蜜柑、by 芥川龍之介

I have recently completed an original English translation of Mikan, a most fine short story by Akutagawa. Dictionaries, both print and digital, were consulted, but what you are about to read is 100% AI free. Mikan It was an overcast evening in winter. I was sitting in the corner of the second-class carriage of the up-train departing from Yokosuka, vacantly waiting for the whistle to signal departure. The car’s electric lamp was already on, and strangely, I was the only passenger in the compartment. Peering outside, the darkening platform was oddly deserted, without a trace of anyone come to see off travelers. However, there was a cage containing a puppy, which from time to time raised a pitiful-sounding howling. These things in some weird way mirrored the state of my feelings. I was indescribably exhausted and weary of everything, and a shadow of gloom was falling on me like the snow-portending clouds from the sky. My hands were still stuck in the pockets of my coat, as was the evening edition, but I couldn’t summon the interest or energy to peruse the paper. But, at last, the sound of the whistle. I was dimly aware of a feeling of relief, and leaning my head against the window frame, I wasn’t so much waiting for the objects before my gaze to begin to move backwards as somehow lying in wait for it to happen. However, from the direction of the ticket gate I thought I heard the clacking of geta, following on the heels of which the voice of the conductor, scolding, accompanied by the door to my carriage being roughly opened by a lass of thirteen or fourteen who, flurried, burst into the car just as it swayed heavily as the steam train slowly got underway. The platform piers that, one after another, caught my eye, the water car that seemed forgotten in place, the red cap offering polite felicitations to someone on the train… all seemed to be leaning backwards unwillingly through the sooty smoke beating against the carriage window. Gradually I began to feel composed and, whilst lighting a cigarette, first raised my languid eyelids to glimpse the face of the girl sitting opposite. Her unwaxed hair was done up in the style called ichougae, and her cracked cheeks, which bore traces where she’d drawn her nails across them, were a disgusting shade of scorched red. Everything about the girl suggested she was an out-and-out country bumpkin. Moreover, the bedraggled shawl of sickly green around her neck trailed loose threads to her knees, atop which was perched a large bundle tied up in a furoshiki. The frost-bitten hand holding this bundle also clutched a red third-class ticket as if for dear life. I disliked the coarse features of the maiden. Her unclean attire was likewise displeasing. Finally, it annoyed me to no end that this benighted girl could not even tell the difference between a second and third-class ticket. And so, to blot out the presence of the lass, I lit a cigarette and casually spread the evening edition across my knees. At that very moment, the ray of outside light playing across the newsprint was suddenly replaced by the light of the electric lamp in the carriage, with the smudged print of several lines of type becoming unaccountably bright and floating up before my eyes. Needless to say, the train had now entered the first of the many tunnels on the Yokosuka Line. However, though by the light of the lamp I scanned the newspaper expecting my melancholy to lift, the mundane and frivolous affairs described therein left me apathetic. There were death notices and wedding announcements and reporting on the armistice and a political scandal… the instant the car entered the tunnel I had the illusion the train had reversed direction. In this state of mind my eyes moved mechanically from one dreary article to another. Of course, through all this the girl, with her coarse facial expression, remained unaware that I was sitting across from her. The train in the tunnel, the rustic girl, the evening edition buried in inanities… if not a symbol of something, what was it? If not symbolic of the enigma, vulgarity, and ennui of existence, what? The whole thing wasn’t worth worrying over. Tossing away the unfinished paper, I leaned my head against the window frame and, as one dead, closed my eyes and nodded off. A few minutes passed. Suddenly, with a vague sense of dread, as though in some unaccountable way I was being oppressed, I opened my eyes and peered around. Unnoticed, the lass had moved from the seat opposite to sit next to me and was now trying repeatedly to open the window. The heavy glass window wouldn’t budge, though. The girl’s cracked cheeks grew redder, and from time to time she made sniffling and gasping noises which resounded in my ears. It would be a mistake to say a part of me didn’t feel for the girl. However, it appeared the train was just then approaching the mouth of the tunnel, for the twilight assumed the color of decaying leaves as the flanks of the mountains on either side pressed against the windows, and the moment when the meaning of this peculiar episode would be revealed seemed to be on hand. Yet all the while the young girl continued to struggle with the window, and for the life of me I couldn’t fathom her fixation. No, the only explanation I could settle on was that it was some freakish whim. As before, I was aware of a pitiless feeling building in the pit of my stomach as the girl with her chapped hands entered into a desperate pitched battle with the window that wouldn’t move, and I prayed fervently that she would wrestle with that stubborn window ineffectually through all eternity, glaring at her all the while with evil eye. Presently the carriage resounded with a dreadful noise as the train hurtled into a tunnel, and at that instant the window, now all but opened, at last fell with a crash. Just like that it became difficult to breathe in the carriage as smoke that resembled molten soot suddenly came rushing in through the square hole, the thick black fog completely filling the compartment. I suffer a congenital tracheal complaint, yet there wasn’t even time enough to cover my face with a handkerchief as the carriage became a sea of smoke, owing to which I was seized with a fit of violent coughing that left me gasping for breath. However, the lass showed no indication of being aware of me as she leant through the open window, hair blowing in the darkness of the tunnel whilst she stared intently in the direction the train was moving. As I watched the girl through the light of the lamp and sooty smoke, already it began to grow lighter and lighter outside, and had the cool odor of soil and dead vegetation and water not come rushing into the carriage, allowing me at last to recover from my coughing fit, even had I berated this strange girl and made her shut the window, it would have made no difference in the end. However, the train was at that time gradually exiting the tunnel through a narrow gap between mountains covered in withered vegetation, passing a level crossing outside some poor town. Nearby, hovels with roofs of thatch or tile were packed closely in suffocating squalor. I expected to see the gatekeeper waving his signal, but there was merely an off-white flag flapping idly in the gathering dusk. At last it seemed we had exited the tunnel, and at the moment of passing this lonely crossing I beheld, on the far side of the fence, three young red-cheeked boys standing cheek to jowl. It seemed to me they were cowering with hunched shoulders, pressed down by the weight of the leaden sky. Moreover, the boys were wearing kimono whose color matched the dismal scenery of this forsaken place. As with raised heads they followed the passing train, hands lifted swiftly in unison, innocent young throats thrown back high, the boys burst into a joyous shouting whose meaning completely escaped me. Whereupon, it was really a matter of the briefest instant. The girl, who had thrust half her body out the window, suddenly extended her chapped hands, appeared to twist vigorously let to right, and without warning, as if to cause my heart to dance, some five or six mikan dyed in the warm tints of the sun rained down here and there over the boys who had come to see the train off. Involuntarily, I gasped. Then, a flash of apprehension, and I understood everything. The young maiden, likely on her way to take up some post as a domestic servant, this young girl had stored the mikan in the sleeves of her kimono and tossed them through the window in thanks for the solicitation shown by her younger brothers in making a special journey to this desolate crossing to see her off. The dusk enveloping the lonely scene, the voices of the boys as of young birds, and the dazzling color of the mikan as they fell haphazardly from the sky- all seen through the window of the train in a brief instant, and then gone. This affecting scene created the most vivid impression, as if seared into my heart. And then I was aware of a mysterious sense of cheerfulness welling up from within me. Elated, I raised my head and gazed on the young girl as if she were someone else. At some time she had returned to the seat opposite, her chapped cheeks were again buried in the yellow-green woolen shawl, the furoshiki once more held in the hand that clenched the green third-class ticket. This occasion marked the first time in my life that I was able to forget a modicum of my indescribable weariness and ennui, the sense of life’s inscrutability, its monotonousness and absurdity.