“Doesn’t it hurt? The doctor said to trample it torturingly. But doesn’t it hurt?”
The Naigu tried to shake his head to show that it was not hurting him. But since his nose was being trampled on, he could not move his head as he wished. So, rolling up his eyes and fastening them on the cracks in the disciple’s chapped feet, he answered in an angry-sounding voice,
“No, it doesn’t!”
As his nose was being trampled on where it itched, he really found it more comfortable than painful.
After a while, something that looked like grains of millet began to come out on his nose. It looked, so to speak, like a bird plucked and roasted whole. The disciple, seeing this, stopped moving his feet and observed as if to himself,
“He told me to pull these out with hair-tweezers.”
The Naigu, puffing out his cheeks with dissatisfaction, without a word, left his nose to the disciple to deal with as he wished. Of course it was not because he was unaware of his disciple’s kindness. But though he was aware of that, he was displeased at having his nose treated just as if it were a commodity. Reluctantly, with the expression of a patient being operated on by a doctor in whom he has no faith, he watched the disciple with hair-tweezers pulling the fat out of the pores of his nose. The fat came out in the shape of bird quills half an inch long.
Finally when the nose had once been gone over, the disciple looked relieved and said,
“If you boil it once more, it’ll be all right, I think.”
The Naigu, still knitting his brows and looking dissatisfied, did as the disciple told him.