A God of an Apprentice
Naoya Shiga (1883-1871) is thought to be a god of novel in Japan.
Actually, one of famous Shiga's short novels is titled "Kozo-no Kamisama" (a god of an apprentice).
A poor boy was working in a shop in Tokyo far before WWII. One day he delivered a scale used to weigh a good or the like to a customer, since the shop where he worked handled such a type of goods.
The boy got hungry when he was walking back to his shop. He happened to find a small buffet-style sushi shop at a busy corner of a Tokyo downtown. He had some money he humbly accumulated over days by avoiding use of a bus or such convenience. So, he went to the counter where some other customers were eating sushi. The boy asked one clump of sushi with a piece of fish on. The master of the sushi shop said it was 30 sen or so while picking up some rice and a piece of the fish. The boy looked at coins in his hand. It was a little short of the price. So, in a shameful manner, he said he had to go and couldn't eat it. The sushi master coolly watched the apprentice exiting the place while throwing the clamp of sushi into his mouth.
But one wealthy middle-class gentleman happened to be at the sushi-shop counter. He felt sorry to the poor boy as he saw him ashamed so much.
One day this gentleman went into a scale shop to buy one product: a big metal scale. There he found the boy who had failed to eat sushi the other day. So, suddenly he got an idea.
He asked the manager of the shop to have the boy carry the product he just purchased. Then he walked out on the Tokyo street with the apprentice to a forwarding agency. The gentleman got into the agency to arrange the delivery of the good to his house. But he also asked a clerk not to tell his address to the boy he was with.
Then the gentleman took the boy to a decent sushi restaurant (which the gentleman happened to judge to be convenient and well managed) on the main street; it was an ordinary type of shop where some private rooms were prepared. He told the apprentice of the scale shop to go inside a room and eat sushi as much as he wanted as it was a bonus for him. The boy thought a dream came true. And the boy found that the sushi shop was one the manager of the scale shop sometimes visited. The manager once told to the apprentice how delicious sushi of the shop was. So, the boy thought that the gentleman had something to do with the manager. While the boy was eating, the gentleman disappeared after paying some money to the master of the sushi restaurant. When the boy getting satisfied with delicious sushi was leaving the shop, the master said to him to come back again on any day, since the gentleman paid for other services for the boy.
The apprentice was later puzzled as he found that nobody of the scale shop knew the gentleman. There was no linkage between him and the generous gentleman. But the poor boy thought that the gentleman must have known that he had been very much ashamed in the buffet-style sushi shop the other day. And the gentleman must have known that the manager of his shop sometimes ate sushi at the shop on the main street. So, the poor apprentice concluded that the gentleman was a god.
On the other hand, the gentleman did not feel better after the incident. He was not sure about whether he had behaved like a hero to the poor apprentice. His generosity and kindness to the poor boy did not satisfy him rather strangely. His middle-class daily life did not get his mind off this episode he had planned by himself. His wife busy in social life could not see what happened to his husband. He was in mixed feelings for some time, though he did not fully repent his kind act.
But the poor apprentice boy was determined to work hard honestly and conquer any hardship, since his god must surely appear again to save him in future.
(And of course the boy never went again to the shush shop on the main street to eat more sushi. He did not even tell anybody his god and the miracle.)
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Another great novelist of Japan before WWII was Ryunosuke Akutagawa.
And Akutagawa one day asked his mentor, Soseki Natsume who is the most respected author in the modern era of Japan, how Shiga could write a novel so naturally. Natsume, the greatest novelist in Japan, answered, "I cannot even write that way. Shiga writes really naturally without pain."
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