Abandoned Child

Ryūnosuke Akutagawa

Abandoned Child

Ryūnosuke Akutagawa

There is a temple called Shinkyo-ji in Nagasumi-cho, Asakusa, but - no, it is not a large temple. It is not a large temple, but it is said to be a temple with a long history, and is said to have a wooden statue of Nichiro Shonin. In the autumn of 1889, a boy was found abandoned in front of the temple's gate. There was no year of birth, nor was there any paper with his name written on it. --The boy was wrapped in an old yellow hachijo kimono, with a pair of women's sandals with a broken cord as a pillow.

At the time, the abbot of Shinkyo-ji Temple was an elderly man called Nissho Osho, and just as he was doing his morning service, the gatekeeper, who was also a good old man, came to inform him of the discovery of the discarded child. The monk Osho, who was facing the Buddha, replied without even looking back at the gatekeeper: "Well then, come and let me hold him." Not only that, but as soon as the gatekeeper came to place the child in his arms, he himself received him and said: "Oh, this is a lovely child. Don't cry. From today onwards, I will feed you." And he began to soothe him in a casual manner. ――What happened at this time? Later on, the gatekeepers, who favoured the monk, often told visitors about this incident while they were selling star anise and incense sticks. As you may know, Nisso Osho was a plasterer from Fukagawa, but in his nineteenth year he fell from a scaffold and lost his sanity for a time.

The monk named him Yunosuke and began to bring him up as if he were his own child. But, as the temple had been devoid of women since the Meiji Restoration, it was not an easy task to bring him up. The monk himself would take care of him in his spare time during sutra chanting, from guarding him to taking care of his milk. It is said that once, when Yunosuke was suffering from wind, there was a Buddhist memorial service for an eminent parishioner called Shittatsu in Kawagishi's Nishijin area, and the eminent monk, with a feverish child in one hand and a crystal prayer bead in the other, performed the sutra reading as usual.

The monk, Nisso Osho, was a great hero, but his heart was fragile and he wanted to see the child's birth parents. Whenever he went up to give a sermon - even today, if you visit the temple, you will see an old sign hanging from a pillar in front of the temple saying "Sermon, 16th of every month." Sometimes he would draw on Japanese and Chinese sayings and tell them that the reason for remembering the love and affection between parents and children is to repay the debt of gratitude to Buddha as well. However, although sermon days came and went, not a single one of them volunteered to identify themselves as the parents of the abandoned child. --When Yunosuke was three years old, a woman came to him once claiming to be his parent, but she was a woman with a white powder burn. However, she must have been planning to use the abandoned child as a seed for some evil scheme. When he questioned her carefully, he found that she had nothing but suspicious things to say, so Nisso Osho, who had a strong temper and a volatile temperament, used his tongue and almost no strength at all, and after giving her a lot of criticism, he immediately drove her away.

In the winter of 1894, when the world was abuzz with rumours of the Sino-Japanese War, on the day of his sermon on the 16th, a woman of thirty-four or thirty-five years of age and good looks followed him calmly. In the storehouse, Yunosuke was peeling tangerines by the hearth with a kettle on it. --The woman, without even a second glance, put her hand in front of the monk and, suppressing a trembling voice, said boldly, "I am the mother of this child." The monk, Nisso Osho, was so taken aback by this that for a while he could not even say a word of greeting. The woman, however, paid no attention to the monk, staring intently at the tatami mats, almost as if she were reciting from memory - and yet the upheaval in her heart was evident all over her body and soul - a recitation of the thanks she had received for her upbringing up to the present day.

After a few moments, the monk raised his chin and, interrupting the woman's speech, urged her to tell him why she had abandoned the child. The woman, with her eyes still fixed on the tatami mats, began to tell her story.

Five years ago, her husband had opened a rice shop in Asakusa Tawaramachi, but he got involved in the stock market and finally ran away in the night, leaving the family fortune in ruins. But in this situation, the only thing standing in the way was the new-born boy. Unfortunately, the woman had no milk, so on the night they were about to leave Tokyo, the couple abandoned the baby in front of the Shinkyo-ji temple gate, weeping.

The husband went to work for a shipping company and the woman became a servant girl in a yarn shop, where they worked hard for about two years. In the summer of the third year, the owner of the shipping company, seeing her husband's honesty and hard work, allowed them to open a small branch on the main street of Honmoku, which was finally opening up at that time. The woman quit her job and joined her husband, which goes without saying.

The branch office prospered considerably, and when the year changed again, a strong-looking baby boy was born to the couple. Of course, the memory of the tragic abandoned child must have lingered in the couple's minds during this time. In particular, every time the woman poured her meagre milk into the baby's mouth, she was reminded clearly of the night she had to leave Tokyo. But the shop was busy. The child grew bigger and bigger every day. She had some money in the bank. --The couple was able to enjoy a happy family life for the first time in a long time.

But it wasn't long before such ill fortune followed. Just when she thought she could finally smile again, in the spring of the 27th year, her husband fell ill with typhoid fever and died after not having been on the bed for more than a week. If that had been the only reason, the woman could have given up, but what she couldn't bear to think of was that even her child, who had been born before her husband's death, suddenly died of diarrhoea within a hundred days of his death. The woman cried like a madwoman day and night. No, not just for the time being. For the next six months and a half, she even had to live in a state of almost complete despair.

When her grief wore off, the first thing that came to her mind was to see her abandoned eldest son. "If he is a good boy, I want to take him into my hands and bring him up, no matter how much pain he is going through." —She felt as if she couldn't resist the temptation to do so. The woman immediately got on a train and arrived in front of the Shinkyo-ji temple in Tokyo, a place she had missed so much. It was the morning of the 16th sermon day.

The woman immediately went to the temple and wanted to ask someone about her child's whereabouts. But of course, she would not be able to see the monk until the sermon was over. So, in spite of her frustration, the woman joined the many good men and women who filled the main hall and lent her ears to the sermons of the monk, Nisso Osho. --In fact, they were only waiting for him to finish his sermon.

The monk told the story of the meeting of the lady of the lotus blossom, Lady Rengefujin, with her five hundred children, and kindly told them about the preciousness of the love between parents and their children. Lady Rengefunjin gives birth to five hundred eggs. The eggs are washed into a river and brought up by the king of a neighbouring kingdom. Five hundred soldiers born from the eggs come to attack the castle of Lady Rengefunjin, who does not even know her sons. When she heard this, she climbed up to the upper floor of the castle and said: "I am the mother of five hundred of you. The proof is here." Then she showed her beautiful hands squeezing the milk. Like a spring of five hundred streams, the milk poured out from the breasts of the lady on the high tower and into the mouths of the soldiers, without a single leak. ――This allegorical tale from the Shinkyo-ji temple moved the heart of this unfortunate woman, who was listening to the sermon without even hearing it. That is why, when the sermon was over, the woman, with tears in her eyes, rushed from the main hall along the corridor and immediately came to the temple's reception hall.

When she had finished listening to his sermon, Nisso Osho invited Yunosuke, who was standing by the hearth, to meet his mother, whose face he did not know, for the first time in five years. The monk naturally knew that the woman's words were not a lie. When the woman picked up Yunosuke and held him in her arms for a while, tears shone beneath her eyelashes as she smiled at him, even though he was an open-minded and generous man.

The next few days were no different. Yunosuke's mother took him back to their home in Yokohama. After the death of her husband and children, she followed the advice of a sympathetic carrier and his wife and taught needlework to others, earning a modest but comfortable living.

When the guest had finished his long story, he picked up the cup of tea in front of his knees, but did not put his lips to it.

"That discarded child is me."

I nodded silently and poured hot water from the kettle into the kyusu. Even though we had never met before, I had already guessed that the story of this lovely abandoned child was the personal history of my guest, Matsubara Yunosuke l, from his childhood.

After a period of silence, I spoke to the guest.

"Is your mother still in good health?"

The answer was surprising.

"No, she died the year before last. --But the woman I just mentioned was not my mother."

When the guest saw my surprise, a smile flashed in his eyes.

"I am not lying when I say that my mother ran a rice shop in Asakusa Tawaramachi, or that she went to Yokohama and had a hard time there. However, it was later discovered that while she said she had abandoned her child, this was a lie. Just the year before my mother died, I was walking around the Niigata area with the business of my shop - as you know, my shop is in the cotton yarn business - when I met a sackmaker who lived next door to my mother's house in Tawaramachi, and we got on a train together. He told me that his mother had given birth to a baby girl at the time and that she had died before she could close the shop again. After returning to Yokohama, I immediately took a copy of the family register so that my mother would not know, and found that, as the sackcloth seller had said, it must have been a girl who was born in Tawaramachi. Moreover, she died at the age of three months. I don't know how my mother could have known that I was a child, but she had lied about my being an abandoned child in order to support me. She did so for more than twenty years, almost forgetting to eat or sleep, and she devoted herself to me.

"I don't know how many times I have thought about it, but even though I don't know the truth, it is the most important thing. The most plausible reason, however, is that the sermons of Nisso Osho, who was late with her husband and children, made an extraordinary impression on my mother's heart. I think that as she listened to his sermons, she was inspired to take on the role of a mother I did not know. She must have learnt that I was being cared for by the temple from the visitors who came to hear the sermons at the time. Or perhaps the temple gatekeeper told her."

The guest kept his mouth shut for a moment, then, with a thoughtful look in his eyes, he sipped his tea as if remembering.

I couldn't help but ask: "So when you said you weren't her child, did you tell your mother that you knew you weren't her child?"

"No, I didn't tell her that, because it would have been cruel to her if I had told her. My mother didn't tell me a single word about it until she died. I guess she thought it would be cruel to me to speak of it. In fact, my feelings towards my mother changed drastically after I found out that I was not her child."

"What do you mean by that?"

I looked into the eyes of my guest.

"I have come to miss her even more than I did before. Ever since I discovered her secret, my mother has become more than a mother to me, a discarded child."

The guest replied somberly, wistfully. As if he didn't know that he himself was more than a child.

(July 1920)