Modern Japanese Stories/Wager in Mid-air

Kūchū no Geitō

Wager in Mid-air

by Ogawa Mimei

It was at a time when I had been reduced to painting street-signs for my living. My days were spent entirely in drawing huge advertisements on bill-boards for toothpaste, circuses, bottled beer and ladies’ underwear. At first the novelty of my new life made it tolerable, but soon I came to loathe it and to long for some form of escape even if only temporary.

Formerly when I had worked as a serious painter I had, of course, never taken the slightest interest in the pictures on bill-boards, let alone given any thought to the people who painted them. If anything, these pictures had struck me as an insult to my artistic sensibility. Yet now when I saw the little drawings printed on the covers of note-books in the stationer’s, or the designs glazed on the lids of paint-boxes, or even the bill-boards outside cinemas, I used to stop and look, and sometimes I found myself actually being moved by them. I suppose it was because I had come to realize that among the people who produced these drawings there must be many who, like myself, had once aspired to be real artists but had been forced by circumstances into this drudgery.

What made me begin to hate my new occupation, however, was not just the feeling that I was prostituting such talents as I might have; it was the relentless monotony. I soon learned that almost all the workers with whom I had now come to spend my time suffered to a greater or lesser extent from this sense of monotony. They were for ever discussing possible ways of breaking the tedium of their lives.

We would gather in the evening by the benches near the suburban tenements where we lived. One by one we arrived from different directions, exhausted at the end of a long day’s work in the heat. We sat down heavily on the benches or, if there was no longer any room, squatted beside it on the gravel, and indolently fanned ourselves as we chatted away oblivious to the passing of time. Along came a couple of young street-acrobats. One of them danced round with a lion’s mask while the other accompanied him on a tambourine. A girl wearing a red sash came out of the ice-cream parlour opposite where we sat and gave the boy a copper. Later a young woman strolled past with a samisen, her hair fastened in a bun with a green comb, and a baby on her back.

“Not bad looking, eh?”

“I bet she’s an ex-geisha or something. What do you think?”

She walked up and down the street in front of us. Occasionally she stopped and strummed on her samisen. Later a huge, dirty-looking woman in an advanced state of pregnancy waddled past us. We looked at her in fascination. She was the most repulsive woman we had ever seen. … So that day drew slowly to an end.

“A good job? Hell, there’s no such thing as a good job! It’s all a lot of sweat! If anyone thinks it’s fun making a living, he’s crazy.”

“No, we’ll never get anywhere this way. Just sweat away till we croak, that’s all! The only way to make money is gambling.”

“Gambling, eh?” said a large, dark-skinned bricklayer who was squatting next to the bench in his under-shirt. “I’ll tell you about gambling. When I lived in Shitaya, there was a girl in the neighbourhood about twenty-four years old. She was a pretty little piece, I can tell you! I used to watch her passing outside my window. She strutted past in her straw sandals with her head high in the air. She wore a big gold chain over her breast and always carried a shining patent leather handbag. She had a gold chain on the bag also. She lived in a poor looking sort of house and I got to wondering how she could afford to doll herself up like that. Then I heard she’d been gambling and made quite a pile. ‘That’s how to get rich,’ I thought to myself. ‘Even women can do it.’ Then early one morning on my way to work I saw a girl hurrying out of a low-class brothel. I just saw her back but there was something familiar about the way she walked. I followed her for a while and then saw her face as she got on a tram. It was the girl with the gold chain, all right! So much for gambling!”

“That’s right,” said a serious-looking man on the bench. “You can’t always hit it lucky. And even if you do, it doesn’t always work out. Why, only last week I saw in the paper that a certain man won a gambling pool or something. He’d been hard up all his life and then all of a sudden about half a million yen fell in his lap. What did he do? He went stark raving mad and murdered his wife with a hatchet! No, it’s no good when things change too much…. I’m not so sure it isn’t best to jog along the way we do.” The man sat looking straight ahead after he had spoken. He seemed quite moved by what he had said. After a while he got up and left. Then one by one the others began to leave, some to start their night-shifts, some for the public baths, some for home. Soon they had all gone except myself, a tin-smith called Chō and two others.

“Is it hard to learn the flute?” said Kichikō, an engineer’s mate. “I’d like to play the flute.”

“What an idea!” said Chō with a smile. “How’s a clumsy ox like you going to play the flute? Anyhow it takes years before you can play an instrument.”

“I suppose you’re a great hand at the flute,” said Kichikō.

“No, I can’t play. I like listening, though,” said Chō.

“Well, you’re a fine one to tell me I can’t play the flute! You’re a clumsy brute yourself.”

“I may not be able to play, but at least I know what it’s all about. You haven’t got the vaguest idea what art is. It’s not something you can learn like playing tiddly-winks!”

“Oh yes, I’d forgotten. You’re a great artist, aren’t you? said Kichikō laughing. “A great artist when it comes to singing songs in the beer parlour, I mean!”

“I’m good at standing on my hands,” announced Chō, beaming all over but with a touch of genuine pride. Chō was a rather silent man. He had a large round face—almost bloated, in fact. There was something about his expression that made one feel he was smiling inwardly all the time in a warm, pleasant way.

“Standing on your hands? What a very original art!” I said without thinking. We all laughed, including Chō.

I did not know why, but for some reason Chō’s hand-standing excited my curiosity. In time I came to learn Chō himself and from some of his friends how he had acquired his avocation. It appeared that he had once seen a girl doing a hand-standing stunt in the circus. Standing upright on her hands, she had crossed a long narrow plank suspended between two platforms high over the arena. Chō had been greatly impressed. There seemed to be no catch in this as in so many other circus tricks; it was purely the result of long practice. Suddenly it occurred to him, as he sat there in the circus, that he could learn the trick himself.

From then on, he began practising hand-stands whenever he had time—after meals, in the evenings and in the brief rest-periods between work. At least it broke the monotony.

Often he was discouraged and felt that he would never be any good. Yet he persevered. “It’s that girl,” he told me once, “that girl at the circus. I just can’t get her out of my mind. She was a real beauty, you know. Fine white teeth, red lips, lovely breasts, big, dark, mysterious eyes—she’s the prettiest girl I’ve seen.”

He had never seen her again but by his hand-standing he kept her memory alive. Apart from this there was, I guessed, a hidden motive that made him continue his exhausting pastime. By becoming himself an expert hand-stander, as great if not greater than this girl, was he not in some way derogating from the perfection which he had originally seen in her, thereby making her, in this respect at least, less wonderful? By surpassing her in the art of hand-standing, by taking for himself the praise that had originally all been hers, was he not somehow punishing her for being so completely unattainable?

“The trouble was,” said Chō, “I didn’t have a high narrow plank to practise on. But I got round this in the end. I found a straw mat with a thin black border to do my hand-stands. This black border became the plank and both edges became sheer drops hundreds of feet high. So when I practise walking along the edge of the mat on my hands, I’m as frightened of falling as I would be in the circus. Well, I’ve got now so I can do it every time without even swaying. And if I can do it on the mat, I don’t see why I couldn’t do it in the circus like she did…. But of course I’ll never really know.”

“That girl certainly did something to you,” I said to Chō one day. Chō looked at me seriously. “It’s the same as painting,” he said. “When you see something beautiful, it gets you in some way, doesn’t it, and that makes you want to paint it. You’ll work away like mad trying to paint it, won’t you? Well, it’s the same with me. Only I can’t paint so I’ve got to imitate what I’ve seen. Is that so strange?”

His explanation struck me as quite reasonable.

“Look, Chō,” said Kichikō that evening when I first heard about the hand-standing, “why don’t you let us see you do it now?” He laughed and looked round. The last rays of the summer sun were fading; the sky had lost its brightness and become a light transparent blue. A slight wind had blown up and dull, vaguely-coloured clouds scudded past high above us.

“Would you really like to see?” said Chō cheerfully. He stood up, and leant forward on one of the benches. As he put his weight on it, the bench shifted slightly on the gravel.

“I’d better do it here,” he said. He planted his hands firmly on the gound next to the bench and raised himself a couple of times falling back lightly in the same place. Then, keeping both legs closely together, he moved slowly up until he was standing vertically in the air. The soles of his straw sandals faced the surface of the limpid evening sky. His plump arms were slightly bent as they supported his heavy, squat body. As the blood ran to his head, his face became so dark that one could hardly distinguish it from the earth.

Kichikō whistled with admiration. “That’s good,” he said. “That’s pretty damned good!” Quite a few people had gathered from the neighbourhood to watch Chō’s performance and they were all exclaiming their admiration as he held his feet immobile in the air. When he stood up again, a couple of the local errand-boys and a few other enterprising young fellows began to try the trick. After I left, I turned back and saw them all in their light shirts standing upside down by the benches in the gathering dusk.

There was a large steel-works in the neighbourhood. Most of the workers were regular employees, but there was also quite a number of casual labourers who drifted in from the other factories or from the mines and usually left again after a time. One evening as we were gathered by our benches, a small, intelligent looking man joined us. “You’re new around here, aren’t you?” I said.

“That’s right. I’ve just got myself a job as a lathe man in those iron-works over there. I’ve got lodgings near here, too.”

He soon established himself as one of our group. We all found him interesting because he had spent his life moving from place to place and could describe all sorts of things that were unfamiliar to us. Although uneducated, he was a good talker and as he told us of the hardships he had undergone, the strange places where he had worked, the odd customs he had observed in other parts of Japan and the efforts of workers to improve their conditions, we felt that we were being lifted out of the prisons of our narrow lives.

His lively eyes shone as he described life underground in the Aso mines where he had formerly worked. “To get to the first pit, you go down a hundred and fifty feet in the cage. Then down you go another hundred and fifty feet to the next pit. There are twelve pits altogether. In the bottom pit the temperature was nearly a hundred degrees just from the heat of the earth. There was a whole lot of us working down there. The air was pumped down from the pit-head. But after you’d been down there a while, it got so damned hard to breathe your lungs were fit to burst. I was in the war and I can tell you that to spend eight hours down there in that mine was worse than twenty-four hours under enemy fire.

“And don’t let them tell you mining isn’t dangerous! Down there you’re at the mercy of machines and they’re always going wrong. One of the fellows I knew was pulling a loaded trolley on to the elevator. At least he thought the elevator was there but something had gone wrong and instead he stepped backwards into the empty shaft and went shooting down hundreds of feet with the loaded trolley on top of him. You could hear him screaming right down to the bottom.

“You see, the strain down there makes you careless in the end. Lots of the fellows get blown to smithereens by the dynamite they’ve planted themselves. Sometimes they even knock down the props when they’re working and get buried alive.

“But I’ll tell you something funny. While you’re down there in the mine, you’re so busy with your work, you’re so damned glad you haven’t had an accident yourself and trying so hard to watch out in the future, that you don’t have time to worry about anything else. It’s when you come out on the surface after a day’s work that you start thinking. You see other people walking about up there who’ve never been down a mine all their lives. And you get to asking yourself, ‘What the hell! I’m no different from them. What do I spend all day down in that damned hole for?’

“That’s the way lots of us began figuring. It wasn’t hard to get the other fellows to see our point of view. What the hell, we were risking our lives down there every day to make profits for the company. We all got together and were going to make a set of minimum demands for our safety—not wages, mind you, just for our safety. But we had an informer among us. Our plan leaked out and the company put a stop to it all.

“Later on, a couple of smooth, well-dressed men came along and told us how we ought to organize ourselves. They’d never been further down a mine than the pit-head but they pretended to know all about it. Well, we miners were a pretty uneducated bunch but we could tell fakes when we saw them. If these men really had our interests at heart, we’d have felt it and gone along with them all the way. But it didn’t take us long to see they were the type who make their living out of our troubles and a damned good living too. ‘Better honour than life, they used to teach us in the Army. Well, these men wanted honour and life—and plenty of both—all at our expense. The dirty rats—what could they teach us? It’s lucky for them they cleared out before I got my hands on them!

“No one who hasn’t really been a worker knows what it’s all about. You can’t learn it out of a book. You’ve got to be a worker, you’ve got to live like a worker, day after day, year after year. That’s the only way to get to understand the ‘labour problem’.

“We weren’t born to live like slaves or animals! We workers deserve the same share of the country’s wealth as everyone else. That’s what I’d like to tell society.”

‘A Socialist,’ I thought to myself and wondered whether all the others realized it. They used to sit listening to him in silence and occasionally I noticed Chō sighing as if moved by something the man had said.

One day as I was strolling down the sunlit street, I stopped dead in my tracks. Some of the things the little man had said suddenly came back to me with extraordinary force. It was as if I had been walking along a narrow single-track railway bridge and had abruptly been struck by the thought, ‘What shall I do if a train comes rushing towards me?’ Perhaps the time would come when I’d have to make such a decision. The idea made my heart pound like a hammer.

The little man told us one day about a derelict mine. The ore had given out and the miners had all moved to other pits. The power was still connected, however, and one morning the lights were turned on for a party of visiting journalists. One of the men got separated from the rest of the group and before he knew it, he was hopelessly lost in the maze of tunnels and passages which twisted about underground like the coils of some immense serpent. He must have rushed around, gradually becoming panic-stricken, in those weird, deserted corridors hundreds of feet below the ground. His shouts for help would have been deadened by the thick walls. And then he ran headlong into the open elevator-pit and fell hundreds of feet into pitch darkness.

This story made a great impression on me and it was long before I could rid my mind of the terrifying vision.

Gradually I came to think that, however monotonous and unrewarding my present work might be, I should at least be grateful that it was safe. “After all,” I said one evening, “why do we work anyway? When all’s said and done, surely it’s so we can earn enough to keep alive. In that case, it’s a complete contradiction to take a job where you’re risking your life.”

It seemed unbelievable to me that anyone should be so mad as to do work in which he might at any moment be killed. Later I was to learn that such logic does not always apply and that to break the unendurable monotony of their lives, some people will in fact do things which can only be classed as insane.

Chō and the little man became friends and I often saw them together. One evening as I was calling for Chō on my way back from work, I found him standing outside his shop talking to the little man. They both nodded to me. The man had a map in his hands. “Here it is,” he said, pointing to a small corner of land sticking out into the blue northern sea, “here’s Nikolaevsk. That’s where I’ll be heading now. A friend of mine’s working up there and he’s asked me to join him.” He looked up at the deep blue sky. “When I decided to leave the mines,” he continued, “I first thought I’d try my luck somewhere really far away—Sakhalin, Kamchatka or somewhere. But then I thought if I came to Tokyo, I’d meet a lot of interesting people, people I could talk to, people who felt like I did about things. I’ve always been a great talker, you know, ever since I was a youngster. Well, I’ve got to like a lot of you fellows, but I’m not really your type. So now I’m pushing on. I won’t be going straight to Nikolaevsk. I’ll spend the winter working in Hokkaidō and try crossing over to the mainland next spring.” He paused for a while. “I suppose the fact is I’m just a born wanderer,” he added, laughing. We said good-bye, and Chō and I stood watching him walk away in the distance.

“He asked me if I wanted to go with him,” said Chō. “And I would have too, except for my old mother. She’d be lost without me.”

We started walking along slowly. A few sprigs of wilted morning-glory stood in a black, unglazed vase in a window opposite the shop. It was really amazing how blue the sky was. Under this deep, weird, silent blue, the black-tiled roofs of the houses seemed to roll sadly into the distance like the dunes along the sea shore.

None of us ever saw the little man again. We heard that he found a job in a factory at Ōi. No doubt he made his way to Hokkaidō and perhaps he even reached Nikolaevsk. Whereever he may be, I am sure he is heatedly expounding his theories.

I thought about him often. I remembered the clear look in his eyes when he was not talking. In them were reflected the images of far away mountains, of clouds floating across distant skies, of infinitely remote stars and sometimes of the dark, raging ocean. Yes, he was a wanderer and I felt that like the wanderers of old he had within him a song that comforted him in his weariness and that constantly spurred him on to discover new places and new ideas. Compared to him, the members of our group, rooted here in our dreary suburb, seemed to me men exhausted by the monotony of work, men in whom all spirit of adventure had atrophied. At least, that is what I thought until the following incident.

I had spent all day painting a huge advertisement for women’s dresses on a tin bill-board. In the evening when I had finished, I decided to pass by Chō’s shop. It was a close, sultry evening and although the summer was almost over, the sun was extremely hot. There was not the slightest breeze. When I arrived, Chō was standing in a shirt and a pair of khaki trousers working on a shiny tin bucket.

“Have you ever been to the girls’ circus at Asakusa?” he said when he saw me.

“No, never. I’ve been to the opera once—that’s all.”

“I’d like to go to the amusement park at Asakusa,” said Chō, wiping the perspiration off his face.

“Asakusa,” I said. “That shouldn’t be too difficult. It doesn’t take all that long to get there.”

“It’s all right if you’ve got money. Then you can go to the mountains for the summer. But when am I going to have time to go to Asakusa? I suppose that’s what they mean by no leisure for the poor.” His face was wreathed in smiles; he looked as if he was imagining the gay, bustling pleasure grounds of Asakusa.

Presently Kichikō, the engineer’s mate, joined us. He had on a short workman’s coat.

“Well, hot enough for you?” he said in his gruff voice. “What’s happening? Anything interesting?”

“No,” said Chō. “By the way, Kicki, where were you last night?”

“Last night? Oh yes, after work I went down to the river at Ryōgoku to cool off.” He sat down on Chō’s work-bench and began fanning himself.

“Look, Chō,” said Kichikō after a while. “What about you and me climbing that chimney over there by the spinning mill? We’d get quite a view.”

“In this heat?” said Chō. “How high do you suppose it is?

“Come on, don’t be a coward,” said Kichikō laughing. “It’s two hundred and fifty feet.”

“Heights don’t bother me,” said Chō. “I was always climbing trees when I was a kid.”

“Well then, let’s go.”

“What about you?” said Chō looking in my direction.

I remembered how I had once peered out of the window from the fourth floor of an office building. The pavement below had looked white and dry in the glaring sun and the heat seemed to be flashing from the hard surface. Suddenly I had imagined how my blood would redden those burnt, white stones if I fell out of the window.

I glanced at Chō but did not answer.

Just then Kichikō looked at me. “Come on,” he said. “You can have a go at painting the top of the chimney. It’ll be more fun than those hoardings of yours!”

I was too much of a coward to admit that I was frightened of heights. “All right. I’ll come along,” I said, even simulating a certain enthusiasm.

The three of us left Chō’s shop. On our way we stopped at an ice-cream parlour and each had a glass of iced water. Then we set out for the spinning mill. It was on a huge dusty plain at the edge of the city. As we trudged along, the shriek of the crickets reverberated in my ears like the sound of a boiling kettle. The perspiration was streaming down my forehead. We were all looking ahead at the chimney which reared itself before us under the blue, cloud-speckled sky. It had only recently been completed and the scaffolding was still coiled round it all the way to the top like a monstrous snake. There was no smoke.

We reached the chimney in about fifteen minutes.

“Are you sure it’s two hundred and fifty feet?” said Chō looking up. “It doesn’t seem that high from here.”

“Come on and see,” said Kichikō. “You’ll get dizzy just standing down here staring at it.” He bent his head back and looked up to the top. “Imagine working up there, though,” he added. “They wouldn’t get me to work on a chimney like that for anything.”

We took off our coats and threw them on the ground next to the solid-looking brick foundation; then we removed our shoes and socks and wetted the palms of our hands with spittle. I put one foot on the rickety scaffolding and glanced back at the city: under the deep blue sky the roof-tops stretched out in solid black rows; they looked very safe.

Kichikō started climbing first; after him went the rotund Chō and finally myself. The steps were not built straight, but circled round the chimney in an endless looking spiral. The narrow iron rungs dug sharply into the soft soles of my feet.

I had not realized what this climb would be like. As the other two moved steadily upwards round the chimney, I gradually began to fall behind. When I had reached about the half-way mark, I suddenly felt I could not continue. By glancing down, I realized that it would be at least as hard to start going down. From now on, I forced every muscle in my body to continue climbing. My feet no longer hurt, but my legs were trembling uncontrollably and although I planted myself firmly on each rung, I had the uncomfortable feeling that at any moment my body would float off into space of its own accord.

The wind was blowing quite hard up here and I could hear some of the looser boards of the scaffolding clatter noisily. If just one of these flimsy rungs should slip or break, I’d lose my footing and go plunging headlong into space. At the thought, a cold sweat ran over my whole body. My hands were particularly clammy and I was certain that they would slip as I grasped the rungs above. If only I could wipe them or rub them with sand….

Looking up, I saw that Kichikō had reached the top of the chimney. He was standing on the narrow bricklayers’ platform that surrounded it and leaning with both his hands on a low, perilous railing. He looked round at the scenery. Now Chō reached the top and joined Kichikō in admiring the view. From time to time they glanced down the side of the chimney to see how I was getting on.

Finally I reached the top. It was broader than I had imagined while climbing—about six feet in diameter. My legs were twitching with a sort of cramp and I realized that I could not possibly stand on the platform with the other two. Instead I squatted down carefully on the wooden boards and held on to the bottom of the railing with both hands. My teeth chattered and my whole body was trembling.

I no longer cared in the slightest what impression I was making on my companions. My only object now was to elicit their sympathy so that they might somehow help me to reach the ground safely. Normally they would have laughed to see me in this condition and probably they would have teased me. But now they just glanced at me occasionally without smiling or saying anything, as if it was quite normal that I should be in such a state. In some way, this attitude of theirs added still further to my anxiety. I should almost have welcomed some normal bantering. Instead I heard Chō saying, “Take a look over there, Kichi. The sea’s come right up close, hasn’t it. And look at those trams. They’re just like little crawling bugs… What’s that tower over there?”

“That’s the twelve-storied pagoda of Asakusa,” answered Kichikō nonchalantly.

I just stared straight down at the wooden boards. My head was blank and there was a haze in front of my eyes. Yet I could not help noticing between the wide cracks of the boards people down below like tiny black beans. At this sight, my throat became clogged and I could hardly breathe. I must stay still, I told myself. If I try looking at the sea or the twelve-storied pagoda of Asakusa, I’m done for.

Gradually I noticed that the sun was sinking and that the whole sky had turned crimson. Why in God’s name had I come up here? How would I ever get down? I was bound to lose my footing on those endless steps. As my mind darted back over my past life, which now seemed infinitely remote, I remembered with shame how I had cursed the monotony and never felt really grateful of its safety.

Only a few feet away, gaped the huge, black empty mouth of the chimney. I was aware of a distant rumbling sound coming from its depths, like the roar of some great monster. At the same time I suddenly realized that the entire chimney was swaying back and forth, even if only very slightly. I had forgotten that tall buildings and chimneys move in the wind.

A sense of despair came over me. Just then I heard an astounding remark from Kichikō.

“I don’t suppose you could do that trick of yours up here?” he said.

I looked up at Chō who was standing directly over me. His face at this moment seemed more enormous than ever. He smiled strangely and looked round.

“Of course I could,” he said after a while. “I can stand on my hands anywhere. The trouble is, there’s no proper place to rest my hands on up here. These damned boards bend every time you step on them. Besides, this platform’s so narrow that the railing would get in the way when I raised my legs.”

“Supposing we wagered you? If you can do it up here, we’ll each give you a yen,” said Kichikō after a pause. “What about it?” he added looking down at me. “You’d give him a yen, wouldn’t you?”

The whole thing was a joke, I realized. Chō was a determined fellow, but he wasn’t crazy. He obviously knew that this would be suicide. I nodded silently at Kichikō. I’d share in the joke, if that’s what they wanted.

“You’d each give me a yen, eh?” said Chō. “That makes a whole day’s wages.”

“Only look here,” said Kichikō laughing nervously. “If you make a mistake, it’ll be the end of you. I’ll have to go down and pick up the mess.”

“You needn’t tell me. I can figure that out for myself,” said Chō. “The trouble is,” he continued, as if speaking to himself, “where would I put my hands?” He looked all round the platform. Then his eyes came to rest on the thick iron mouth of the chimney. He bent over and looked into the great black opening.

“If I do it,” he said, “I’ll stand on this edge.”

He felt the surface of the chimney-top.

“The trouble is, it’s damned slippery.” Suddenly his expression changed and with a sense of horror, I knew that he was going to try the trick. I wanted to stop him and began to stutter out something, but the words wouldn’t come. All I could do was to squat there gazing up at him intently with my sunken eyes. Surely, I thought, he could not be doing this for the two yen, however much he may have wanted to spend the day at Asakusa. Could it be that he was still trying in some way to get the better of that girl at the circus? Or was he emulating the little man and defying monotony in his own way? I never knew. The next moment I heard Chō say, “All right. I’ll take the wager. I’ll have a go.” There was no longer the slightest trace of laughter in his voice.

“Wait a minute,” said Kichikō, suddenly becoming dead serious. “You know what’ll happen if you slip.”

“If I slip, that’s the end of me.” There was a touch of defiance in Chō’s voice as he threw out the words. He turned round in the direction of the city and stared at it for a few moments. The sun was rapidly disappearing now and strangely-shaped tufts of cloud drifted past in the darkening sky. Yet the top of our chimney was brilliant red from the last rays of the sun, as if illuminated by giant flames.

Chō spat on his hands and rubbed his palms carefully with a handkerchief to remove any trace of greasiness. Then he hung the handkerchief on the railing and bracing himself, planted both hands on the iron mouth of the chimney. For several moments he stood there peering down into the huge, black opening from whose depths emerged the continual roaring sound. I glanced at him. His eyed protruded from their sockets, his short fat back bulged, repeated tremors passed down his arms, and his close-cropped head was wet with perspiration. All this time the chimney swayed rhythmically to and fro in the wind.

Chō brought his legs together and drew them in as far as possible to avoid catching them on the railings. Once they were raised, it would be too late to make any adjustment. Should he then miscalculate and lose his balance, he would either fall headlong into the two hundred and fifty foot gullet of the chimney, or backwards over the railing and down to the hard ground below.

His legs had now left the platform and were already a few feet in the air. My head began going round and I had to look down. When I next glanced up, Chō was gradually straightening his legs. A moment later they were fully extended and now he stood there on his hands, his body a rigid line against the evening sky. A presentiment of relief ran through me.

Kichikō had not taken his eyes off Chō for a moment. He continued to gaze fixedly at him as he now slowly drew in his legs and began to retrace the line he had drawn in the air. Skilfully avoiding the railing, he gradually brought them back to the platform. For the first time since the performance had begun, I allowed myself to look straight at him. The strength of his entire body seemed to be concentrated in the bulging muscles of his arms. I noticed that a sort of spasm was passing from the nape of his neck to his shoulders. His hair was drenched.

The hand-stand was safely completed. For a while none of us spoke. Chō stood staring straight into space with unblinking, protruding eyes. His complexion was not even pale, but completely colourless like a dead man’s. Round the corners of his mouth I detected a cool, dark, self-mocking smile.

In a flash I remembered seeing such a smile once before. A car had come hurtling along the street where I was walking and had almost run over a man working on the tram lines. By some miracle he had escaped, though the side of the car must have grazed his overalls. Afterwards he had stood there rigid in the middle of the street still holding a large granite paving-stone. His eyes were wide open and there was a weird smile on his face. The car disappeared in the distance and the people who had stopped to look hurried on; but the man still stood there staring straight ahead into space….

Then I noticed a black bird skimming past directly over the chimney and silhouetted strangely against the dark sky.

Kichikō was the first to go down and I followed him. Glancing back, I saw Chō still standing there on the platform. His face was that of a dead man. He seemed sunk in thought.

Ogawa Mimei (b. 1882)
This story was first published in 1920
Translated by Ivan Morris