book for one or two hundred yen. When he first entered college, Tomihiko thought that any sort of proper learning had to begin with the classics, and so he bought dog-eared copies from the many used book stores surrounding campus. After six or seven years of living in Kyoto, reading used books and smelling the old paper, even someone who isn’t really a bookworm will acquire something of a bookworm’s aura. The rhythm of the sentences and the smell of the paper seep into your bones.

Tomihiko remembers picking up Kajii Motojirō’s Lemon from the hundred-yen cart in front of a bookstore. Lemon is about Kajii’s experiences at Third Higher School (now part of Kyoto University), and features many familiar locations around the city. During his time in Kyoto Kajii had a reputation as a troublemaker: jumping into canals, taking beer bottles to the head in fistfights, overturning food carts, and causing a ruckus at cafes across from the stairway to Yasaka Shrine. Quite an active life. If Tomihiko jumped into the canals he would probably be swept away; if he were hit by a beer bottle he’d probably die; and he wasn’t anywhere near strong enough to overturn a cart. If Kajii was a hurricane howling through the streets of Kyoto a hurricane, Lemon was the eye of the storm. It is a quiet book, yet there is a tautness in its pages, and the slightest disturbance might unleash the winds once more.

Kajii bought his exploding lemon at Yaō, a fruit store in Teramachi Nijō. Tomihiko must have ridden by it countless times on his bike, yet he doesn’t have the slightest recollection of it.

Unfortunately, the Maruzen bookstore in Kawaramachi has gone out of business, so one can no longer leave lemons on its bookshelves. Maruzen carried many copies of the author’s The Tatami Galaxy, so he was very sad when he heard that it was closing its doors.

“But when you think about it, lemons don’t explode,” Tomihiko muses.

Kajii Motojirō graduated from Third Higher School in 1924, while physicist Yukawa Hideki graduated in 1926. In his autobiography Yukawa states, “At the time, the Kyoto branch of Maruzen was still on Sanjō Avenue.” That must mean that Maruzen was on Sanjō Avenue when Kajii Motojirō lived in Kyoto, though Tomihiko can’t be entirely sure.

It was at the Maruzen on Sanjō Avenue that the young Yukawa bought his copy of Fritz Reiche’s The Quantum Theory. Tomohiko tried and failed to understand the Schrodinger equation, but he is familiar with the house in which Yukawa lived. From his fifth year in college on through his graduate school years, Tomihiko worked at a sushi delivery place. The owner of the shop once said to him, “This here is where Yukawa lived,” pointing out a large mansion on the delivery map marked with Yukawa’s name.

Near the former Yukawa residence lies the Tadasu Forest, where the horseback archery ceremony is held during the Aoi Festival. During Obon, that long riding ground plays host to the Evening Breeze Used Book Fair. Each time Tomihiko ventures there, the sheer number of books makes his head spin, but he continues to attend partially out of a sense of duty. He also goes to the spring used book fair at the exhibition hall in Okazaki as well as the autumn book fair at Chionji.

Tomihiko’s copy of Uchida Hyakken’s Hyakkien Nikkichō, purchased at the Evening Breeze book fair, says the following:

This passage has always resonated deeply with him. If you spend any time at all walking around Kyoto you will notice that it is full of intricately intertwined alleyways. Tomihiko enjoys riding his bike around those nondescript paths more than he does going around the famous tourist destinations. There is a mystery in unfamiliar alleyways.

Tomihiko stumbled upon Saifukuji, where lies the grave of Ueda Akinari, as he was wandering the narrow streets around Yoshida one day on his way towards Nanzenji in Okazaki. That particular route is one of Tomihiko’s favourites, not least because you can stop in the Lake Biwa Canal Museum to cool off on hot summer days.

Ueda Akinari was a famous Edo-period literary scholar, poet, and author. He is supposed to have been born in Osaka, but in his later years moved to Kyoto and died there in 1809. The first literary work which Tomihiko read solely because it seemed literary was Ueda’s Tales of Moonlight and Rain. Tomihiko chose not to study classics in his final year of high school, spending his time reading Tales of Moonlight and Rain in the school library instead. But do not be deceived. Tomihiko read the Shinchosha Classics edition, with helpful red annotations in modern Japanese next to all of the hard bits so that he didn’t have to overwork his brain. Additionally, the language of the Edo period is much easier to understand than the ancient Japanese used in The Tale of Genji. Furthermore, Tales of Moonlight and Rain is interesting, and it’s easy to read a book when it is interesting. Some of the stories are mysterious, others are scary. One of the best-known scary tales is The Cauldron of Kibitsu:

The young Tomihiko hunched over in the corner at the library, whispering to himself, “I’m not scared, I’m not scared.” He bought a copy at a used book store in Nijō, and it remains in his possession to this day.

Tomihiko enjoys other scary stories too, and though he found the original language of _The Tale of Genji _too archaic and difficult to read, Enchi Fumiko’s translation of the fourth section, Yūgao, sent shivers down his spine. _Tales of Days Gone By _also contains many spooky tales, as does The Tale of the Heike. As a fifth year in college, Tomihiko used to crawl underneath a kotatsu and read The Tale of the Heike; the scene with thousands of monkeys descending Mt. Hiei with torches in hand to burn the city frightened him, as did the monk being abducted by tengu.

“When you think about it, they’re all set in Kyoto,” Tomihiko realizes. “The Tale of Genji, The Tale of the Heike, and Tales of Days Gone By are all stories about places nearby.” Modern Kyoto is just as ripe for stories of the supernatural, including the mystery of unfamiliar alleyways, which is never far from Tomihiko’s mind. Perhaps the Kyoto setting has something to do with why he likes Uchida Hyakken’s spooky tales.

Uchida wrote about his coming to Kyoto in a piece called The Two Sen Age, which is not about the supernatural but rather money. Having come to Kyoto to attend a week-long summer university course at an institution on Mt. Hiei, he stayed in a boarding house between Sanjō Bridge and the Lesser Sanjō Bridge. The ten yen which his grandmother had sewn into his money pouch warning him never to use, he spent nearly as soon as he arrived at a bookstore in Kyōgoku. And when he paid out his rent he spent a little too much on tip, leaving him two sen short of the train fare to go back to Okayama. Not even having enough to ride a rickshaw to the station, he had to walk on foot to the stationT at Shichijō (modern-day Kyoto Station) instead, fighting back tears the whole way. Uchida wrote many stories revolving around money, including one tale called The Pawnbroker’s Curtain. When something he’d pawned was about to be sold off, his mentor advised him to pay the interest so that it would be saved. His master was none other than Natsume Sōseki.

Natsume Sōseki also spent time in Kyoto. He joined the Asahi Shimbun newspaper in 1907, and from March 28 to April 12 of that same year traveled around Kansai. On his first night in Kyoto he took a rickshaw from the station at Shichijō going the opposite direction of Uchida’s laboured walk, traveling north through the darkened streets of the city.

Eventually he arrived in the area surrounding Shimogamo Shrine. Sharing the rickshaw with him was Kanō Kōkichi, a professor at Tokyo Imperial University. Tomihiko owns a collection of Sōseki’s personal correspondence, purchased at a store on Shirakawa Street. One of the letters to Professor Kanō, dated October 23, 1906 begins quite delightfully:

The address on the letter is 48 Shimogamo-mura, Kyoto, which leads Tomihiko to believe that Professor Kanō also lived near Shimogamo Shrine.

A feeling of cold permeates the piece which Sōseki wrote about his evening arrival in Kyoto, entitled An Evening Arrival in Kyoto. That cold and the story about red bean soup are particularly memorable for Tomihiko. From Kyoto, Sōseki pens a letter to Komiya Toyotaka, complaining, “Kyoto is cold, Shimogamo Shrine is cold, and the people who sleep within the Tadasu Forest dream only of cold.” He repeats the word “cold” incessantly like he is pounding away at mochi with a mallet, which Tomihiko also finds amusing.

Sōseki wraps up An Evening Arrival in Kyoto with the following:

As he lays there buried deep within the layers of his futon, wondering how it is that even here he cannot escape the cold, something glimmers white outside the window in the unsettling stillness. Tomihiko rouses himself, makes coffee, and cracks open the window.

“Snow!” he yelps.

Snow is not very common in Kyoto, but today in the cold depths of February it falls thick and fast, piling up on the ground. Having grown up in a place without much snow, Tomihiko gets overly excited when white powder covers the ground. Normally staid and nervous, he finds a previously unimaginable sense of excitement welling up within. Not knowing what to do with this exuberance, he goes outside and spends hours finding smooth, pristine snow to walk over. Any time it snows, there is not a road from Kitashirakawa to Ginkakuji on which Tomihiko has not left his footprints.

Once Tomihiko climbed Mt. Uryū alone, fearing all the while that somewhere Hakuyūshi was hidden somewhere in the snow observing him. Hakuyūshi was a mountain hermit who once lived in the Rakutō Shirakawa, and teacher of Jōzan, the founder of the temple of Shisendō. He is written about in the Kinsei Kijinden.

Scared off the mountain by the prospect of running into Hakuyūshi, Tomihiko instead ambled down the Philosopher’s Walk. The thick snowdrifts muffled the sound of the town. The still path led him to Hōnen-in, the resting place of Tanizaki Junichirō. Though Tomihiko enjoys Tanizaki’s writing, he is a poor reader and doesn’t remember the words: only the enjoyment of reading has stayed with him. Young Tomihiko found The Makioka Sisters frustrating; perhaps he simply wasn’t ready for it. More vivid in Tomihiko’s memory is the image of Tanizaki slurping up his favourite botanhamo¹ with gusto.

Is botanhamo so delicious? Tanizaki Junichirō’s writing is delicious, yet strange and slippery; perhaps botanhamo is the same way.

Pondering such matters, Tomihiko resumed his stroll down the Philosopher’s Walk.

He recalled a friend of his with whom he experienced the highs and lows of college life for five years. Once they had planned to read Nishida Kitarō’s An Inquiry into the Good, reasoning that having received so much from Kyoto reading this book was only their duty to pay the city back. Their philosophical discussions on the Philosopher’s Walk could become a student and tourist attraction. “Maybe the city will even give us an award!” he said. “Failing that, we might still get some compliments from raven-haired maidens visiting from out of town.”

Filled with zeal, Tomihiko bought a copy of the treatise, but found himself stymied on the very first page of Part I. Chastened, he read the Preface, only to find that it recommended new readers to skip Part I. So that’s why it was so confusing! he exclaimed, regathering himself and going on to Part II, only to find its first page equally as impenetrable. Thus the duo failed to receive any honours from city hall, never mind any compliments from raven-haired maidens. But even had they broken through that wall of impenetrable words, would they really have received the praise they sought? For they had long since built up a reputation for reading obscure books and been shunned for it.

When Tomihiko’s father was a student at Kyoto University thirty years prior, many students read esoteric books. Being a member of the Sophistry Debate Society, Tomihiko’s father was especially well read, and even participated in debates. Café Muse, at which he held reading club discussions with students from women’s colleges, no longer exists, but Shinshindō is still around. Three decades ago students held fierce debates on Dostoevsky, Noma Hiroshi, Shibata Shō, and Oe Kenzaburō in the very same nook where today Tomihiko sits alone, dreaming to himself.

His coffee cup has run dry. But wielding the financial power of an adult, Tomihiko orders another. Breathing in the toasty aroma, he looks around the quiet, dim café.

He remembers another book as he sits there. It is set in an alternate world, and the word Kyoto does not appear once within its pages. Yet in Tomihiko’s mind he draws a connection between that book and this old-fashioned cafe. Perhaps that is because Tomihiko read it knowing that it was written by someone who also graduated from a university in Kyoto. The book he is thinking of is City of Dreams, by Yamao Yūko.

As he smokes a cigarette Tomihiko thinks back to the mystery of alleyways, to shrines and temples, to curio shops and the strange odds and ends displayed in their windows, to the snow falling faintly over the streets, to the smell of used book stores, to dim cafes, to the long-ago events of his student days right here in Kyoto. And he thinks of a passage from City of Dreams.

And there also lives a Tomihiko.

Footnotes

1. Conger eel soup, where the flesh of the eel is prepared in such a way to resemble a white peony flower (botan). A Kyoto summer delicacy. ↩