nose like his own. So he noticed neither their wide-sleeved hunting coats of deep blue nor their white summer garments. Naturally the orange-colored caps and the sober brown robes of the priests, in that he was accustomed to them, did not exist for him at all. He did not see the people; he only saw their noses. But though there were hooked noses, he failed to find a single one like his own. With the repetition of his failure, his heart became more and more unhappy. His unconsciously taking hold of the end of his dangling nose while in conversation with others, and blushing out of all keeping with his years, was simply the consequence of his being moved by this unhappiness.
Finally he even thought of obtaining some solace at least by finding some man with a nose like his own in the Buddhist scriptures or other books. But it was not written in any scripture that either Mokuren or Sharihotsu had a long nose. Of course Lung Shu and Ma Ming were both Boddhisatvas with ordinary noses. When he heard, apropos of Chinese story, that the ears of Lin Hsuan-ti of the Chu-Han were long, he thought how relieved he would have felt if it had been that worthy’s nose instead of his ears.
It is needless to say that while the Naigu thus troubled himself negatively, he, at the same time, tried positive ways to make his nose grow short. He did just about everything he could in this direction, too. Once he tried drinking a decoction of snake-gourd and once applying rat urine to his nose. But in spite of all his efforts, it still dangled its five or six inches down over his lips as before.
But one year in the autumn, one of his disciples, while in Kyoto on the Naigu’s business, was told by a doctor of his acquaintance of a way to shorten noses. This doctor was a man who had come originally from China and was at that time a priest at Chōrakuji.
The Naigu as usual pretended not to care about his nose and deliberately refrained from proposing an immediate trial of the method. But on the