This story in the original Japanese can be found here.
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The Drinking Spirit*
One
It was heat as had not been felt in recent years. Like lead, the mud tiles on the houses dully reflected the light of the sun, and it was thought that, in this state, the chicks and the eggs in the swallows’ nests below were broiled to death. That is not to mention that throughout all the fields, hemp and millet, there was not anything which was green, unwithered, and head unbowed to the shimmering ground. And the air just above the fields, though clear, was thick with heat, and here and there drifted lumpy summer clouds, as if balls of hail had been baked on a pan… “The Drinking Spirit” begins with three men heading out, in this weather, to a sun-baked threshing ground.
The mysterious thing was that among these three men, one of them was lying face-up, stark naked on the ground. And for some reason, his hands and feet were bound up with hempen rope. But there was no sign that this exceptional character was drawing any suffering from this. He was fat like a pig, and he was short, had a good complexion, and made you feel as if he was somehow dull. And then, there was a single pot placed at his head, but what was put into it is unknown.
One of the other men was draped in yellow priests’ robes and had a small copper hoop hanging from his ear; at first glance he looked like an archaic wandering monk. His skin was close to black, and in addition his curly hair and eyebrows made him look like he came from west of the Pamir Mountains. For a while he had been patiently brandishing a red-handled rod, trying to ward off the buzzing flies, and whenever he seemed to tire a bit, as he was now, he would come to that previous pot and squat down with a turkey-like superiority.
The third man was long separated from the other two, standing in the shade of a shack in the corner of the threshing ground. From the tip of his chin was growing a beard, solely for appearances, like a rat’s tail, and around a simple black robe long enough to hide his feet was hanging a sloppily tied brown cloth in knots. From his grandiose use of a fan made from white feathers, he was most certainly a Confucianist or the like.
All three of the men, as if they had agreed beforehand, were completely silent. In addition, they hardly moved. They did not seem to have any interest in waking the man up, and perhaps for this reason they were breathing quietly.
The sun was just at its peak in the sky. Not even the dog’s barking could be heard, perhaps because it was napping. The sun sparkled peacefully on the green leaves of the hemp and millet surrounding the threshing ground. And then, finally, the sky as far as you could see shimmered with heat, and it seemed as if even the clouds had trouble breathing. Looking out upon the scene, none of the three men appeared to be breathing. They guarded the silence like the clay soldiers in the tomb of Guan Di…
This, of course, is not a story of Japan. This event took place one summer in Liu’s threshing grounds in the area known as Zhangshan.
Two
The naked figure lying in the blazing heat was the owner of this threshing ground. His surname was Liu, and his personal name was Da Cheng. He belonged to one of Zhangshan’s most prominent families. This man’s hobby was drinking alcohol, from morning until night, without letting the cup leave his hand. In addition, because “when he drank alone he exhausted whole bottles,” he held his liquor far beyond the average person. As I said much earlier, “of the sixty miles of fields near the castle, about half was millet,” so there was never a fear that the family property would need to be worried about due to drinking.
So if you were to ask why this man was lying naked in the blazing heat, it would be a sort of fate: that day, he had gone out with his same drinking buddy Master Sun (that would be the Confucianist holding the fan). While they were grasping their Dutch wives**, playing chess in a well-ventilated room, a servant girl came in. “Excuse me, a monk who says he has come from Baozhuang Temple has paid a visit, and he says he wishes to speak with Master, what shall I tell him?”
“What? Baozhuang Temple?” Liu said, his small eyes glittering vibrantly. Rising to his plump feet, suffering from the heat, he said, “Well, go say hello.” Then, he glanced at Sun and added, “Maybe it’s that do-gooder.”
That do-gooder of Baozhuang Temple was a Western priest who had come from the east. It was said that it addition to the art of medicine, he was a practitioner of the art of love, and so he was well-known in this neighborhood. There was Zhang San’s cataracts, for example, which had suddenly begun to recover. Li Si’s long illness suddenly began to convalesce. There was a rumor running rampant that it was quite close to miraculous: even these two had heard the rumor. This priest, for some reason, was coming to Liu’s house. Liu, naturally, had absolutely no thought of meeting with him.
While we are on the topic, Liu was not at all a man who enjoyed company. But if he had another guest when a visitor called, he usually met with them gladly. This was because he held a childish vanity at the fact that he could boast of having guests. And besides, today’s priest had met with much fame recently. By no means was he a shy man when it came to visitors: this was basically Liu’s incentive to take visitors.
“I wonder why he’s here?”
“He wants something, I bet. ‘Alms for the poor!’”
While the two spoke, following the servant’s directions, they came to the tall of stature, bizarre-looking monk with eyes of sapphire. He was wearing yellow priest’s robes and his long hair curled irritatingly down to his shoulders. Still holding his red-handled rod, he was standing lazily in the center of the room. He did not move his mouth save to greet them.
Liu hesitated for a moment, and then, somehow uneasy, he tried asking, “What do you want?”
Then, the priest spoke, “It is you, who loves alcohol.”
“I suppose,” Liu answered the abrupt question vaguely, and then, as if seeking help, turned to Master Sun. Sun was busying himself with dropping stones on the ground. There was no sign he was paying attention.
“You have been stricken with a sickness. This I know,” said the priest emphatically. When he heard ‘sickness,’ Liu made a confused face, and, gripping his Dutch wife, said, “Sickness?”
“That is so.”
“No, since I was a child…” Liu tried to say something, but the foreign priest interrupted him.
“Even though you drink, you do not get drunk.”
Staring at his partner’s face, Liu said nothing. It was true; no matter how much he drank he had never been drunk.***
“That is proof of your sickness!” The priest gave a faint smile, then continued. “There is in your stomach a drinking spirit. If it is not removed, you cannot be cured. This humble soul has come to cure you of your sickness.”
“Cure me?” Liu muttered unconsciously. He now felt ashamed of this.
“If I can.”
Then Master Sun, who had been silent until now, interjected.
“Will you use medicine?”
“No, I will not use anything like medicine,” the foreign priest replied bluntly.
Master Sun, naturally, held Taoism and Buddhism in particular disdain for no apparent reason. So it was rare that he would speak in the presence of Taoists or monks. His sudden butting into the conversation now was his interests being piqued by the phrase alcohol spirit. When the alcohol-loving master heard this, he became anxious and wondered if there was not an alcohol spirit within his stomach as well. But when he heard the priest’s curt reply, he suddenly felt as though he had been played for a fool, and making a face, he returned to his silent game of Go. At the same time, Liu began to think that he had been played for a fool by this arrogant do-gooder.
Liu, of course, was not mindful of this.
“Well, will you use needles?”
“Well, that is for matters of less seriousness.”
“So then spells?”
“No, not spells either.”
After this went on for a while, the priest explained simply the remedy: all you have to do is get naked and stay in the sun for a long time. Liu thought as if this was extraordinarily easy. If he could be cured by such a thing, it would not be such a big deal. In addition, though he was not aware of it, his curiosity was somewhat stirred when the priest said that he would cure him.
Then, at last, Liu bowed his head. “Well then, I beg your cure,” he came to say: that is why Liu was laying in the threshing ground, naked, in the blazing sun.
Then, the foreign priest said that he could not move, and bound his body in hempen rope. Then he asked a servant to bring a vessel of alcohol and place it at Liu’s head. It is unnecessary to say that by force of circumstance, Zao Qiu’s good friend Master Sun ended up as a witness to this mysterious treatment.
No one, besides the foreign priest, knew what kind of creature this drinking spirit was, nor what would happen when it vacated the stomach, nor what purpose the vessel of alcohol at his head served. Liu, knowing nothing about these things, felt as if he had done something very foolish. But the truth is, any ordinary man who had received an education, largely would have done the same.
Three
Hot. Sweat steadily built up on his forehead, and just as it seemed it would bead up, quickly it would flow lukewarm into his eyes. Unfortunately, his hand being bound, it was not as though he could take his hands and dab his forehead with a cloth. So now, just as he was moving his neck trying to change the course of the sweat, he felt terribly dizzy. Regrettably, he decided to suspend this plan. The sweat then freely soaked his eyelids, ran around his nose and down to his chine. Any number of uncomfortable sensations.
Until then, his eyes open, his gaze had been fixed on the white-seared sky, or the dangling hemp leaves, but with the sweat flowing freely he had to abandon even that. When that happened—the sweat entering his eyes, that is—Liu, for the first time, knew what was meant by piercing. So with a face like a death row inmate, he meekly closed his eyes. He had been beaten down without reprieve by the sun, and this time the whole exposed area of his skin, head and body, gradually became wracked with a sort of pain. The power to move every which way was working over the whole of his skin, but his skin itself was not at all flexible. Now all over his skin there was a stinging—you would think that that is the least you could call it—pain. This was not the pain he felt from the sweat. Liu came to be somewhat annoyed with receiving the foreign priest’s remedy.
But when he thought about it afterwards, that was not yet the painful part: before long his throat got dry. Even Liu knew that somebody like Cao Cao had once told his soldiers that there was a plum grove up ahead, easing their thirst. But in this case, no matter how much the sweetness and bitterness of plums drifted through his mind, the dryness of his throat did not change in the slightest. He tried moving his chin and biting his tongue, but the inside of his mouth was still taken with heat. To make matters worse, if the vessel at his head was not there, his resolve would almost certainly have been bolstered to some degree. But the pungent aroma of the alcohol unceasingly attacked his nostrils. Furthermore, it may have just been his imagination, but every minute he felt as though the scent seemed to get stronger and stronger. Liu, just to see the vessel, opened his eyes. When he tried opening his upper eyelids, the mouth and about half of the generously inflated body filled his eyes. That was all he saw, but at the same time, in Liu’s imagination he saw in the dimness of the vessel a trace of a golden liquor filled to the brim. Without thinking he ran his dry tongue across his cracked lips, but even then there was no trace of saliva. His sweat, even, by this point, had been dried by the sun and no longer flowed.
Then, a horrible dizziness welled up twice, three times in succession. He had had incessant headaches for a while. In his heart, Liu bore a deepening grudge against the foreign priest. And then, again, he wondered why somebody such as him had been taken for a ride by that idiot’s cajoling and suffered this stupid pain. His throat got more and more dry. His stomach got strangely nauseous. He could no longer bear to wait any longer. Now Liu had at last made up his mind. He intended to ask the foreign priest at his head to stop the treatment. Wheezing, he opened his mouth—
At that exact moment, Liu felt a mass he knew nothing of creeping its way up from his stomach to his throat. Just when he thought it was inching up like an earthworm, he then felt it was crawling like a lizard. At any rate, some soft thing was softly creeping and crawling its way up his esophagus. And then, when that finished, just when he thought that it would be impossible to pass through his Adam’s apple, abruptly, something like a loach slipped smoothly through the dark area and leapt out energetically.
At that same moment, there was the sound of something splashing into the aforementioned vessel of alcohol.
Then, the foreign priest suddenly rose to his feet and began to untie the ropes that bound Liu’s body. He told him to relax because the drinking spirit had already come out.
“It’s out,” Liu groaned. Lifting his dizzy head and forgetting his thirst due to his overwhelming curiosity, he crawled, still naked, to the side of the vessel. Then, when he saw this, Master Sun, shielding himself from the sun with his fan, went to the two of them. When the three of them together peeked into the vessel, there was a small salamander-like creature with skin like clay swimming in the alcohol. It was about three or four inches long. It had a mouth, eyes. It looked as if it was drinking the liquor as it was swimming. When he saw this, Liu felt sick to his stomach…
Four
The effectiveness of the priest’s cure was evident immediately. From that day on, Liu Da Cheng could not drink alcohol. His says that now he even hates the smell of it. But the strange thing is that Liu’s health has been declining. Three years after exposing the drinking spirit, his once plump face is nowhere to be seen. His dull skin, coated in grease, covers a grim bony face, and all that remains of his frost-tinged locks is on his temple. How many times in a year has he been bedridden?
But beyond that, his decline was not limited to his health, Liu’s estate had been steadily decreasing. Now his sixty miles of fields had largely passed into other hands. Liu himself, regrettably, had had to take up a plow in his untrained hands and pass day after miserable day.
Why had Liu’s health declined after throwing up the drinking spirit? Why had his property declined? Beyond comparing the cause and effect of the removal of the drinking spirit and Liu’s subsequent ruination, this is a problem which can happen to anyone. In reality this problem has been repeated among all sorts of businessmen living in Zhangshan, and moreover from their mouths many answers have been offered. Now nothing remains but to choose the most representative of the three answers.
Answer One: The drinking spirit was not Liu’s disease, but his fortune. Due to meeting this boneheaded priest, he ended up losing this God-given gift.
Answer Two: The drinking spirit was not Liu’s fortune, but his disease. If you were to ask why, it is because downing a vessel every time Liu drank was something impossible for the average person. Now, if he had not gotten rid of the drinking spirit, had he not been scolded by Bi Jiu, he surely would have died. When you look at it that way, the reversal towards poverty and sickness must be called fortunate in Liu’s case.
Answer Three: The drinking spirit was neither Liu’s sickness nor his fortune. Liu had drunk just alcohol for a very long time. Removing alcohol from his life left nothing else. When you look at it this way, Liu was the drinking spirit, and the drinking spirit was Liu. Therefore the loss of the drinking spirit was the same as if Liu had killed part of himself. Essentially, from the day he could not drink alcohol, even though Liu was Liu he was not. If we assume that it was already too late for Liu, then it is only natural that the old Liu’s health and wealth would also be lost.
I myself do not know which of these answers is the most correct. I, emulating the didacticism of Chinese novelists, have merely enumerated this sort of ethical judgment at the end of the story.
(April 1916)
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*The title of this story is酒虫, “sakamushi” or “shūchū,” which is a mythical creature that compels one to drink. I am convinced that, with the dual meaning of “spirits,” there is a fantastic pun to be made that has completely eluded me. “The Drinking Spirit” was the best I could come up with. Here are some other variations: “The Liquor Bug;” “The Spirit Spirit;” “The Spirit of Alcohol;” “Sakamushi* (with a footnote);” and “Trimalchio in West Egg.”
**I may be the last person on Earth to not know what a Dutch wife is, but just in case, it’s a roughly human-sized cage of wicker or bamboo that you’re meant to wrap your body around, therefore exposing the maximum amount of skin to the breeze.
***In the Japanese, this line began with「……」, which, to my knowledge, is the first known instance of somebody just talking with an ellipsis.