Blue Bamboo: Tales by Dazai Osamu Read Free

loved detective stories and from time to time, alone in his room, experimented with disguises. He’d recently bought a dual-language edition of Conan Doyle stories, purportedly for the purpose of studying English, but in fact he was reading only the Japanese translation. He quietly suffered the tragic conviction that of all the brothers and sisters, he alone worried about their mother sufficiently.
    The father had died some five years before, but there was no threat to their standard of living. Which is to say that they were a family of some substance. Occasionally they were all overcome with a suffocating sense of boredom, and such was the case on this particular day. It was a dark and cloudy Sunday. Summer was on its way, but first the gloomy rainy season must be endured. They’d all gathered in the drawing room, where the mother was dispensing apple juice to her five children. The youngest son’s cup was considerably larger than everyone else’s.
    It was customary in this household for the brothers and sisters to relieve bouts of boredom by taking turns spinning out a collective story. The mother too sometimes joined in.
    “Any ideas?” The eldest son swept a pompous gaze over the assemblage. “I’d like today’s protagonist to be a bit eccentric, perhaps.”
    “Let’s make him an elderly man.” The younger daughter struck a hopelessly affected pose—elbow on table, chin on palm, forefinger raised to rest against cheek. “I gave this a lot of thought last night”—it had, in fact, just occurred to her at that moment—“and I realized that elderly men comprise the most romantic category of human beings. An old woman won’t do at all. It has to be a man. An elderly man can be merely sitting on a veranda, and that’s all it takes, it’s already romantic. Ahh...”
    “An old man, eh?” The eldest son pretended to think it over for a moment. “All right, so be it. Let’s make it a nice story, though, full of sweetness and light. ‘The Return of Gulliver’ last time was a bit too dark. I mean... I’ve been rereading Brand recently, and I have to admit it makes my shoulders stiff. It’s just too harrowing.” A rare confession.
    “I’ll go first!” The youngest son nominated himself in a shrill voice without bothering to pause and arrange his thoughts. He gulped down his apple juice. And then, slowly and deliberately, he began setting forth his ideas.
    “I, uh...I... Allow me to explain how I see it.” The others smiled ruefully at his attempt to sound mature, and the second son produced his famous jeering cackle, but the youngest forged ahead.
    “I think this elderly gentleman must be a great mathematician. Yes, I’m sure of it. A great and renowned mathematician. A Doctor of Mathematics, naturally, and a world-class scholar. Mathematics is changing drastically these days, as I’m sure you’re all well aware. It’s going through a transitional period. This has been underway for the past ten years or so—since about 1920, to be more precise, or just after the end of the World War.”
    It was painfully obvious that he was parroting, word for word, a lecture he’d attended at school the day before.
    “If one looks back on the history of mathematics, one can see how the science has evolved in concert with the times. The first stage in this process came with the discovery of differential and integral calculus. That spawned what in broad terms we might call modern mathematics, as opposed to the traditional Greek variety. New territory had been opened, and directly afterward we had a period of, not refinement, strictly speaking, but expansion. That was the mathematics of the eighteenth century. As we move into the nineteenth century we find, sure enough, another rash of new ideas, and this too was a time of sudden change. To choose one representative figure, we might mention Gauss, for example. That’s G, a, u, double-s. But if we define a transitional period as a time during which continual,