There was nobody at Ike-no-O who did not know about the nose of Zenchi Naigu. It was five or six inches long and hung down from above his upper lip to below his chin. As for its shape, it was equally thick at base and tip. A long and slender sausage, so to speak, dangled from the middle of his face.
The Naigu, who was over fifty, had always grieved in secret at this nose of his from the far-off days when he was an acolyte to the present, when he had reached the position of an attendant at the palace chapel. Of course outwardly he even now wore an expression that proclaimed his lack of any particular concern about it. This was not merely because he thought it wrong for a priest who ought to devote his whole heart to the adoration of the anticipated Western Paradise to trouble himself about his nose. Rather it was because he hated to have people know that he was fretting to himself about it. In ordinary daily conversations, he feared above all else the appearance of the word “nose.”
There were two reasons why the Naigu found his nose too much for him. One was that in a practical way the length of it was inconvenient. In the first place, when he ate, he could not do it by himself. If he did, the tip of his nose got into the boiled rice in his metal bowl. So when taking his meals, he had one of his disciples sit across the dining-tray from him and hold his nose up with a piece of wood an inch wide and two feet long while he ate. But for him to dine in this way was by no means an easy thing for either the Naigu, whose nose was held up, or the disciple who held it. In those days a story got abroad even in Kyoto of how a Chūdōji, who once took the place of this disciple, let his hand shake when he sneezed and dropped the nose into a dish of gruel. But for the Naigu, this was not at all the main reason he grieved over his nose. The