Otogizoshi: The Fairy Tale Book of Dazai Osamu

He rubs his nose and pretends to wipe a tear.

It’s a brisk, invigorating summer morning. The surface of Lake Kawaguchi is shrouded in smoky white mist. Up on the mountainside, the tanuki and the rabbit are drenched in that mist as they toil away cutting and bundling sticks.

The tanuki displays not the single-minded devotion he promised, so much as a mindless frenzy, and it makes for a disturbing sight. Groaning exaggeratedly-Unngh! Unngh!- he swings his sickle with reckless abandon, letting out occasional howls of pain. He dashes left and right and back and forth in his fanatical quest for dead sticks, clearly wanting only to show his beloved Bunny what a hard worker he is. It isn’t long, of course, before he runs out of steam. Wearing a look of utter exhaustion, he tosses the sickle aside.

“Look at this. Look at all the blisters on my hands. Ooh… They hurt. And I’m so thirsty! Hungry too. I mean, that was some serious manual labor I just did. Let’s take a little break, what? Open up the old box lunch, and… oof, foo, foo!” Laughing this odd-sounding, embarrassed laugh, he reaches for the lunch box, which is about the size of a large oilcan, opens it, sticks his nose inside, and begins slurping up the contents. This he does with genuine single-minded devotion, not to mention sound effects: mush-mush, gatz-gatz, pep-pech. The rabbit looks up from her work and gapes at him, aghast. She sidles over to look inside the container but immediately draws back, giving a little cry of horror and covering her face with both hands. It seems there are some rather extraordinary ingredients in that lunch.

But today, for reasons of her own, the rabbit isn’t heaping the usual abuse on the tanuki. She has remained silent all morning, wearing a manufactured half-smile on her lips, efficiently gathering firewood, and ignoring the overly excited tanuki’s manic behavior. Even after viewing the contents of the lunch and receiving a serious shock, she neither complains nor gags but goes right back to cutting wood. She’s downright tolerant today, and the tanuki is very pleased with himself: Is she finally falling for me, after seeing the way I cut firewood? Well, what woman wouldn’t be impressed by a muscular performance like that? Some lunch, though-I’m stuffed! Kinda sleepy too. Maybe a little nap… Convinced he’s earned a bit of self-indulgence, he stretches out and is soon snoring loudly. Whatever fool dreams he’s dreaming, he holds forth at some length in his sleep- “Love potions don’t work, I tell ya!”-and doesn’t awake until nearly noon.

“You slept a long time,” the rabbit says gently. “I’ve tied my firewood into one big bundle. You do the same, and we’ll carry it all down to Ojii-san’s house.”

“Let’s do that, yeah.” The tanuki yawns extravagantly, scratching his arm. “I’m starving. It’s not good for me to be sleeping the day away on an empty stomach,” he says, and gravely adds, “I’m sensitive, you know. All right, then, I’ll hurry up and bundle all that wood I cut. The lunch box is empty, after all. Time to wrap this up and find some food.”

They head back down the mountain, both bearing large bundles of sticks strapped to their backs.

“You go first,” says the rabbit. “I’m afraid there might be snakes around here.”

“Snakes? I’m not afraid of no snakes. If I see any, I’ll just catch ’em and-” He’s about to say eat ’em but swallows the words. “I’ll catch ’em and kill ’em. Just follow me.”

“It’s so nice to have a big, strong man around at times like this.”

“You flatter me,” the tanuki says, puffing out his chest. “But, really, you’re being awfully sweet today. Too sweet, almost. You’re not going to take me back to Ojii-san’s and have him make me into tanuki stew, are you? Ah, ha, ha, ha! Anything but that!”

“Well, if you’re so suspicious, you needn’t bother coming. I’ll go alone.”

“No! I didn’t mean it like that. I’ll go with you. It’s just… I’m not afraid of snakes, or anything else in this world, but that Ojii-san is a tough customer. I mean, he was going to eat me for dinner! Pretty barbaric, if you ask me. At least, it’s not exactly what you’d call genteel. Tell you what-I’ll carry this wood as far as the big hackberry tree just short of his yard, and you take it from there, all right? That’s as far as I go. I mean, if I came face to face with old Ojii-san right now, I wouldn’t know what to say. It’d just be awkward. Hey, what’s that? I hear something. What do you think it is? Hear it? It’s like a click, clack sound.”

“Well, what do you expect? This is Click-Clack Mountain.”

“Click-Clack Mountain? This one we’re on?”

“Yes. Didn’t you know that?”

“Nope. I never knew this mountain had a name. Pretty weird name too. You’re kidding me, right?”

“Heavens, no! All mountains have names, you know-Mount Fuji, Mount Nagao, Omuro Mountain. This one’s named after the sound it makes. There it goes again, hear it? Click, clack.”

“I hear it all right. Funny, though. I never heard it before, not even once. I was born on this mountain and in thirty-some-odd years here, I-”

“My! Is that how old you are? The other day you told me you were seventeen! You beast. I thought your face was too wrinkled and your back too bent for seventeen, but I didn’t think you’d try to shave off twenty whole years! You must be almost forty, right? That’s old.”

“No, no! Seventeen. I am seventeen. Seventeen. Hey, sometimes my back might look a little bent when I walk, but it’s not because of age. It’s just a natural reaction to hunger. When I said ‘thirty-odd- years,’ I was talking about my brother. My brother is always using that expression, see, and I just sort of picked it up. Expressions can be contagious, right? You know how it is, kid.”

He’s so flustered that he’s gone and called her “kid.”

“I see.” The rabbit remains cool. “But I never knew you had an older brother. In fact, I remember you saying, ‘Oh, I’m so lonely, I’m so alone, I have no parents or brothers or sisters.’ Those were your exact words. You told me I had no idea what it felt like to be all on your own. So?”

“Right. That’s right.” Not even the tanuki knows what he’s trying to say now. “That’s why everything is so complicated in this world. Nothing is black or white. Sometimes you might have a brother and sometimes you might not.”

“That doesn’t even make any sense,” the rabbit says disparagingly. “It’s just crazy talk.”

“Yeah, no, the truth is, I do have one brother. I hate even to say it, but he’s a drunkard and a layabout and just a complete embarrassment, and I’m really ashamed of him, but for thirty-some-odd years-I’m talking about my brother now-he’s been a burden to me. Ever since he was born.”

“That doesn’t make sense either. How can a seventeen-year-old carry a burden for thirty-some-odd years?”

The tanuki pretends not to hear this.

“There are a lot of things in this world that can’t be explained easily. At any rate, I disowned him long ago. He’s dead to me. Hey, what’s that? I smell something burning. Do you smell it?”

“No.”

“No?” Since the tanuki is always eating noisome things, he has little confidence in own nose. He tilts his head, a puzzled look on his face. “Is it just me? Hey, now it sounds like wood burning. Crackle-crackle, burn- burn. You hear that?”

“What do you expect? This is Crackle-Burn Mountain.”

“Don’t give me that. You just said it was called Click-Clack Mountain.”

“That’s right. The same mountain can have different names, depending on the location. On the slope of Mount Fuji is a big bump called Little Fuji, and Omuro Mountain and Mount Nagao are almost like parts of Fuji too. Didn’t you know that?”

“No, I did not. I’ve been here on this mountain for thirty-some-odd- I mean, according to my brother, they’ve always just called this the Mountain in Back. Phew! It’s getting awfully warm. This is a weird day. What’s next? An earthquake? Wow, it’s hot. Whoa! Hey! Ow, ow, ow! Damn! Help! The firewood’s burning! Owwwww!”

The next day, the tanuki is in his hole moaning and groaning.

“Oh, the pain! Is this the end? I must be the unluckiest man who ever lived. Just because I was born a bit better-looking than most, the women are afraid to approach me. A dapper and sophisticated man is at a real disadvantage, I tell you. They probably take me for a woman-hater. Hell, I’m no saint. I like women. But they all