الفصل الفصل 2 · THE NOSE

. THE NOSE

There was nobody at Ike-no-O who did not know about the nose of Zenchi

Naigu. It was five or six inches long and hung down from above his

upper lip to below his chin. As for its shape, it was equally thick at

base and tip. A long and slender sausage, so to speak, dangled from the

middle of his face.

The Naigu, who was over fifty, had always grieved in secret at this

nose of his from the far-off days when he was an acolyte to the

present, when he had reached the position of an attendant at the

palace chapel. Of course outwardly he even now wore an expression that

proclaimed his lack of any particular concern about it. This was not

merely because he thought it wrong for a priest who ought to devote his

whole heart to the adoration of the anticipated Western Paradise to

trouble himself about his nose. Rather it was because he hated to have

people know that he was fretting to himself about it. In ordinary daily

conversations, he feared above all else the appearance of the word

“nose.”

There were two reasons why the Naigu found his nose too much for him.

One was that in a practical way the length of it was inconvenient. In

the first place, when he ate, he could not do it by himself. If he

did, the tip of his nose got into the boiled rice in his metal bowl.

So when taking his meals, he had one of his disciples sit across the

dining-tray from him and hold his nose up with a piece of wood an

inch wide and two feet long while he ate. But for him to dine in this

way was by no means an easy thing for either the Naigu, whose nose

was held up, or the disciple who held it. In those days a story got

abroad even in Kyōto of how a Chūdōji, who once took the place of this

disciple, let his hand shake when he sneezed and dropped the nose

into a dish of gruel. But for the Naigu, this was not at all the main

reason he grieved over his nose. The truth is, he was troubled over his

self-respect, which was injured by his nose.

The people in the town of Ike-no-O said it was fortunate for Zenchi

Naigu, with such a nose, that he was not a layman. For with him

carrying that nose, they thought there would have been no woman willing

to become his wife. And some of them even gave it as their opinion that

he had probably taken to the priesthood on account of that nose. But

the Naigu himself did not feel that his troubles over his nose were the

least bit lessened through his being a priest. His self-respect was

too delicately strung to be influenced one way or the other by such

an ultimate fact as matrimony. So he tried both constructively and

destructively to correct the injury done to his self-respect.

The first thing he took thought for was some means by which to make his

long nose look shorter than it really was. When nobody was about, he

took a mirror, and reflecting his face in it at all sorts of angles,

earnestly exercised his ingenuity. Sometimes he could not be satisfied

with only changing the position of his face, so first resting his head

in his hands, then putting his finger to the tip of his chin, he would

peer persistently into the glass. But not once up to this time had his

nose looked short enough to satisfy even himself. Sometimes he even

thought that the more he worried about it, the longer it seemed. At

such times the Naigu always put the mirror back into the box, sighed as

if it were something new, and returned reluctantly to his reading stand

to go on reading the Kannon Sutra.

And again the Naigu was always paying attention to other people’s

noses. The Ike-no-O temple often held preaching services. At the temple

there were lines of closely built monks’ cells, and in the bath-room,

the resident priests boiled up water daily. Accordingly the priests

and laymen frequenting the place were many. The Naigu examined their

faces patiently. For he wanted to put himself at ease by finding out at

least one nose like his own. So he noticed neither their wide-sleeved

hunting coats of deep blue nor their white summer garments. Naturally

the orange-colored caps and the sober brown robes of the priests, in

that he was accustomed to them, did not exist for him at all. He did

not see the people; he only saw their noses. But though there were

hooked noses, he failed to find a single one like his own. With the

repetition of his failure, his heart became more and more unhappy.

His unconsciously taking hold of the end of his dangling nose while

in conversation with others, and blushing out of all keeping with

his years, was simply the consequence of his being moved by this

unhappiness.

Finally he even thought of obtaining some solace at least by finding

some man with a nose like his own in the Buddhist scriptures or other

books. But it was not written in any scripture that either Mokuren or

Sharihotsu had a long nose. Of course Lung Shu and Ma Ming were both

Boddhisatvas with ordinary noses. When he heard, apropos of Chinese

story, that the ears of Lin Hsuan-ti of the Chu-Han were long, he

thought how relieved he would have felt if it had been that worthy’s

nose instead of his ears.

It is needless to say that while the Naigu thus troubled himself

negatively, he, at the same time, tried positive ways to make his nose

grow short. He did just about everything he could in this direction,

too. Once he tried drinking a decoction of snake-gourd and once

applying rat urine to his nose. But in spite of all his efforts, it

still dangled its five or six inches down over his lips as before.

But one year in the autumn, one of his disciples, while in Kyōto on the

Naigu’s business, was told by a doctor of his acquaintance of a way to

shorten noses. This doctor was a man who had come originally from China

and was at that time a priest at Chōrakuji.

The Naigu as usual pretended not to care about his nose and

deliberately refrained from proposing an immediate trial of the method.

But on the other hand, he dropped cheerful remarks about being sorry to

give his disciple so much trouble every time he took his meals. In his

heart, of course, he was waiting for his disciple to talk him over and

get him to try it. And naturally the disciple could not be unaware of

the Naigu’s scheme. But the feelings that made him adopt such a scheme

must have moved the disciple’s sympathy more strongly than did his

own antipathy to it. The disciple, as the Naigu had expected, began

eagerly to urge him to try the method. And the Naigu himself, also in

accordance with his expectation, finally followed this earnest counsel.

The method was the very simple one of just boiling his nose in hot

water and letting someone trample on it.

Water was boiled daily in the temple bath-room. So the disciple poured

water so hot that he could not stand his finger in it directly into a

bucket and brought it from the bath-room. But there was a fear of the

steam scalding the Naigu’s face if he dipped his nose directly into the

bucket. So they decided to make a hole in a tray and, putting it on the

bucket for a cover, to insert his nose through the hole into the hot

water. If he soaked only his nose in the water, it did not feel hot at

all. After a while, the disciple said,

“It must be boiled now, I think.”

The Naigu smiled a forced smile. This was because he thought that if

any one heard only that, he would never imagine that it was a remark

about a nose. After being steamed in the boiling water, it itched as if

it had been bitten by fleas.

When the Naigu had drawn his nose out of the hole in the tray, the

disciple began with all his might to trample it, still steaming, with

both his feet. The Naigu, lying on his side and stretching out his nose

on the floor boards, watched the disciple’s feet moving up and down

before his eyes. From time to time the disciple looked down with a

pitying face on the Naigu’s bald head and said,

“Doesn’t it hurt? The doctor said to trample it torturingly. But

doesn’t it hurt?”

The Naigu tried to shake his head to show that it was not hurting him.

But since his nose was being trampled on, he could not move his head as

he wished. So, rolling up his eyes and fastening them on the cracks in

the disciple’s chapped feet, he answered in an angry-sounding voice,

“No, it doesn’t!”

As his nose was being trampled on where it itched, he really found it

more comfortable than painful.

After a while, something that looked like grains of millet began to

come out on his nose. It looked, so to speak, like a bird plucked and

roasted whole. The disciple, seeing this, stopped moving his feet and

observed as if to himself,

“He told me to pull these out with hair-tweezers.”

The Naigu, puffing out his cheeks with dissatisfaction, without a word,

left his nose to the disciple to deal with as he wished. Of course it

was not because he was unaware of his disciple’s kindness. But though

he was aware of that, he was displeased at having his nose treated

just as if it were a commodity. Reluctantly, with the expression of

a patient being operated on by a doctor in whom he has no faith, he

watched the disciple with hair-tweezers pulling the fat out of the

pores of his nose. The fat came out in the shape of bird quills half an

inch long.

Finally when the nose had once been gone over, the disciple looked

relieved and said,

“If you boil it once more, it’ll be all right, I think.”

The Naigu, still knitting his brows and looking dissatisfied, did as

the disciple told him.

Well, when he took his boiled nose out the second time, indeed it was

short as it had never been before. Now it was not greatly different

from the ordinary hooked nose. The Naigu, stroking his shortened nose,

peered shame-facedly and nervously into the mirror the disciple gave

him.

His nose, that nose which had hung down below his chin, had shrunk up

almost unbelievably and now simply clung on spiritless above his upper

lip. The red blotches on it here and there were probably bruises left

by the trampling. Now surely nobody would laugh at him. The Naigu’s

face in the mirror looked at the face outside and blinked its eyes

contentedly.

But during all that day, he was uneasy for fear his nose might become

long again. So while he read the sutras and while he ate his meals,

whenever opportunity offered, he put up his hand and stealthily felt

the tip of his nose. But it simply kept its place decently above his

lips, and there was no sign of its getting any longer. Then after a

night’s sleep, when he awoke early the next morning, he felt his nose

the very first thing. It was still as short as ever. Whereupon, for

the first time in many years, the Naigu experienced the same sense of

relief he had enjoyed when he had finished heaping up merit for himself

by copying out the Hoke Sutra.

But within the next two or three days, the Naigu discovered a

surprising fact. It was that a samurai who was at the temple at

Ike-no-O on business at that time looked more amused than ever and,

unable to talk as he wished, did nothing but stare at the Naigu’s nose.

Moreover, the Chūdōji who had once dropped his nose in the gruel kept

his eyes on the ground at first, and stifled a laugh when he met the

Naigu outside the hall, but finally burst out laughing as if he could

restrain himself no longer. It happened not only once or twice that the

under priests who were being given orders listened respectfully while

face to face with 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 absent-mindedly 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 light-hearted 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.