Blue Bamboo: Tales by Dazai Osamu by Dazaï Osamu

out of the house: that much was all to the good, but heaven knows how she’ll lay into me when I return after failing in my heroic quest. Woe is me! I’d just as soon end it all right here and now.”
    Such was Yu Jung’s exhaustion that his mind had become thoroughly befuddled, and thus, unworthy though it was of one who had studied the Way of the sages, he cursed the world and lamented his fate. Peering through droopy-lidded eyes at a great flock of crows that whirled about in the sky above him, he sighed and muttered: “Ah, to be one of those crows, who know nothing of wealth and poverty!” Then he closed his eyes and lay there as still as a corpse on the balcony of the King Wu Shrine.
    Now, King Wu, you must know, was the posthumous title given to a great military leader of the Three Kingdoms era. After his death he was deified as the guardian spirit of waterways, which was why this shrine on the shore of Lake Tung-t’ing was dedicated to him. As deities go, King Wu was said to be remarkably responsive to prayers, and each time a ship passed his shrine the crew would bow their heads in worship. In the woods next to the shrine lived a flock of hundreds of crows, and whenever a ship appeared, the entire flock would take wing with a deafening din of caws and squawks to circle above the mast. The crew and passengers considered the crows sacred emissaries of the deity king and would fling scraps of mutton and other meats up into the air for them to catch in their beaks.
    It was the sight of these birds frolicking merrily about in the great blue sky that had inspired Yu Jung’s envy. “Ah, to be a crow...” He muttered the words in a feeble, doleful voice, and he was just beginning to nod off when someone tapped him on the shoulder.
    “Hello, there,” said a man dressed in a thin black robe. Yu Jung, still half asleep, peered up at him.
    “I’m sorry. Please don’t yell at me. I meant no harm. So sorry...”
    Apologizing to others for no reason whatsoever was second nature to Yu Jung, an ignoble habit born of having been scolded incessantly since childhood, and as he rolled over on his side and closed his eyes again he continued to mutter, “So sorry, so sorry,” as if in a delirium.
    “No one’s going to yell at you,” said the man in the black robe. His voice was a strange, hoarse sort of cackle. “I’ve been sent by King Wu. His Majesty wishes me to inform you that if you find the world of human beings so disagreeable, and so envy these crows the life they lead, then you’re just the man we’ve been looking for. It happens that there is a vacancy among the Black Robes, and His Majesty has condescended to bestow the appointment upon you. Here.”
    So saying, the man covered Yu Jung with a thin black garment exactly like his own, and in less time than it takes to say it, Yu Jung was transformed into a crow. He blinked, hopped up onto the balustrade, and began to comb out his feathers with his beak. Then he spread his wings and flew off, somewhat falteringly at first, to join the flock swirling in the air above a passing ship whose sails shone white in the light of the setting sun.
    Swooping left and right, he deftly caught the scraps of meat sailors flung up; soon his stomach was fuller than he could recall it ever having been in his life, and he flew back to the woods beside the temple and perched on the branch of a tree. As he sharpened his beak on the branch, he gazed at the late afternoon sunlight glittering like gold on the surface of Lake Tung-t’ing. The sight moved him to recite a poem in the manner of the ancient sages:
    Like a thousand golden petals:
    Wavelets scattered
    By the autumn wind.
    “Am I to take it, sir,” said an alluring feminine voice, “that you are pleased?”
    Yu Jung turned to see a female crow perched next to him on the branch. He bowed politely to her.
    “‘Pleased’ is scarcely the word, miss. Never have I known such lightness, such a sense of being free of the dust