Free Blue Bamboo: Tales by Dazai Osamu by Dazaï Osamu Page B

fit to smile.
    Yu Jung’s parents had both passed away when he was a child, and he had been brought up in the care of a succession of relatives who shuttled him from one home to the next. Once his inheritance was exhausted, however, these relatives began to look upon him as little more than a nuisance, and finally one of his uncles, a drunkard who was well in his cups at the time, pressed upon the young man a dark-complected, skinny, and uneducated maidservant from his own home, arrogantly ordering him to take her as his bride and pronouncing it an excellent match. Yu Jung was thoroughly repulsed by the proposition, but the uncle was, after all, one of the relatives who’d raised him and a person to whom he therefore felt a lifelong obligation. Being a man for whom filial piety was the highest law, Yu Jung could scarcely vent his anger at this outrageous imposition, and so, fighting back the tears and feeling more dead than alive, he meekly suffered himself to be wed to that skinny, withered, hideous woman two years his senior who, to add insult to injury, was rumored to be the drunken uncle’s mistress.
    Ugly as this woman may have been, by no means did she compensate for it with a gentle heart. She had nothing but scorn for Yu Jung’s scholarship, and when she heard him muttering something to the effect that “The Way of Great Learning leads to the highest excellence,” she laughed through her nose and said, with all the sarcasm and malice she could muster, “Excellence? Better a way that leads to a little money, or a decent meal,” then slapped a bundle of her own dirty laundry in his face and added: “Look here, these need washing. It wouldn’t hurt you to help me out around here now and then.”
    Yu Jung tucked the clothing under his arm and headed for the riverbed behind the house, reciting a poem beneath his breath as he went:
    A whinnying of horses
    As daylight wanes.
    A clash of swords;
    The first breath of autumn.
    The poem did little to relieve his sense of the dreariness of life, however, or the feeling that he was an exile in the land of his own birth, and with a great, gaping emptiness in his heart he wandered aimlessly up and down the riverbank, like a man bereft of his wits.
    “Such a wretched way of life is an insult to my august ancestors,” he thought. “This fall I will be thirty—the time when a man must stand firm. By heaven, I shall. I shall rise to the challenge and spare no effort until I have made a great name for myself!”
    Having arrived at this momentous decision, Yu Jung strode back to his house, dealt his wife a resounding blow, and marched off to the capital, brimming with confidence, to sit for the government service examination. Unfortunately, his many years as a starving scholar had robbed him of strength and focus; the answers he wrote were hopelessly garbled, and he failed the exam spectacularly. His sorrow, as he trudged wearily homeward, was more than mere words can convey, and since he hadn’t eaten for some time, he was soon so famished he could scarcely walk. When he reached the King Wu Shrine, on the shore of Lake Tung-t’ing, he collapsed on the balcony in front of the main hall, sprawled on his back, and moaned.
    “Ah, what is this world but a realm of meaningless suffering? Since childhood I have devoted myself to studying the Way of the ancient sages and have remained ever vigilant, even in solitude, against unworthy thoughts. And yet, though I may have grasped a truth or two from time to time, I have been granted none of heaven’s blessings. Far from it: I’ve been subjected to ridicule and derision every day of my life. In spite of which, did I not take courage and boldly present myself at that examination? Yes! Only to fail miserably... In a world like this, where the brazen, the shameless, the evil-hearted alone prosper, a weak and penniless scholar like myself is destined forever to be a failure and a laughingstock. I struck my wife and dashed gallantly