Modern Japanese Stories/Machine

Kikai

Machine

by Yokomitsu Riichi

At first, I sometimes wondered if the master of the establishment was not insane. He would decide that his child, not yet three, did not like him. A child had no right to dislike its father, he would announce, frowning fiercely. Barely able to walk, the child would fall on its face. That gave him cause to slap his wife … why had she let it fall when she was supposed to be watching it? For the rest of us this was all fine comedy. The man was in dead earnest, however, and one did begin to wonder if he might not be insane.

A man of forty, snatching his child up and marching about the room with it when for a moment it stopped crying. And it was not only with the child that he seemed strange. There was a suggestion of immaturity in everything he did. His wife naturally became the centre of the house, and it was natural too that her allies gained strength. Since my own ties were if anything with the husband, I was always left to do the work everyone most disliked. It was unpleasant work, really unpleasant work. Yet it was work that had to be done if the shop was not to come to a complete standstill. In a sense it was I and not the wife who was at the centre of the house; but I could only remain silent about the fact. I was among people who thought that the one given the unpleasant job was the one who was otherwise useless.

Still, the useless one can sometimes be strangely useful at something that baffles others, and in all the many processes involving chemicals in this name-plate factory, the process entrusted to me was richest in violent poisons … a hole made especially for pushing otherwise useless people into. Once shoved into the hole, I found my skin and my clothes wearing out under the attacks of corrosive ferric chloride. Fumes tore at my throat, I was unable to sleep at night. Worse, my mind seemed to be affected, and my eyesight showed signs of failing. It was not likely that a useful person would be put into such a hole. My employer had learned the same work in his youth, no doubt because he too was a person who was otherwise useless.

But not even I meant to linger on until in the course of time I became an invalid. I had come from a shipyard in Kyūshū, and I had happened to meet a lady on a train. She was a widow in her fifties who had neither children nor home. She meant, after presuming upon the kindness of Tokyo relatives for a time, to open a rooming house or the like. I said jokingly that when I found work I would come and live with her. She replied that she would take me to see the relatives she had mentioned. They would have work for me. I had no other prospects at the time, and something refined in her manner told me to trust her. So I trailed after her and arrived here.

At first the work seemed easy. Then, gradually, I saw that the chemicals were eating away my ability to work. I would leave today, I would leave tomorrow, I told myself. But having lasted so long, I should at least wait until I had learned the secrets of the trade. I set about becoming interested in dangerous chemical processes.

My fellow worker, a man named Karubé, promptly decided that I was a spy who had crept in to steal trade secrets. Karubé had lived next door to the wife’s family, and, since that fact gave him certain liberties, he responded by putting the interests of the shop above everything and becoming the proverbial faithful servant. He would fix a burning gaze on me when I took a poison down from the shelf. As I loitered before the dark room he would come up with a great clattering to let me know that he was there watching. I thought all this a trifle ridiculous, and yet his earnestness made me uncomfortable. He considered the movies the finest of textbooks and detective movies a mirror of life, and there was no doubt that I, who had wandered in unannounced, was good material for his fantasies. He had ambitions beyond spending the rest of his life here. He meant one day to set up a branch establishment, and he most certainly did not mean to let me learn the secret of making red plates, an invention of our employer, before he had learned it himself.

I was only interested in learning and had not a suggestion of a plan for making my living by what I had learned. Karubé was not one to understand such subtleties, however, and I could not in complete honesty deny that once I had learned the business I would think of making my living by it.

In any case, my conscience would be at rest if I could tell myself that it was good for him to be teased a little. Having reached this conclusion I quite forgot about him.

His hostility grew, and I came to think, even while I was calling him a fool, that precisely because he was a fool perhaps he was not such a fool after all. It is rather fun to be made a gratuitous enemy, because one can make a fool of one’s adversary while it lasts; and it took me a long time to note that the pleasure left a crack in my defences. I would move a chair or turn an edge tool, and a hammer would fall on my head, or sheets of brass, ground down for plates, would come crashing at my feet. A harmless compound of varnish and ether would be changed for chromic acid. At first I thought I was being careless. When it came to me that Karubé was responsible, I concluded that if I was not careful I would find myself dead. It was a chilling thought. Karubé, though a fool, was older than I and adept at mixing poisons. He knew that if he put ammonium dichromate into a person’s tea the result would pass as suicide. I would see something yellow in my food and take it for chromic acid and have trouble making my hand move in its direction. Presently, however, this caution struck me as funny. Let him try killing me if it seemed so easy! And so I forgot him again.

One day I was at work in the shop when the wife came in to tell me that her husband was going out to buy sheet metal, and I was to go with him and carry the money. When he carried it himself he invariably lost it. Her chief concern was always to keep him away from money. Indeed most of our troubles could be traced to that particular failing of his. No one could understand how he always managed to drop whatever money he had. Lost money would not come back, however one stormed and scolded, and, on the other hand, one did want to protest when the money for which one had sweated disappeared like foam upon the water. If it had only happened once or twice things would have been different; but it happened constantly. When he had money, he lost it. Inevitably, then, the affairs of the house shaped themselves rather differently from the affairs of most houses.

A man of forty taking money and promptly losing it … one wondered how it could happen. His wife would tie his wallet around his neck and drop it inside his shirt, and even when the wallet was still there the money would have quite disappeared. It seemed likely that he dropped it when he took something from the wallet. Even so, one would have thought that he would occasionally have said to himself, as he took his wallet out or put it away again, that he might have lost something. Perhaps he did in fact watch himself. If so, could one believe that he really lost all his money so often? Perhaps it was a trick on the wife’s part to delay payment.

So I thought for a time, but his behaviour was enough to convince me that the wife’s reports were true. It is said of the rich that they do not know what money is; and in a somewhat different sense our employer was wholly indifferent to the five-sen copper for the public bath … and to the money for sheet metal. There was a time when he would have been called a sage and a saint; but those who must live with a saint have to be alert. None of the shop work could be left to him, and what he could perfectly well have done by himself two had to go out to do. It is impossible to calculate the needless labour caused by that one man. All of this was true; and yet the establishment would have been far less popular had he not been there. It may have had its detractors, but not because of him. Not everyone approved of his subservience to his wife, but he was so good-natured, so small and docile in his chains, that on the whole he pleased people. He was even more charming when, free for a moment of his wife’s sharp eye, he scampered about like an uncaged rabbit and threw money in all directions.

I am therefore constrained to say that the heart of the house was not the mistress or Karubé or myself. Clearly I am an underling and have an underling’s devotion to his master; but I liked the man and that is the end of it. To imagine the sort of man he was, the reader must think of a child of, say, five who has become a man of forty. The thought of such a man is ridiculous. We wanted to feel superior to him, and yet we could not. The unsightliness of our own years came to us paradoxically as something fresh and new. These were not my thoughts alone. Much the same thoughts seemed to move Karubé. It occurred to me afterwards that his hostility came from a goodness of heart that made him want to protect our master. The difficulty I found in leaving the shop came from the unique goodness of the master’s heart, and the dropping of hammers on my head had the same source. Goodness sometimes has strange ways.

Well, the master and I went out to buy sheet metal, and on the way he said that there had been an interesting proposal that day: someone wanted to buy the red-plating process for 50,000 yen. Should he sell or should he not? I could not answer, and he went on. No question would arise if the process could be kept secret for ever, but his competitors were feverishly at work. If he was to sell at all he should sell now.

That might be true, but I had no right to discuss the process on which he had worked so long. Yet if I were to leave him to his own devices he would do as his wife told him, and she was a woman who could think of nothing not immediately before her eyes.

I wanted to do what I could for him … indeed that wish became an obsession. When I was in the shop, it seemed that all the processes and all the wares were waiting for me to put them in order. I came to look upon Karubé as a menial, and, worse than that, his somewhat histrionic manner annoyed me. And then I began to move in another direction. I noted again that Karubé’s eyes were fixed on my smallest move. When I was at work his gaze almost never left me. It seemed clear that the wife had told him of her husband’s latest research and of the red-plating process. Whether she had also told him to watch me, I could not be sure. I had begun to wonder if Karubé and the wife would not one day steal the secret, and I was telling myself that it might be well to do a little watching. I was therefore under no illusion that the two of them did not have similar doubts. When I was the object of suspicious looks I did, it is true, feel somewhat uncomfortable; but it amused me to think, perhaps impudently, that I too was watching.

Then the master told me of his new research: he had long been looking for a way to tarnish metal without using ferric chloride. So far he had found nothing satisfactory. He wondered if in my spare time I would help him. However, good-natured as he was, I thought he should not be giving out news of so important a matter. Still, I was touched that he should trust me. It did not occur to me that the trusted one is the loser, and that the master was thus perpetually the winner over us all; but that bottomless childishness was not something one acquired, and it gave him his worth. I thanked him from my heart and told him that I would do what I could.

I thought I would like at some time in my life to have someone thank me from his heart. But since the master had no petty thoughts about doing and being done by, I could only bow lower before him. I was caught as one hypnotized. Miracles, I found, are not worked from without, they are rather the result of one’s own inadequacy. With me as with Karubé, the master came first. I began to feel hostile toward the wife who controlled him, hostile toward everything she did. Not only did I wonder by what right such a woman monopolized such a man, I even thought occasionally of how I might free him from her. The motives that made Karubé lash out at me became clear as day. When I saw him I saw myself, and was fascinated.

One day the master called me into the dark room. He was holding a piece of aniline-coated brass over an alcohol burner, and he began to explain. In colouring a plate, one must pay the most careful attention to changes under heat. The sheet of brass was now purple, but presently it would be brown-black, and when, at length, it turned black, the promise would be that in the next test it would be roundly defeated by ferric chloride. The colouring process, he said was a matter of catching a midway stage in a given transformation. He then ordered me to make burning tests with as many chemicals as possible. I became fascinated with the organic relationships between compounds and elements, and as my interest grew I learned to see delicate organic movements in inorganic substances. The discovery that in the tiniest things a law, a machine, is at work came to me as the beginning of a spiritual awakening.

When Karubé noticed that I had free entry to the dark room (until then no one had been admitted), the colour of his face changed. He was thinking, no doubt, that the care with which he had watched me had been wasted, since what was not permitted to him … to him who thought only of the master … was permitted to me, a newcomer. Still more, he was thinking that unless he was careful he would find himself completely in my power. I knew that I should be more circumspect, but who was Karubé that I should worry about him at every move I made? I felt no sympathy for him, only a cool, detached interest in what the fool would be up to next, and I continued to treat him with lofty indifference.

He was infuriated. Once when I needed a punch he had been using it disappeared. Hadn’t he been using it until a minute ago, I asked. What had disappeared had disappeared whether he had been using it or not, he answered, and I could go on hunting until I found it. That was true, I thought; but hunt as I would I could not find it. Then I happened to glance at his pocket and there it was. Silently, I reached for it. Who the devil did I think I was, reaching into a person’s pocket without permission? Another person’s pocket … while we were here in the shop everyone’s pocket was everyone else’s, I retorted. Because that was the way I felt, he said, I was the sort that would go around stealing secrets.

“When did I steal anything? If helping him with his work means stealing, then you’re stealing too,” said I.

For a moment he was silent. Then, lips quivering, he stammered: “Get out of here! Get out of this shop!”

“All right, I’ll go. But I owe it to him not to leave until his research has gone a little farther.”

“Then I’m going.”

I tried to quiet him. “You’ll only be causing trouble. Wait until I leave myself.”

But he insisted he would go.

“All right. Go ahead. I’ll take on the work of the two of us.”

With that he snatched up the powdered calcium at his elbow and threw it into my face.

I knew that I was wrong, but wrongness could be interesting. I saw his impatience as clear as day, the fretful irritation in the good heart of the man. I relaxed to enjoy the sport, and at the same time I knew that it would not do, and sought to quiet him a bit. I had been wrong to ignore him. It would have taken more of a person than I was, however, to cower before each new wave of indignation. The smaller one is the more one does to make people angry. As Karubé grew progressively angrier I saw the measure of my own smallness. In the end, I no longer knew what to do, with myself or with Karubé. Never before had I found myself so unmanageable. It has been well said that the spirit follows the dimensions of the body. In silence, mine seemed to follow them exactly.

After a time I went into the dark room and, to precipitate a bismuthal dye, began heating potassium chromate in a test tube. That too was an unwise move. The fact that I had free entry into the dark room had already aroused his envy, and now I went in again. He exploded, of course. The moment the dark-room door opened, he took me by the collar and threw me to the floor. I let him have his way, indeed I almost threw myself down. Violence was the only thing that worked with a person like me. He looked up to see whether the potassium chromate had spilled, and while he was about it he made a hasty circuit of the room. Then he came back and stood over me, glaring … apparently the trip around the room had accomplished nothing. Since he was now wondering what to do with himself, he might well decide to kick me if I moved. For a few tense moments I asked myself what exactly I was doing; but soon I began to feel dreamy. I had been thinking that I must let him have a really good tantrum, and by the time I had concluded that he was angry enough to be satisfied I was quite at ease myself. I looked up to see how much damage he had done. The devastation, I decided, was worst on my own face. Calcium was gritty in my mouth and ears. Still not sure that I should get up, I looked at the shining pile of aluminium cuttings by my nose and was astonished at the amount of work I had done in three days.

“Let’s stop this foolishness and get to work,” I said. “There’s aluminium to be coated.”

But Karubé had no mind to work. “Suppose we do your face instead.”

Shoving my head deep into the cuttings, he rubbed it back and forth like a wash cloth. I visualized my face being polished by a mountain of little plates from the doors of houses, and thought how disturbing a thing violence could be. As he rubbed, the corners of the aluminium stabbed at the wrinkles and hollows of my face. Worse, the half-dried lacquer stuck to my skin. It would be swelling soon. I concluded that I had done my duty and started for the dark room again. Thereupon he seized my arm, twisted it behind my back, and pushed my face against the window, thinking, apparently, to slash it with glass splinters.

The violence would not go on long, I was sure. But in fact it went on and on. Though much of the blame was no doubt mine, my contrition began to fade. My face, which I had hoped wore a diffident, conciliatory expression, was swelling more and more painfully, and offering a pretext for new violence. I knew that Karubé no longer enjoyed being angry, but the matter was beyond his control.

As he took me toward a vat of the most poisonous corrosive, I turned on him: “It’s your business of course if you want to torture me, but the experiments I’ve been working on in the dark room are experiments no one else has done, and if they’re successful there’s no telling what profits they’ll bring in. You won’t let me work, and now you’ve upset the solution I spent all that time on. Clean it up!”

“Why don’t you let me work with you, then?”

I could not tell him that the decision was out of my hands, that a person who could not even read a chemical equation would be less of a help than a hindrance. It may have been a little cruel of me, but I took him into the dark room, showed him the closely written equations, and explained them to him.

“If you think you’d find it interesting, go ahead … mix and remix after these figures. Go ahead! You can do it every day in my place, all day long.” For the first time, I had the better of him.

With the fighting over, I found life easier for a time. Then, suddenly, Karubé and I were extremely busy. An order came from a certain municipal office to do name plates for a whole city, fifty thousand of them in ten days. The wife was delighted, but we knew that we would have to go virtually without sleep. The master borrowed a craftsman from another name-plate shop. At first I was overwhelmed by the sheer volume of work; but soon I began to see something strange in the manner of the new craftsman, Yashiki. Although his awkwardness and his sharp glance did suggest a craftsman, I suspected that he might perhaps have been sent to steal our secrets. If I were to speak of my suspicions, however, there would be no way of knowing what Karubé might do to him, and I decided to keep quiet for a time and only watch. I noted that his attention was always on the way Karubé shook his vat. Karubé’s work was the second speciality of the shop, something no other shop could imitate. Yashiki put sheets of brass into a solution of caustic soda to wash away the varnish and glue that Karubé used with corrosive ferric chloride. It was therefore natural that Yashiki should be interested. Still, given my doubts, the very naturalness of it was cause for further doubting.

But Karubé, more and more pleased with himself now that he had an audience, was in great form as he shook his vat of ferric chloride. Since he had had doubts about me, he should naturally have had still greater doubts about Yashiki. Quite the reverse was true: he explained the shaking of the vat in such esoteric terms that I wondered where he might have learned them. You always laid the inscription face down, it seemed, and let the weight of the metal do the work. The uninscribed surface corroded more rapidly … suppose Yashiki have a try for himself. At first I listened nervously to the chatter, but in the end I decided that it made no difference. One might as well teach the secrets to anyone who wanted them. I would no longer be on my guard against Yashiki.

My chief gain from the incident was the discovery that secrets leak out through the conceit of their possessor. But it was not only conceit that led Karubé to tell everything. There could be no doubt that Yashiki was an able seducer. Though the light in his eyes was sharp, it had a strange charm, when it softened, that had the effect of making one’s caution melt away. That same charm came at me each time he spoke, but I was so busy with all the jobs I had to rush through that I paid no attention: from early in the morning I had to lacquer heated brass and dry it, and put metal coated with ammonium dichromate out to react in the sun, and add aniline, and rush from burner to polisher to cutter. Yashiki had no charms for me.

On about the fifth night I awoke and saw Yashiki, who should have been at night work, come from the dark room and go into the wife’s room. While I was wondering what could be taking him there at such an hour, I unfortunately fell asleep again. The first thought that came into my mind the next morning was of Yashiki. The trouble was that I gradually became less sure whether I had actually seen him or whether it had been a dream. I had had similar experiences from overwork before, and I suspected that I had only been dreaming. I could imagine what reasons he might have for going into the dark room, but I had no idea how to explain the other. I could not believe that the wife and Yashiki had been carrying on in secret. The easiest solution, then, would be to dismiss it all as a dream.

At about noon, the master began laughing and asking his wife if there had been anything out of the ordinary on the previous evening.

“I may be a heavy sleeper,” she answered quietly, “but I know who took the money. If you have to steal it, you might at least do it more cleverly.”

He laughed still more delightedly.

Had it been not Yashiki but the master I had seen going into her room? I thought it odd that the latter should be sneaking into his own wife’s room, chronically short of money though he was.

“It was you I saw coming from the dark room?” I asked.

“The dark room? I don’t know anything about the dark room.”

The confusion deepened. Had it been Yashiki after all in the dark room? It seemed certain that the man who had stolen into the wife’s room was not Yashiki but the husband, and I could not think that I had only dreamed of Yashiki emerging from the dark room. The suspicions that had for a time left me began to gather again. I saw, however, that doubting in solitude was like doubting oneself and did one no good. I had better ask Yashiki directly. But if I did and it had in fact been he, then he would be upset, and to have upset him would be no gain.

Still the master was of such interest that I thought it a pity not to push farther. For one thing, the secret formula for combining bismuth and zirconium silicate … the one on which had been so hard at work … and the formula for the red amorphous selenium stain that was the master’s speciality were both kept in the dark room. Not only would their loss be a severe blow to the business, but the loss of my own secret would take all the zest from life. If he was trying to steal it, there was no reason why I should not try to keep it hidden. I determined to suspect him more intensely. When I thought how, after having been suspected by Karubé, it had now become my turn to suspect Yashiki, I wondered if I would be giving Yashiki the prolonged pleasure I had had in making a fool of Karubé; but then I reconsidered and decided it would do me good to try being made a fool of for once. I turned my full attention to Yashiki.

Perhaps because he noticed how my eyes lit up, Yashiki began to look exclusively in directions where his eyes would not meet mine. I was afraid that if I made him too uncomfortable I would have him taking flight. I must be more circumspect. Eyes are strange things, however. When glances that have been wandering at the same heights of consciousness meet, each seems to sink to the farthest depths of the other.

I would be at the polisher talking of this and that, and my glance would ask him; “Have you stolen the formulae yet?”

“Not yet, not yet,” that burning eye would seem to answer.

“Well, be quick about it.”

“It takes a devil of a long time, now that you know what I’m after.”

“My formulae are full of mistakes anyway. It wouldn’t do you much good to steal them now.”

“I can correct them.”

So the imaginary conversations went while Yashiki and I worked together; and gradually I began to feel friendlier towards him than towards anyone else in the establishment. The charm that had excited Karubé and made him tell all the secrets was working on me. I would read the newspaper with Yashiki, and on subjects that interested us both, our opinion would always agree. Especially on technical matters, I would speed up when he speeded up and slow down when he slowed down. Our views on politics and our plans for society were alike. The only question on which we disagreed was the propriety of trying to steal another person’s invention. He had his own views, and thought that there was nothing wrong with stealing if it contributed to the advance of civilization. The person who tries to steal may in fact be better than the one who does not. Comparing his spy activities with my own attempts to hide inventions, I concluded that he was doing more for the world than I. So I thought … and so Yashiki made me think. He seemed to come nearer and nearer, and yet I wanted to keep at least the secret of the amorphous selenium stain from him. Even while I was his closest friend, therefore, I was the one who most got in his way.

I told him that Karubé had suspected me of being a spy when I first came to work here, and had almost killed me. Karubé had not done the same to him, laughed Yashiki, because he had learned his lesson with me.

“And that’s why you found it so easy to be suspicious of me,” he added mischievously.

“If you knew all along that I was suspicious, you must have come here all ready to be suspected.”

“That’s right,” he said.

It was as good as admitting that he had come to steal our secrets. I could not help being astonished at the openness with which he had said it. Perhaps he had seen through me and was sure that in my surprise I would come to respect him. I glared at him for some seconds.

But Yashiki’s expression had already changed. Somewhat loftily, he went on: “When you come to work in a shop like this, it’s the usual thing to have people think you’re up to something. But what could a person like me do? No … I won’t begin apologizing now. Suppose we just work and let work. The worst thing,” he laughed, “is having someone like you look at me as if I ought to be doing harm when I’m not.”

He had touched a sensitive spot. I felt a certain sympathy for the man. He had borne the sort of treatment I was now getting.

“You can’t be enjoying the work very much if it makes you say things like that,” I said.

Yashiki pulled his shoulders back and shot a glance at me, then passed the moment off with a quick laugh.

I made it my policy to let him plot what he would. A person of his ability would no doubt have seen everything from a single trip into the dark room, and, having let him see, one could do nothing, short of killing him, but take the consequences. Perhaps one should rather be grateful for having met such a remarkable person in such an unlikely place.

I went even further: I came to think that it would be a good thing if, in the course of time, he did succeed in taking advantage of the master and stealing our secrets.

One day I said to him: “I don’t mean to stay here long myself. Do you know of any good openings?”

“I meant to ask you the same thing. If we’re alike even in that, what right have you to be lecturing me?”

“I see what you mean. But don’t misunderstand me. I don’t mean to be lecturing and I don’t mean to be prying. It’s just that I respect you, and I thought you might let me be your pupil.”

“Pupil?” He smiled wryly. Then, abruptly, he was sober again. “Go and have a look at a ferric chloride factory where the trees and grass have died for a hundred yards around, and talk to me again afterwards.”

I had no idea what the ‘afterwards’ would be, but I thought I had a glimpse of his reasons for thinking me rather simple. But what were the limits to which he would go in making me look foolish? They seemed out of sight. Gradually I lost interest, and as I did so I thought I would have to try at making him look foolish. I had been attracted to him, however, and the effort was abortive … in fact it was comical. These superior people put one through a harsh discipline!

One day when we were about to finish the rush order, Karubé threw Yashiki on his face under the cutter. “Admit it, admit it!” he said.

Apparently he had caught Yashiki sneaking into the dark room.

Astride Yashiki’s back, Karubé was pounding at his head when I came into the shop. So it’s finally happened, I said to myself. I felt no impulse to go to Yashiki’s rescue, however. Indeed I was rather a Judas, curious to see how the man I respected would respond to violence. I looked coolly into Yashiki’s twisted face. He was struggling to get up, one side of he head in the varnish that was flowing across the floor; but each time Karubé’s knee hit him in the back he fell on his face again. His trousers were pushed up, and his stout legs were bare, threshing awkwardly at the floor. This rather spirited resistance struck me as utterly foolish; but revulsion was stronger than disdain, as if the face of the respected one, ugly from pain, showed an ugliness of spirit as well. I was troubled less by the violence itself than by the fact that Karubé could force a person to wear such an expression.

Karubé had no eye for expressions, ugly or otherwise. He took Yashiki’s neck in both hands and pounded his head against the floor. I began to doubt whether my indifference to suffering was entirely proper, but I felt that if I were to make even the slightest move to help one or the other I would be guilty of still greater impropriety. I also began to wonder whether Yashiki, not prepared to confess in spite of the pain to which that ugly, twisted face testified, had actually stolen anything from the dark room, and I turned to the task of reading his secret in the furrows of the disordered face. From time to time he would look at me. To give him strength, I offered a contemptuous smile each time his eyes met mine. He made a really determined effort to overturn Karubé. He was helpless, however, and there was a new rain of blows.

Starting up when I laughed at him, Yashiki was showing his true colours. The more he moved himself to action, it would seem, the more he gave himself away. Though I tried to laugh at him, I began to feel something like true contempt, until, as the moments passed, I was no longer able to laugh. He had a way of choosing the least likely moments for his struggles. A most ordinary human being, no different from the rest of us.

“Suppose you stop hitting him,” I said to Karubé. “Won’t it do just to talk to him?”

“Stand up.” Karubé gave him a kick and poured metal fragments over his head, much as he had buried my head in the same fragments.

Yashiki edged away and stood with his back to the wall. He explained rapidly that he had gone into the dark room in search of ammonia. He had been unable to clean glue from sheet metal with caustic soda.

“If you needed ammonia, why didn’t you ask for it?” said Karubé, and hit him again. “Anyone ought to know that there’s no place in a name-plate factory as important as the dark room.”

I knew that Yashiki’s explanation was absurd, but the thunder of fists was too violent. “You ought at least to stop hitting him,” I said.

With that Karubé turned on me. “It’s a conspiracy between the two of you, is it?”

“You can answer that yourself if you give it a little thought,” I was about to say; but it occurred to me that our doings could not only be thought a conspiracy, they might in fact be something very like one. I had calmly let Yashiki go into the dark room, and even thought myself a lesser person for not stealing the master’s secrets. The result was, in effect, a conspiracy.

As my conscience began to trouble me, I took on a confident manner. “Conspiracy or no conspiracy, I think you’ve hit him enough,” I said.

With that Karubé hit me on the jaw. “I suppose you let him into the dark room.”

I was less worried about being hit than eager to show Yashiki, already hit, that I was now being hit for taking his crime upon myself. I felt almost exhilarated. “Look at me now!” I wanted to say. I had a strange feeling, however, that Karubé and I must now seem the conspirators. Yashiki must think that I could so unconcernedly allow myself to be hit only because I had arranged to be hit. I glanced up at him … he seemed to have come to life now that there were two of us.

“Hit him!” he said, flailing away at the back of Karubé’s head.

I was not particularly angry, but because of the pain I took a certain pleasure in the exercise of hitting back. I hit Karubé in the face several times. Thus assaulted from before and behind, he turned his main attention to Yashiki. I tugged from behind, and Yashiki, still flailing away, took advantage of the opening to knock him down and sit on him. I was astonished at how lively Yashiki had become. Doubtless it was because he thought that I, angry at having been hit without reason, was with him in the attack.

But I had no need of further revenge. I stood silently by and watched. Effortlessly, Karubé overturned Yashiki, and began pounding him more fiercely than before. Again Yashiki was helpless. After Karubé had pounded for a time, he suddenly stood up and came at me, perhaps thinking I would attack him from the rear. It was a foregone conclusion that I would lose in single combat with Karubé. I kept my peace once more and waited for Yashiki to help me. But Yashiki began hitting not Karubé but me. Unable to cope with even one adversary, I could do nothing against two. I lay there and let them hit.

Had I been so wrong? As I lay doubled up with my head in my arms, I wondered if I had so misbehaved that I must be hit by the two of them. No doubt my conduct had been surprising, but had the other two not also chosen courses that one might call strange? There was no reason for Yashiki, at least, to be hitting me. It is true that I had not joined him in the attack on Karubé; but he had been a fool to expect me to.

In any event, the only one who had not been attacked by the other two simultaneously was Yashiki. The one who most deserved to be hit had most cleverly escaped.

By the time I began to think I would like to give him a cuffing for his pains, we were all exhausted. The cause of the whole senseless fight had clearly been less that Yashiki had gone into the dark room than that we were exhausted from having made 50,000 name plates in such a short time. Ferric chloride fumes wore on one’s nerves and disordered one’s reason, and instinct seemed to show itself from every pore. If one chose to be angry at each small incident in a name plate factory, there would be no end to anger.

I had, none the less, been hit by Yashiki, and the event was not to be forgotten. What would he be thinking? If his behaviour gave me the occasion, I might find ways to make him ashamed of himself.

When the incident stopped … though one could hardly have said that it had an ending … Yashiki turned to me. “It was wrong of me to hit you, but I had to finish the business. There was no telling how long Karubé would go on hitting me. I’m sorry.”

That was true, I had to agree. If I, the least guilty, had not been hit by the two of them, the fighting would have gone on and on. I smiled wryly. I had then been protecting Yashiki in his thievery. And I had to forgo the pleasure of making him ashamed of himself. The man was an astonishingly able plotter.

In some chagrin, I said to him: “If you’ve been so clever at using me, I’m sure you’ve been just as clever at getting secrets from the dark room.”

“If even you think that, it’s only natural that Karubé should have hit me.” He laughed his practised laugh. “Weren’t you the one who turned him on me?”

I could offer no explanation if he chose to think that I had provoked the incident. Perhaps he had hit me because he suspected that I was in league with Karubé. It was becoming harder and harder to know what the two thought of me.

One thing was clear, however, in all the unclearness: that Karubé and Yashiki, in their separate ways, were suspicious of me. But could I know how clear this fact so clear to me really was? Some invisible machine, in any case, was constantly measuring us, as if it understood everything that went on among us, and pushing us according to the results of its measurements. Even while we nursed our suspicions, we looked forward to the next day, when the work would be over, and we could rest. Forgetting exhaustion and enmity in pleasant thoughts of payment, we finished the day; and the next day a new blow came.

On his way home the master lost the whole of the money for those 50,000 plates. The labours that had not allowed us a decent night’s sleep had come to precisely nothing. The sister who had first introduced me had gone with him, foreseeing that he would drop the money … and so at least that much ran true to form. For the first time in a very long while he would like to have the pleasure of holding the money we had earned, all of it, he said. Quite understanding, the sister let him have it for a few minutes. And in those few minutes the flaw worked like a sure machine. Since of course no one thought that the lost money would come back, we only sat looking at one another (though we did report the loss to the police). We could no longer expect to be paid and exhaustion suddenly overtook us. We lay motionless in the shop. Smashing some boards that lay at hand and flinging away the pieces, Karubé turned on me.

“Why are you smiling?”

I did not mean to be smiling, but since he said I was, presumably I was. No doubt because the master was really too comical. The comedy being probably a result of long years of ferric chloride fumes, one felt anew that few things were to be so feared as a disordering of the mind. What a wondrous system it was whose workings made a man’s defects draw others to him and leave them unable to fear!

I did not answer. It would do no good to explain.

Then Karubé stopped glaring at me. “We’ll have a drink!” he said, clapping his hands.

He had spoken at a moment when one or another of us was sure to speak. Inevitably, our thoughts turned to liquor. At such times there was nothing for young men to do but drink. Not even Yashiki could have guessed that because of the liquor he would lose his life.

That night we sat drinking in the shop until after midnight. When I awoke I saw that Yashiki had mistaken leftover ammonium dichromate for water, drunk from the jug, and died. Even now I do not think, as apparently the men from the shop that sent him here do, that Karubé killed him. Although it was I who had again that day done the glueing in which ammonium dichromate is used, Karubé and not I had suggested that we drink, and it was natural that suspicion should fall more heavily on him. Still, it did not seem likely that Karubé could have conceived the dark plot of getting him drunk and killing him unless we had thought of drinking much earlier in the evening. Karubé was none the less suspected, probably because of the threatening manner that immediately gave him away as one who liked violence.

I do not say with finality that Karubé did not kill Yashiki. I can only say that my limited knowledge makes me able to offer the statement that he did not. For I also know that he, like me, must have thought, upon seeing Yashiki go into the dark room, that there was no way short of killing him to keep him from learning the secrets. I had thought that the way to kill him would be to get him drunk and give him ammonium dichromate, and the same thought must have run through Karubé’s mind. Yet not only Yashiki and I were drunk. Karubé was too. It therefore seems unlikely that Karubé gave Yashiki the poison. And if the possibilities that had troubled him through the days had worked in his drunken mind to make him offer Yashiki ammonium dichromate, then perhaps, by the same token, it was I who was the criminal.

Indeed how can I say absolutely that I did not kill him? Was it not I, rather than Karubé, who feared him? All the while he was there, was it not I who was most on guard to see him going into the dark room? Was it not I who harboured the deepest resentment at the idea of having him steal the bismuth and zirconium silicate formula I was working on?

Perhaps I murdered him. I knew better than anyone where the ammonium dichromate was. Before drunkenness overtook me, I kept thinking about Yashiki and what he would be doing the next day, somewhere, when he would be free to leave. And if he had lived, would I not have lost more than Karubé? And had not my head, like the master’s, been attacked by ferric chloride?

I no longer understand myself. I only feel the sharp point of an approaching machine, aimed at me. Someone must judge me. How can I know what I have done?

Yokomitsu Riichi (1898–1947)
This story was first published in 1930
Translated by Edward Seidensticker