Otogizoshi: The Fairy Tale Book of Dazai Osamu

seventy, but her back is straight, her eyes clear. It’s said that she was once quite a beauty. A quiet and serious sort from girlhood on, she now goes about her housework each day with grim determination.

“Well, spring has sprung!” Ojii-san burbles. “The cherry trees are in bloom.”

“Is that so,” Obaa-san responds without interest. “Will you get out of the way, please? I’m trying to clean up here.”

Ojii-san slumps in his seat, deflated.

He also has a son who is nearly forty and so morally irreproachable as to be a rarity in this world. This son not only neither drinks nor smokes but makes a point of never laughing or getting angry or experiencing pleasure either. All he does each day is silently toil in the fields, and since the people in the village and surrounding areas have little choice but to respect him for that, he’s known far and wide as the Saint of Awa. He has never married or shaved his beard, and one is tempted to wonder if he isn’t made of wood, or stone.

In short, this family of Ojii-san’s is nothing if not respectable and upstanding. And yet the fact remains that he is depressed. He wants to be considerate of his family but feels he cannot help but drink. And if drinking at home only leaves him all the more dispirited, it’s not because either Obaa-san or the Saint of Awa has ever scolded him for it. They sit at the table with him each evening, eating their dinner in silence as he sips his sake.

Growing a bit tipsy, Ojii-san begins to desire conversation and to make inane comments. “By the way, spring is here at last, you know. The swallows are back.” An uncalled-for observation. “‘Spring evening: one moment, a thousand pieces of gold,’ what?” he mutters. Utterly insipid.

“Gochisosama de gozarimashita.” The Saint of Awa, having finished his dinner, stands up and bows deeply as he intones these words of gratitude for the meal.

“Ah,” Ojii-san says, and sadly drains his little sake cup. “Guess I’ll eat something myself.”

So it generally goes when he drinks at home.

One fine morning, Ojii-san went up

the mountain to gather wood.

On sunny days, he likes to wander the forested slopes of Mount Tsurugi with a gourd dangling from his waistband, collecting kindling at his leisure. When he grows a bit tired of picking up sticks, he sits with loosely crossed legs on a large boulder and clears his throat with a great display of self-importance.

“Ahem! What a view!” he says, and sips sake from his gourd. He looks happy. Away from home like this, he seems a different person. He might even be unrecognizable if not for the enormous wen on his cheek. Some twenty years ago, in the autumn of the year he passed the half-century mark, his right cheek had begun to feel warm and itchy, and then to swell little by little. As he patted and stroked it, the wen grew ever larger, and he would smile sadly and say, “Now I’ve got myself a fine grandchild.”

To which his son, the Saint of Awa, would reply with great joy-killing solemnity, “A man’s cheek cannot give birth to a child.”

Obaa-san, for her part, proclaimed without so much as a reassuring smile that the wen didn’t appear to be life-threatening, and showed no further concern. The neighbors were somewhat more sympathetic, saying that such a large wen must be quite a nuisance and how had he acquired it and wasn’t it painful? But Ojii-san just laughed and shook his head. Far from considering the wen a nuisance, he really has come to think of it as a darling grandchild, a companion to comfort him in his solitude, and when he washes his face each morning he takes special care to purify the wen with cool, fresh water. On days like today, when his spirits are high and he’s drinking alone in the mountains, this wen is an indispensable sidekick. He’s petting it fondly as he sits atop the boulder with his legs crossed wide.

“Ha! What’s there to be afraid of? I’ll have my say! You’re the ones who need to drink and loosen up a little. There’s such a thing as being too serious, you know. ‘The Saint of Awa,’ eh? Well, forgive me, mister holy man!”

He mutters these tirades to his wen, roundly disparaging one person or another, and always finishes by clearing his throat loudly: Ahem!

It grew cloudy.

The wind started to blow.

Rain came pouring down.

Squalls like this are rare in springtime. But we must assume that weather is volatile on mountains the size of Tsurugi. White mists rise from the mountain slope as rain beats down, and pheasants and other birds dart for cover with the swiftness of arrows. Ojii-san just smiles to himself.

“Can’t hurt to cool off my wen in a little shower,” he says, and remains sitting on the rock, watching the rain come down. But the longer he watches, the harder it rains, and the less it looks like letting up.

“Hmm. Now it’s gone beyond cool,” he concedes. Standing up, he sneezes mightily, then shoulders the bundle of wood he’s gathered and crawls into the brush. It’s already crowded in there with birds and beasts taking shelter.

“Excuse me! Coming through! Sorry!” He greets the monkeys and rabbits and pheasants and things with cheerful courtesy and passes deeper into the forest, where he finally wriggles inside the hollow trunk of an enormous old cherry tree.

“Well, well, this is a very nice room!” he says once inside, then calls to the rabbits and the others, “Come on in, everyone! There aren’t any high and mighty Obaa-sans or Saints in here! Come in, come in!” He babbles excitedly for a while, but soon he’s softly snoring. Drinkers tend to say inane and obnoxious things when they’re drunk, but most of them are in fact harmless, innocent souls like this.

Waiting for the rain to stop,

Ojii-san fell fast asleep.

The skies cleared, and the sun went down.

Now a bright moon lit up the cloudless sky.

It’s a waning quarter moon, the first one of spring. It floats in a sky the color of water, almost a pale green, and slivers of moonbeam litter the forest floor like pine needles. Ojii-san is still sound asleep. Only when a cloud of bats flies out of the hollow tree with a thunderous flapping of wings does he wake with a start, alarmed to find that it’s nighttime.

“Uh-oh. This isn’t good.” The somber face of his old woman and the austere countenance of the Saint rise before his eyes. “Never yelled at me yet,” he reminds himself. “But coming home this late, things could get unpleasant. Say! Sake’s not gone, is it?” He shakes the gourd and takes heart when he hears a faint plish-plash. “There you are!” He drains the last drops and begins to feel tipsily sentimental. “Well, I see the moon’s out,” he says, and continues to mumble fatuous remarks to himself as he crawls out from the hollow tree. “Spring evening: one moment-”

And then…

Whose voices were those,

laughing and shouting?

Oh, look! What a wondrous sight!

Was it a dream?

In a grassy clearing in the forest, an otherworldly scene is unfolding. Just look…

Now, I don’t really know what these ogres, these Oni, are like, never having met any. From childhood on, I’ve seen more pictures of Oni than I care to remember, but I have yet to be granted the privilege of coming face to face with one. Complicating matters is the fact that there would appear to be many varieties of Oni. We use the word to describe hateful people, murderers, and even vampires, and one might therefore feel safe in assuming that these beings possess, in general, fairly despicable personality traits. But then one spies in the “New Books” column of the newspaper a headline reading, “The Latest Masterpiece from the Ogre- like Genius of So-and-So-sensei,” and one is perplexed. One wonders if the article is an attempt to alert the public to So-and-So-sensei’s wicked influence or evil machinations. Worse yet, they have gone so far as to label him the “Oni of the Literary World.” One would think that the great sensei himself would react angrily to being called such nasty and insulting names, but apparently that isn’t the case. One even hears rumors to