him, but fell to tittering whenever he so much as looked around behind him.
At first the Naigu interpreted this as being due to the change in his features. But by this interpretation it seemed by no means possible to arrive at a full explanation. Of course the reason for the Chūdōji’s and under priests’ laughing must have lain in that. But all the same, there was in the way they laughed something that had not been there in the days when his nose was long. If his unfamiliar short nose looked more ridiculous than his familiar long nose, so much for that. But there seemed to be something more to it.
“They didn’t laugh so constantly before,” the Naigu would murmur sometimes, interrupting the sutra he had started to recite and cocking his bald head on one side. On such occasions, the amiable Naigu was sure to look absentmindedly at a picture of Fugen hanging beside him and, thinking of the time a few days back when his nose was still long, fall into low spirits, thinking, “like unto a man utterly ruined pondering the time of his glory.” Unfortunately he was lacking in the perspicacity to solve this problem.
In the human heart there are two feelings mutually contradictory. Of course there is no one who does not sympathize at the misfortune of another. But if that other somehow manages to escape from that misfortune, then he who has sympathized somehow feels unsatisfied. To exaggerate a little, he is even disposed to cast the sufferer back into the same misfortune once more. And before he is aware of it, he unconsciously comes to harbor a certain hostility against him. What somehow displeased the Naigu, though he did not know the reason, was nothing other than the egoism he indefinably perceived in the attitude of those onlookers, both priests and laymen, at Ike-no-O.
So the Naigu’s humor became worse every day. He scolded everybody ill-naturedly at the slightest provocation. Even the disciple who had operated on his nose finally came to say behind his back that he would be punished for his avarice and cruelty. It was that mischievous Chūdōji who enraged the Naigu most.
One day, hearing a dog yelping noisily, he went out casually and found the Chūdōji brandishing a stick about two feet long and chasing a thin shaggy dog with long hair. And he was not simply chasing the dog around. He was running after it crying tauntingly, “Watch out for your nose there! Watch out for your nose there!” The Naigu snatched the stick from his hand and gave him a hard thwack in the face with it. The stick was the one with which his own nose had formerly been held up.
The Naigu came to feel angry regret that he had thoughtlessly shortened his nose.
Then one night the wind seemed to have suddenly begun blowing after sunset and the ringing of the wind-bells on the pagoda came to his pillow annoyingly. Moreover, as the cold increased perceptibly, the old Naigu could not get to sleep, try as he might. Then as he lay blinking in bed, he suddenly became aware of an unaccustomed itching in his nose. When he felt it with his hand, it was swollen as if a little dropsical. There even seemed to be fever in that part only.
“Since I shortened it against nature, it may have got diseased,” he murmured, pressing his nose with his hand as reverently as he was accustomed to offer incense and flowers to the Buddhas.
The next morning when the Naigu awoke early as usual, the leaves of the maidenhair trees and horse chestnuts in the temple grounds had fallen over night, and the garden was as bright as if carpeted with gold. It may have been because of the frost which lay on the roof of the pagoda that the nine metal rings in its spire sparkled dazzlingly in the still faint light of the morning sun. Zenchi Naigu stood on the veranda with the shutters up and drew a deep breath.
It was at just about this moment that a certain sensation which he had all but forgotten came back to him again.
He put his hand to his nose excitedly. What it touched was not the short nose of the night before. It was his long old nose dangling some five or six inches from above his upper lip to below his chin. He found that it had grown again in one night as long as it was before. And at the same time he realized that a lighthearted feeling similar to that which he had felt when his nose became short had come back to him from somewhere.
“Now nobody will laugh at me surely,” murmured the Naigu in the depths of his heart, the while he dangled his long nose in the wind of the early autumn morning.
The Handkerchief
Prof. Hasegawa Kinzō, of the Law College of the Imperial University, was sitting in a cane chair on his veranda reading Strindberg’s Dramaturgy.
His special study was colonial policy. Wherefore the fact that he was reading Dramaturgy may cause the reader some surprise. But he, a professor noted not only as a scholar but as an educator, even if the books were not necessary for his special investigations, always, so far as his leisure permitted, looked through any books that were connected in any sense with the thought or feelings of present-day students. In truth, not long before, he had read Oscar Wilde’s “De Profundis” and Intentions only because the students of a certain college of which, along with his other work, he acted as president, were fond of them.
Since he was such a man, we need not marvel that the book he was now reading was a treatise on the modern drama and players of Europe. For among the students under him there were not only those who wrote criticisms on Ibsen, Strindberg and Maeterlinck, but even some enthusiasts who intended to follow
