Akutagawa, unfortunately, left this story unfinished.
Later on, the character of Sōkichi is introduced. I feel like he may be one of Akutagawa’s recurring characters, but I can’t remember where he may have used the name before.
This story in the original Japanese can be found here.
***
The Lily
Ryōhei was wielding a red proofreading brush for some publication. But this was not his true intention. Whenever he had even a little time, he had his nose buried in a translation of Marx, or he was dreaming of gloomy Russia with a Golden Bat cigarette on the tips of his fat fingers. The story of the lily was nothing more than an occasionally recollected memory that unexpectedly crossed his mind at times such as these…
Ryōhei, seven years old this year, gulped down an early lunch in the kitchen of the house in which he was born. Then, his next door neighbor Sanzō, his face sparkling with sweat, suddenly jumped into the sink as if some great calamity had occurred.
“Just now, Ryō! Just now, I found a double-bud lily!”
To express the finding of the double-bud lily, Sanzō held up both of his index fingers in front of his upturned nose.
“Double lily, huh?”
Ryōhei’s eyes widened reflexively. A double-bud lily, with two buds coming out of a single root, was not something easily found.
“Yes, it’s a big fat double-bud, a dick bud, a new bud…” Wiping away sweat with the end of his belt, Sanzō continued on almost as if he was in a trance. Despite that, Ryōhei at some point decided to leave his dish behind and squatted in the sink.
“Finish your lunch! And Isn’t double bud or new bud sufficient?” his mother called two or three times from the spacious room next door as she chopped up the silkworms’ mulberry leaves. But Ryōhei, as if the words had missed his ears completely, fired off questions like how big was it, and were the buds the same length. Sanzō, of course, was eloquent. The two buds were bigger than his thumb. Their height was about the same. Lilies such as this could not be found anywhere in the world…
“How about it, Ryō? Let’s go take a gander right now!”
Shooting a sly look towards Ryōhei’s mother, Sanzō tugged on his friend’s sleeve. To look at the double-bud, the new bud, the dick bud… He had never felt such temptation. Ryōhei, without replying, slipped his feet into his mother’s straw sandals. They were damp, and the straps had become fairly slack.
“Ryōhei! Listen to me! Start eating—“ his mother shouted in surprise, but by that time Ryōhei had galloped out ahead to the backyard. Outside the yard, opposite the path, there was a grove of trees, their new buds appearing hazily. Ryōhei tried to canter off that way, but then Sanzo screamed “It’s this way!” at the top of his lungs, running off towards a field on his right. Once Ryōhei had taken his first step, he turned his head around in an exaggerated manner, and then lowered his head and set off at a noisy gallop back where he had come from. For some reason when he did not do this, Ryōhei did not feel brave.
“What’s up? Maybe it’s on the bank of the field?”
“No, it’s in the field! Maybe this wheat field…”
After speaking, Sanzō slipped into the border of the mulberry field. Leaves the size of copper coins showed on the branches, horizontal and vertical, of the midseason mulberry cross. Following Sanzō, Ryōhei passed under those branches. Sanzō’s rear was right in front of his face, and his belt had come undone and was flapping around.
On the other side of the mulberry field was at last the gnarled wheat field. Sanzō, still in the lead, turned right once again at the divider between the mulberries and the wheat. The quick Ryōhei immediately headed off right behind Sanzō. But before he could get three feet, Sanzō’s angry voice stopped him in his tracks.
“What’s wrong with you? You don’t even know where we are!”
The anxious Ryōhei reluctantly took the lead again. The two of them were no longer galloping. In mutual silence they crept along the edge of the wheat. But when they came to the bank at the corner of the field, Sanzō turned his grin on Ryōhei and pointed at the ridge at his feet.
“It’s, it’s here!”
Having heard this Ryōhei completely forgot his ill mood.
“How is it? How is it?”
Ryōhei peered at the ridge. There, just as Sanzō had said, was a lily wrapped in young crimson leaves with two tapering, glossy stalks. Though he had heard Sanzō speak of it, seeing such splendor now left him speechless.
“Big, huh?” Sanzō said rather proudly, looking at Ryōhei’s face. But Ryōhei only nodded silently, looking only at the lily blossom.
“It’s big, huh?” Sanzō said again, and then tried to touch the blossom on the right. Then, as if he had just awoken, Ryōhei slapped away Sanzō’s hand in a panic.
“Ah! Don’t touch it, you’ll break it.”
“It’s fine with being touched. It’s not your lily!”
Sanzō again lost his temper. This time Ryōhei was not won over.
“It’s not yours, either.”
“It’s not mine, so I’m free to touch it.”
“Stop it right now! You’ll break it!”
“It won’t break! I handled it a whole lot earlier!”
When he heard “I handled it a whole lot earlier!” Ryōhei fell silent. Squatting down there, Sanzō roughly groped at the lily as he had before. But the lily, not half a foot tall, did not seem as if it would move.
“Okay, shall I have a go?”
Glancing at Sanzō’s complexion, Ryōhei, finally at peace, gently gave a stroke to the left blossom. The young red blossom gave an unusually firm sensation to the tips of Ryōhei’s fingers.
“Wooow!” Ryōhei smiled to himself. Then, after a while, Sanzō suddenly said this again:
“That’s a pretty big bulb on the dick bud, huh? –Oh, are you going to dig it up?”
Having already spoken, he thrust his fingers into the earth of the bank. Ryōhei’s surprise was even more violent than before. As if he had forgotten the lily entirely, he abruptly grabbed Sanzō’s hand.
“Stop it! I told you to stop it…” Ryōhei’s voice trailed off. “When you’re found, you’ll be scolded!”
The lily growing in the field was different from those specimens in the plains or the mountains. Nobody, save for the owner of this field, would be allowed to pick it—even Sanzō understood this. With lingering affection, he drew a circle in the earth around the lily, and then listened obediently to Ryōhei.
Somewhere in the clear sky a lark’s cry continued. Beneath the cry, the two children, with love for the double-bud lily, swore an unbreakable oath: number one, that they would not speak of this lily to any of their friends. Number two, that they would come here together to look at it every day before going to school…
***
The next day, just as they had promised, they went out together to the wheat field with the lily. Beads of dew were on the tips of the red blossoms. Sanzō and Ryōhei flicked the right and left buds with their nails respectively, shaking off the dew.
“It’s huge!” Ryōhei marveled at the blossoms as if he had not seen them in a long time. “It’s five years old!”
“Five?” Sanzō shot a look full of scorn at Ryōhei. “More like ten.”
“Ten! Older than me?”
“That’s right. Older than you.”
“So it’ll bloom ten.” They had been told by some older boy that a five year-old lily could have five flowers, and a ten year-old lily could have ten.
“Bloom! Give us ten!” Sanzō declared majestically. Wincing internally, Ryōhei said to himself, as if giving an excuse, “It would be great if it blooms soon.” Then: “It’ll bloom, in the summer.”
Sanzō again sneered at Ryōhei. “Summer? In the summer? It’ll be the rainy period!”
“The rainy period is summer!”
“Summer’s when you wear white clothes!”
Ryōhei was not easily defeated. “You think the rainy period isn’t summer?”
“Dummy! You wear white after Labor Day!”*
“Liar! Why don’t you ask your mom! You wear white clothes in the summer!”
While Ryōhei was thinking that perhaps he shouldn’t have said that, he was slapped on the left cheek. Before he had time to register that he returned fire.
“Brute!”
Sanzō, his complexion different, pushed Ryōhei away with all his might. Ryōhei toppled face-first into the bank of the wheat. The dew having fallen on the bank, at that point his face and clothes had become completely covered in mud. But despite that he leapt quickly to his feet and launched himself again at Sanzō. Perhaps it was the surprise attack, but that time the seldom defeated Sanzō fell flat on his back. And where he fell was right near the double-bud lily.
“You wanna fight, come over here! You’ll hurt the lily, come over here!”
Pointing with his jaw, Sanzō leapt atop the bank of the mulberry field. Ryōhei, near tears, reluctantly joined him. Suddenly the two began to wrestle. The red-faced Sanzō had Ryōhei by the collar and was shaking him back in forth in confusion. Normally if that had been done to Ryōhei he would have started to cry. But that morning he did not cry. Though he felt lightheaded, he stuck stubbornly to his opponent.
Then suddenly somebody came from the mulberries. “What the—are you two fighting?”
The two boys at last ceased their grappling. Standing before them was a pockmarked farmer’s wife. She was the mother of Sōkichi, one of their classmates. It looked like she had come to pick mulberries. She was still in her nightgown and she had applied a towel to her forehead. She had a large bucket. She eyed the two of them with suspicion.
“We’re doing sumō, ma’am,” Sanzō said brightly. But Ryōhei, trembling, cut off his opponent’s words.
“Liar! We were fighting!”
“You’re the liar around here!” Sanzō grabbed Ryōhei’s earlobe, but before he could pull it, Sōkichi’s grim-faced mother easily pulled his hand away.
“You’re a violent little boy! You were the one who left a scar on my Sōkichi’s forehead the other day!”
Seeing Sanzō being scolded, Ryōhei wanted to say, “Serves you right!” But before he could say it, tears began to well up in his eyes. At that moment Sanzō broke free of Sōkichi’s mother and danced, one leg at a time, away into the mulberries.
“Higaneyama is cloudy! Rain’s falling from Ryōhei’s eyes!”
***
The next day, before dawn, there was a heavy rain atypical of spring. Ryōhei’s family’s stock of mulberries for the silkworms to eat had grown low, so around noon his mother and father shook the dust from their raincoats, went out in search of old wheat straw hats, and hurriedly began to make plans to go out into the fields. But all Ryōhei would do during that was gnaw on some cinnamon and think of the lily. The blossoms might be bowed by the rain. Would the bulb be totally washed away with the soil?
“Sanzō’s probably worried, too,” Ryōhei thought again. Then, a funny feeling came over him. Sanzō’s house was next door, so if he went under the eaves of the houses, there was no need for an umbrella. But he didn’t want to be with the idiot he’d fought with yesterday. Even if he came over here, he wouldn’t say one word to him. In that case Sanzō would surely be disappointed, too… (unfinished)
(September 1922)
***
*No, Akutagawa does not reference Labor Day. He references the doyō, which is a day about three weeks before the changing of the season. Which, with fall, works out to be about Labor Day, which is the day you apparently can’t wear white after. So this bizarrely ends up working out.