Natsume Sōseki — Chapter 2: The hairline fracture in an antique cafe mirror — Novella Movement 2

I.

The mirror had been hanging there since before the war—which war, nobody in the café troubled to specify, as though wars were a species of furniture that arrived and departed without needing separate names—and it was cloudy at the corners in the manner of an old man's cataract, so that when I looked up from my laptop to rest my eyes, as the various physicians of the internet instruct one to do every twenty minutes lest the retina wither entire, I saw not my own face so much as the ghost of a face, subtracted by fifty years of silvering damp. Down the left pane ran a single crack, hairline, no longer than a chopstick, and it had the peculiar property of doubling whatever crossed it: a waiter's elbow became two elbows, briefly disjointed, rejoining themselves an inch further on as though nothing at all had happened. I had taken, in the six weeks since my company's Tokyo office ceased to exist for me except as a rectangle of muted voices arriving at nine and departing at six, to watching this crack the way other men watch pigeons.

"You are becoming a mirror-gazer," said the man at the next table, whom I had never addressed and who addressed me now without preamble, as though we had been mid-conversation for years. "Narcissus without the pond. Very economical, very modern."

"I was looking at the crack," I said, "not myself."

"Ah," he said, "but who looks at a crack without first checking what it does to his own nose?"

II.

He was, this man, of a type I had believed extinct outside the pages of an older sort of novel—the sort who wears a good coat gone slightly through at the cuff, who orders the most expensive thing on the menu and somehow is never seen to pay for it, who possesses an encyclopedic and wholly unverifiable knowledge of everyone who has ever sat in the café, this café, in this district of this foreign capital where I had come, ostensibly, to be nearer to a headquarters that no longer required my nearness at all. He introduced himself with a name I promptly forgot, the way one forgets the names of ferry stops, and installed himself thereafter at the table nearest mine with the proprietary ease of a cat that has decided a particular lap will do.

"You work," he observed, nodding at my screen, on which a dozen small rectangular faces sat frozen in the attitudes of people pretending to listen. "But not here. Your work is elsewhere and you are its shadow, cast onto this table by a very long lamp."

"That is one way of putting it."

"It is the only way of putting it that does you justice," he said, and ordered a cognac, though it was not yet eleven.

III.

I should explain—though explanation is a poor guest, arriving always after the feeling that required it has left the house—that I had taken this posting, or rather this absence of posting, this permission to be anywhere so long as I answered a chime at the appointed hour, out of what I flattered myself was intellectual curiosity and what was, on closer and more honest inspection, simple cowardice: the desire to be a foreigner among foreigners rather than merely a stranger among my own. In this I had succeeded admirably. I understood perhaps one word in three of what passed around me, and this ratio suited me; a man who understands everything is condemned to have opinions, whereas a man who understands a third can retreat into aesthetics, can say of an argument only that it had a fine shape, the way one says of a vase that its glaze is unusual, without ever being obliged to hold it.

"You are a scholar," the man said, though I had told him no such thing, "gone soft in a foreign capital, feeding on rented rooms and other men's mirrors. I, on the other hand, am a man who understands mirrors from the other side—the side where one adjusts the fracture, deepens it a little, and finds a buyer for the whole piece before the crack becomes a subject of gossip."

"You mean to sell this mirror."

"I mean," he said, smiling with the particular warmth of a man who has already spent the money in his head, "that everything cracked wants a buyer who has not yet noticed the crack."

IV.

"""
I did not answer him. Outside the window a tram went by, doubled for an instant in the flawed pane exactly as the waiter's elbow had been doubled, arriving and rejoining itself further down the street; and I thought, with the sort of thought one is careful not to finish, that I had grown rather fond of my own reflection's small deformity, the little rift that made two of me for exactly the width of a hairline before restoring me to one—as though the glass, unlike my employer, unlike the muted rectangle of faces waiting for me to unmute, required nothing of me at all except that I continue, however imperfectly, to be looked at.
"""

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V.
"""

He came back the next day, and the day after, with the punctuality of a bill that has learned to present itself before one has finished the meal that occasioned it, and by the end of the week I understood that he had appointed himself something between my broker and my confessor, two professions which in his hands turned out to require identical qualifications: a talent for listening just long enough to learn the price of a thing.

"I have found a buyer," he announced, "a collector of the melancholy sort, the sort who wants his rooms to look as though something has already been mourned in them. He will pay handsomely for a mirror with history. The crack is not a defect, you understand—it is provenance."

"And what will the café owner say, when he finds his mirror sold out from under his coffee cups?"

"The café owner," he said, with the serenity of a man citing scripture, "has not looked at that mirror in eleven years. I have watched him. He wipes the counter, he wipes the second counter, he does not once lift his eyes to the wall. A man who does not look at a thing has already agreed, in the deep court of his conscience, to its removal."

"That is a very accommodating conscience you have constructed for him."

"Consciences," he said, "are like mirrors. One adjusts the fracture to taste."

VI.

I want to record, in the manner of a man cataloguing the contents of a house before it is sold out from under him too, the four things I had by then come to associate with that particular hour of the morning in that particular café: the smell of the varnish they used on the bar, sweetish and faintly of almonds; the waiter's habit of refolding the same three napkins over and over as though folding were itself a form of prayer; the tram's double image crossing the crack at eleven minutes past the hour, with the punctuality of something that did not know it was being watched; and the small chime from my laptop, arriving now with the regularity of a temple bell in a temple nobody attends, calling me back into the rectangle of faces who required of me only that I nod, from time to time, in the attitude of a man following an argument he has long since stopped following. I set these four things down not because they add to anything—a man's four habits do not sum to a life, whatever the ledger-keepers of memoir would have us believe—but because listing them is easier than saying plainly that I had begun, in that city where I understood one word in three, to prefer the company of a swindler and a crack in old glass to the muted rectangle that paid my rent.

VII.

"You are not really going to sell it," I said, on the last morning, though I already half knew the sentence for the polite fiction it was.

"I have already sold it," he said. "The buyer's men come Thursday. I have told the owner it requires resilvering, that I know a man, that it will return to him twice as beautiful. He has agreed to all of it without once raising his eyes from the counter, exactly as I promised you he would."

"And the crack?"

"The crack," he said, finishing his cognac though it was again not yet eleven, "goes with the glass. That is rather the point of it. A whole mirror is worth what any mirror is worth. A cracked one is worth what a story is worth, and stories, unlike mirrors, do not depreciate merely because everyone in the room has heard them before."

I did not attempt to stop him. I want to say this was philosophy, the scholarly flaneur's practiced indifference to the acquisitive doings of rogues, but the truth, which explanation always arrives too late to soften, is that I had grown afraid of what I might see once the wall was bare—whether some other, unfractured surface behind the frame's old plaster, or nothing at all, the raw brick of a foreign capital that had never once required my presence to go on standing.

VIII.

They came on Thursday, two men in the coveralls of movers pretending, not very hard, to be restorers, and lifted the mirror from its hooks with the tender inefficiency of men handling something they have been told is valuable without being told why. The wall behind it was paler than the wall around it, a rectangle the exact shape of the frame, like the ghost of a door in a house long since repartitioned. I looked at this pale rectangle for some time, the way I had looked at the crack, waiting for it to double something—a waiter's elbow, a passing tram, my own diminished face—but a blank wall, I discovered, has no such gift; it merely waits, the way my laptop waits, for someone to arrive and make of it whatever is required.

The man did not come back to explain the money, or to share it, or even to say goodbye in any of the several small ceremonies by which such men usually excuse themselves from further inquiry. I have not seen him since. I still take my coffee at that table, from time to time, beneath the pale unfractured rectangle where the mirror was, and I find that I no longer trouble to rest my eyes at the twenty-minute intervals the physicians of the internet recommend, there being nothing there now to double me, however briefly, into two.