One summer evening, when he was still a child without knowledge of things, Turgenev wandered through his father's garden, densely overgrown with trees and shrubs. By the weedy edge of an old pond, he came upon the miserable sight of a frog and a snake trying to devour each other. In his innocent, childish heart, Turgenev had immediately doubted the goodness of God ... As I read this passage, for some reason I remembered the frightening old garden of my father's house in Koishikawa, where I was born. In those days, already more than thirty years ago, the canal of the Suido district flowed through fields of spiderwort like a rural stream.
At that time the vacant residences of vassals and lower-grade retainers of the old shogunate were coming on the market here and there. Buying up a group of them, my father built a spacious new mansion, while leaving the old groves and gardens intact. By the time I was born, the ornamental alcove posts of the new house had already acquired some of the soft luster of the polishing cloth. On the stones of the garden, which was just as it had always been, the moss grew deeper and deeper, and the shade of the trees and shrubs grew darker and darker. Far back, in the darkest part of those groves, there were two old wells, said to be vestiges of the original households. One of them, during a period of five or six years from before my birth, had been gradually filled in by our gardener, Yasukichi, with all the garden trash, such as dead pine needles, broken-off cryptomeria branches, and fallen cherry leaves. One evening at the beginning of winter, when I had just turned four, I watched Yasu at work. Having finished the job of getting the pines, palms, and bananas ready for the frost, he broke down the sides of the well, which were covered all over with mushrooms dried white like mold. This is one of my many frightening memories of the garden. Ants, millipedes, centipedes, galley worms, earthworms, small snakes, grubs, earwigs, and various other insects that had been asleep in their winter home, crawling out from between the rotten boards in great numbers, began to squirm and writhe slipperily in the cold, wintry gale. Many of them, turning up their dingy white undersides, died on the spot. With a helper whom he'd brought along, Yasu gathered the day's fallen leaves and dead branches together with the chopped-up boards of the well and set it all on fire. Raking in with a bamboo broom the insects and wriggling snakes that had begun to crawl away, he burned them alive. The fire made sharp, crackling noises. There was no flame, only a damp whitish smoke, which as it climbed through the high tops of the old trees, gave off an indescribably bad smell. The wintry wind, howling desolately in those old treetops, seemed to blow down dark night all through the garden. From the direction of the invisible house, the voice of the wet nurse was calling loudly for me. Abruptly bursting into tears, I was led by the hand by Yasu back to the house.
Yasu neatly leveled the ground over the plugged-up old well, but during the spring rains, evening showers, stormy days, and other spells of heavy rain the surface of the ground would subside a foot or two. Afterward the area was roped off and no one allowed to go near it. I remember being told with a special sternness by both my parents to stay away from there. As for the other old well, it indeed is the most terrifying memory I have of that period, which I could not forget even if I tried to. The well seemed to be extraordinarily deep, so that even Yasu did not attempt to fill it up. I don't know what kind of house now stands on that property, but no doubt the well, with the old tree alongside it, is still there in a corner of the grounds.
All around in back of the well, like the precinct of a shrine that's said to be haunted, a grove of cedars stood in dense, dark quietude both summer and winter. It made that part of the garden all the more frightening. Behind the grove there was a black wooden fence with sharp-pointed stakes atop it. On the other side there was, on one hand, the unfrequented thoroughfare of Kongo Temple at the top of a slope and, on the other, a shantytown that my father had always disliked, saying, "If they would only pull that place down ..."
My father had bought up what originally had been three small estates. It was all our property now, but the old well was on a patch of wasteland at the base of a cliff that, since it was far down the slope from where the house had been built, was almost forgotten about by the people of the household. My mother often asked my father why he'd bought that useless piece of land. My father's reply was that if he hadn't, a slum would have gone up at the foot of the hill. We'd have had to look at dirty tile roofs and laundry drying in the sun. By buying it up and leaving it the same, he kept it nice and quiet down there. Probably for my father, the sinister forms of the old trees that howled in the wind, wept in the rain, and held the night in their arms were not frightening at all. There were even times when my father's formal, angular face seemed more vaguely alarming than the wen-shaped knot of a pine.
One night a thief got into the house and stole a padded silk garment of my mother's. The next morning our regular fireman, the foreman of the carpenters, and a detective from the police station came by. As they went along examining the footprints by the edge of the veranda outside my father's sitting room, they found more prints in the trodden and crushed frost that led clear through the midwinter garden. It became evident that the thief had sneaked onto the grounds from the black wooden fence in back of the old well. In front of the well, there was a dirty old towel that he must have dropped in his getaway. Taken by the hand by the chief carpenter, Seigoro, who in feudal days had served the house of Mito, for the first time in my life I walked around this old well off in a corner of the old garden. A solitary willow tree stood by the side of the well. Half-rotten, the trunk had become hollowed and many sad-looking dead branches hung down from it. Struck by an indescribable eeriness, I didn't so much as think of trying to peer down to the bottom of this well that was too deep to fill up even if one had wanted to.
It was not only myself who was afraid. After the robbery, that part of the garden at the base of the cliff and around the old well became a place of dread for everyone in the family except my father. The Satsuma Rebellion had just ended, and the world was full of stories of conspirators, assassins, armed burglars, and bloodthirsty cruelty. Dark, paranoid suspicions hovered everywhere in the air. One could not tell when, under cover of night, lurking under the veranda of the stately gated house of a well-to-do person or of a merchant with a big storehouse, listening for the sleeping breath of the master, a terrorist or assassin would thrust his sword up through the tatami mat. At our house, without the proposal coming from my father or mother, it was decided to have the regular fireman make a watchman's rounds at night. Night after cold night, as I lay in my wet nurse's arms, I heard the clacking of his wooden clapper sound out loud and clear all through the sleeping house.
There was nothing so unpleasant and frightening as the night. After having a Beniya bean-jam wafer from a shop on Ando Slope as my snack, I would have just started playing house with my mother when the yellow evening sunlight on the translucent paper sliding door would fade away even as I looked. The wind rattled drearily through the bare-branched trees and shrubs. It started getting dark first by the black walls of the ornamental alcove in the parlor. When my mother, saying that she was going to wash her hands, stood up and slid open the door, it was dusky all through the garden to the base of the cliff, where it was completely dark. Of anywhere on the grounds, the place where it became night earliest was at the base of the cliff, where that old well was. But wasn't it from the bottomless depth of that old well that the night welled up? Such feelings did not leave me until long afterward.
Even after I had begun to go to grade school, along with the tale of O-Kiki of the Plate House advertised on the notices for peep shows on temple festival days and the picture book Mysterious Lights on the Sea from which my wet nurse read to me, not merely the old well but the ancient, half-decayed willow tree alongside it took on the force of a natural spell. I could not tell how many times they had frightened me in dreams. I wanted to see the frightening thing itself. But when I timidly asked about it, the wet nurse snipped off the buds of my young awareness with the scissors of superstition. As for my father, when he scolded me for disobedience one of his worst threats was that he would drive me out of the house and tie me up to the willow tree by the well. Ah, what terrible memories of childhood. Even when I was twelve or thirteen, I was afraid to go to the bathroom by myself at night. But I dare say I was not alone in this among the children who grew up in that period.
My father was a government official. In those days the cabinet was called the Great Hall of Government, and