The Gate

by Sōseki Natsume

  “But tell us now,” inquired Mrs. Sakai, “when you’re on the road, toting your goods and all, do you manage to eat properly?”

  “I couldn’t hardly go without eating, could I? I mean, if I get hungry, well . . .”

  “And what sort of place do you eat at?”

  “What sorta place? Why, I chow down at teahouses.”

  Laughing, Sakai asked him what he meant by “teahouse,”[46] to which he replied, a place where they feed you.

  The man then amused them by recalling how, when he first came to Tokyo, the food was so good that when he settled down to serious eating, his three meals a day proved too much for most inns to handle—he had to feel sorry for them himself.

  In the end the dry-goods peddler succeeded in selling Mrs. Sakai one roll of pongee made of twisted silk and another roll of white silk gauze. Witnessing this purchase of a summer fabric in the dead of winter, Sōsuke was again struck by the distinctive habits of the well-to-do. Sakai then turned to Sōsuke.

  “And what about something for your wife—say, some cloth for an everyday kimono?”

  Mrs. Sakai added here that there was also a good deal to be saved—such and such a percent—by buying fabric this way. She then assured him that she would take care of any payment right now: He could reimburse them whenever it was convenient. Finally Sōsuke decided to buy a single roll ofmeisen for Oyone. Sakai proceeded mercilessly to beat down the price to three yen.

  “That ain’t hardly nothing at all,” the man said, defeated. “It’s enough to make me cry!” Everyone burst out laughing.

  Evidently the dry-goods peddler managed to do business with any number of customers despite his backwoods speech. As he made the rounds of his regulars all over the city, the load on his back steadily decreased, until in the end there remained only some wrapping cloths and slender “Sanada” sashes. By the time he got to this point, he explained, it was always around the old, lunar New Year, so he would return to his province for a spell and greet the spring there.[47] Then, with new bolts of cloth strapped to his back, he was off to the city again. This fresh stock would be converted into cash by the end of April or the beginning of May, which coincided with the busy season for growing silkworms, when he would again return to his small village amid the piles of volcanic rocks, below the north face of Mount Fuji.

  “In the four or five years he’s been coming to us, he hasn’t changed a bit,” Mrs. Sakai commented.

  “Yes, a remarkable fellow,” her husband observed.

  In these times, when after a few days at home one went out to find that the streets had been widened, or, if one skipped the newspaper for a single day, missed learning about a new streetcar line, for someone who had been coming to Tokyo twice a year to have kept so thoroughly intact his mountain-man ways—it was truly remarkable. After observing the face of this dry-goods peddler, along with his attire, his language, and his way of interacting with people, Sōsuke came to feel a kind of sympathy for him.

  On his way home from the Sakais’, Sōsuke, switching the bundle of just-purchased meisen back and forth from under one flap of his cape to another, vividly retained in his mind’s eye the image of the man who had just sold him this fine cloth for a paltry three yen: the stripes of his coarse homespun jacket; his desiccated, ruddy hair, which, stiff and lackluster as it was, he somehow managed to keep immaculately parted down the middle.

  At home, Oyone had just finished sewing for Sōsuke a new kimono jacket to mark the New Year. For lack of a proper press, she had placed it under a cushion and was sitting on it.

  “Spread it under your futon tonight and sleep on it,” she said, casting a glance over her shoulder at her husband.

  On hearing his account of the man from Kai who had been at the Sakais’, Oyone could not help laughing out loud herself. “And so cheap,” she said over and over again as she feasted her eyes on the texture and striped pattern of the meisen he had brought her. The material was indeed of the highest quality.

  “How can he possibly make a profit at such prices?” she asked at length.

  “The reason is that the middlemen are making far too much profit,” answered Sōsuke, who, extrapolating from this single bolt of meisen, answered as if he were an expert in the trade.

  The conversation then shifted to the comfortable circumstances enjoyed by the Sakais—if their wealth sometimes made them prey to swindles by the likes of the furniture dealer, it also gave them the advantage of stocking up cheaply on articles for which they had no pressing need—and from this point of departure on to the general subject of the astonishingly bright, lively lives they led.

  “Of course it’s not just that they have money,” Sōsuke said to Oyone, his tone suddenly altered. “It also has to do with all those children they have. As long as there are children, even poor families can be very cheerful.”

  In Oyone’s ears his tone resounded with rather harsh self-reproach over their lonely existence. Involuntarily taking her hands off the bolt of cloth in her lap, she glanced at her husband’s face. So full of satisfaction at having brought some rare joy into his wife’s life, in the form of this pleasing gift acquired through the Sakais, Sōsuke was unaware of how his words sounded to her. Oyone let the matter pass with only her brief glance but decided to broach it at bedtime.

  Not long after they had gone to bed at their usual time of a little past ten, Oyone turned to her husband before he could doze off and said, “Earlier tonight you said not having children makes life dreary, didn’t you?”

  Sōsuke recalled that he had said something very general along those lines, but he had certainly not intended it as a pointed reference to Oyone herself. Grilled in this fashion, he was totally at a loss for a reply.

  “Oh, I wasn’t talking about us,” he said.

  Oyone listened in silence. Then, after a pause, she said, “But you are always thinking how dreary thing are at home, so you must have meant what you said, did you not?”

  She was essentially repeating the same point she had made before. Inwardly, Sōsuke had to agree with her interpretation. But in the interest of sparing her feelings he could not bring himself to make such a blunt admission. To soothe his still-convalescent wife it would be best, he thought, to treat the matter as nothing but a joke. He shifted to the lightest tone he could manage.

  “Well,” he began,” “I said ‘dreary’ . . . and naturally things do get dreary at times . . .” But here he came up against a wall, unable to think of anything novel or amusing. In the end, he was reduced to saying, “Oh, never mind. Don’t worry about it.” This too having met with silence from Oyone, he decided to change the subject. “I hear there was another fire last night . . .” Sōsuke said, venturing into current events.

  “I am so very sorry for what this has done to you,” Oyone suddenly broke out in a painful, heartfelt apology, then faltered and fell silent. With her back to the lamp, which was set as usual in the alcove, he could not make out her expression, but he could hear the quavering in her voice. Sōsuke, who had been lying on his back and staring at the ceiling, turned to his wife and gazed intently at her through the very dim light. She peered back at him. “For a long time I’ve been wanting to say how sorry I am, from the bottom of my heart,” she said haltingly, “but it’s been hard for me to put into words . . . and so I’ve just let it go up to now.”

  Sōsuke scarcely knew what to make of this. He wondered if it might be a touch of hysteria;[48] but since he could not be sure, he said nothing. He was in a daze.

  Oyone spoke again, in anguish, and this time with finality: “I can never have a child.” Then she burst into tears.

  At a loss how to console his wife after she had made such a heartrending confession, Sōsuke found his pity for her mounting ever higher. “Oh well, children—they’re really not worth the trouble, are they? I mean, just look at that brood the Sakais have. You can’t help feeling sorry for them. It’s like a nursery school up there . . .”

  “But to know that there will never be
a single one—say what you will, that can’t make you happy.”

  “Who is to say that you couldn’t have one still? You might, you know.”

  At this Oyone only cried harder. Helpless, Sōsuke could only wait stoically until she regained some composure. Then he listened as she unburdened herself.

  Although in the course of their life together the two of them had achieved a greater harmony than the average couple, where children were concerned they had been less fortunate than most. Had it been a clear-cut case of infertility it would have been easier to bear; but to lose the children they had actually conceived—this had made their misfortune all the more keenly felt.

  Oyone’s first pregnancy had occurred shortly after they left Kyoto, while they were just scraping by in their Hiroshima lodgings. Once she had realized her condition, Oyone went from day to day lurching between two simultaneous dreams of the future, one terrifying, the other euphoric. Sōsuke privately viewed the new development as an outward manifestation of the intangible spirit of love they shared, and was filled with joy. As he waited he took pleasure in counting on his fingers the months and weeks remaining until the lump of flesh to which he had contributed a part of himself would come to term and appear dancing before their eyes. But the couple’s hopes were dashed when the fetus was cast out from the womb at only five months. This was the period when they were only barely getting by, in the most straitened circumstances. Gazing at Oyone’s ashen face after the miscarriage, Sōsuke was convinced that this, too, was a result of their poverty. He lamented that such fruits of their love could be crushed by sheer material want and had now been placed out of their reach indefinitely. For her part, Oyone simply wept.

  It was not long after they moved to Fukuoka, however, that once again she found herself craving sour foods. Having heard tales of how one miscarriage tends to lead to another, Oyone became cautious about the smallest things and conducted herself with the utmost restraint. Perhaps this had an effect, for the pregnancy proceeded in virtually textbook fashion until, inexplicably, she gave birth prematurely. The midwife, shaking her head, urged Oyone to have the baby seen by a doctor. After an examination, the doctor told them that since the infant was not fully developed, their room must be kept at a precise, elevated temperature, without any fluctuations between day and night—something that would of course require some mode of generating extra heat. In their current circumstances all Sōsuke could do was to provide a space-heating stove. The couple devoted all their time and meager resources in an intense effort to save the child’s life. But it all came to naught. After one week this small creature, who shared their blood and bore witness to their love for each other, turned cold and lifeless.

  “Whatever shall we do?” Oyone sobbed, cradling the baby’s body in her arms.

  Sōsuke received this new blow with manly stoicism. As the baby’s cold flesh was reduced to ashes, and the ashes put to rest in the dark earth, he did not utter one word of protest. With the passage of time, the shadowy gap that had opened up between them narrowed, then vanished altogether.

  There had been a third episode that formed yet another painful memory. Within a year after their return to Tokyo, Oyone became pregnant again. Her health after the move being far from robust, Sōsuke, not to mention Oyone, was extremely concerned. Yet they summoned up their hopes—This time for sure! they both thought—and were increasingly buoyed with each uneventful month that passed by. But then, at the beginning of the fifth month, Oyone committed a surprising blunder. Since the municipal water supply had not yet been put through to their district, the maid constantly had to scurry back and forth to draw water at the well, where she also did the laundry. One day, needing to speak with the maid while the latter was still at the well, Oyone went out herself and, while talking, stepped over a basin near the faucet, whereupon she slipped and fell on the mossy wet planks there, landing on her buttocks. Fearing that she had ruined things again, she was too ashamed of her carelessness to tell Sōsuke about the mishap and maintained a rigorous silence. The days passed, however, without any ill effect on the quickening fetus or any palpable injury to herself; only then did she finally, and with much relief, make a clean breast of the matter to her husband, long after the fact. Not disposed from the start to reproach his wife, Sōsuke let the incident pass with only a mild admonition. “You must avoid doing anything risky or you’ll run into trouble,” he said.

  In due course, then, the pregnancy approached full term. Oyone had now reached the stage where the baby could come any day, and Sōsuke could think of nothing but his wife, even while at the office. On his way home he would dwell incessantly on whether or not she had given birth during his absence, and pause outside the latticework door to his own house in anticipation. On a couple of occasions, on not hearing the half-expected newborn cries, he leapt to the conclusion that something had gone awry and charged headlong into the house, only to feel mortified at the awkward figure he must have cut.

  Fortunately, Oyone went into labor late one evening, a time when Sōsuke, being at home and having no other business, could stay by her side and help. In this respect, at least, it was a propitious beginning. The midwife was sent for without any great haste; gauze and such were all laid out and at the ready. The delivery itself took place with unexpected ease. Sadly, however, the infant emerged from the confines of the womb into the world without taking so much as a single breath of air. Wielding a tubular glass instrument, the midwife repeatedly forced her own breath into the tiny mouth, but to no avail. What had come into this world was an inert lump of flesh—clearly etched, they could see, with a pair of eyes, a nose, and a mouth. But from its throat there issued nary a cry for them to hear.

  The midwife had paid Oyone a house call just a week earlier and examined the fetus, even auscultating its heart, and pronounced it to be in excellent condition. Even supposing for the moment that the midwife’s examination were faulty, if fetal development had in fact ceased at some point prior to the delivery, surely Oyone would have suffered ill effects, unless, of course, the fetus were aborted. Sōsuke’s subsequent wider search for an explanation yielded a startling, and horrifying, discovery: that the fetus must have been perfectly normal up to the final moments of the delivery, only to be strangled by a prolapsed umbilical cord that became wrapped around its neck. In the event of this abnormal occurrence, the only possible remedy lies in the hands of a skilled midwife, who on detecting the obstruction as she reaches in, will disentangle the cord and pull it out of the way. This much the midwife whom Sōsuke had engaged, being well on in years, clearly understood. In this case, however, as sometimes happens, the prolapsed cord had ringed the tiny throat not once but twice; as the midwife probed the constricted area with her fingers she missed one coil, which pressed hard against the infant’s windpipe until it choked to death.

  The midwife was partly at fault, to be sure, but the greater blame lay with Oyone’s mishap. When, in her fifth month, she fell over backwards and landed hard on the ground beside the well, she had created the conditions for a prolapsed umbilical cord. When Oyone listened to this explanation as she lay on her sickbed, she nodded feebly and said nothing. Her eyes, noticeably sunken from fatigue, misted over behind her long, constantly fluttering lashes. Murmuring consolations, Sōsuke wiped the tears from her cheeks with his handkerchief.

  Such was the couple’s history where children of their own were concerned. Having suffered the anguish of losing a child three times over, they were not disposed to speak about children much at all. Nevertheless, however unspoken, these memories suffused the most private part of their life together with a sadness that showed no sign of dissipating. At times, even in the midst of laughing together over some little thing, they would both experience intimations of these shadows from their past. Even at the moment of her outburst, then, Oyone had no intention of going over with Sōsuke again the details of this shared experience. Nor could he have seen any reason to sit there and listen had his wife simply dredged up those same sad, familiar
events.

  What Oyone had now begun to unburden herself about had nothing to do with the facts of their common past. Learning from her husband of the chain of circumstances that had led to the loss of her third child, she had come to see herself as a mother of monstrous cruelty. Although she had not committed the deed with her own hands, she concluded that she might as well have laid in wait on the shadowy path connecting the darkness with the light in order to wring the breath from the very one to whom she herself had given life. Having reached this conclusion, Oyone could not help viewing herself as a criminal guilty of the most horrendous of acts. Thereafter, unbeknownst to anyone, she had been subjected to hitherto unimagined torments of conscience. And there was not a soul in all the world with whom she could suffer some portion of these torments. She did not divulge her feelings even to her husband.

  After this last episode, Oyone went through with the same three weeks’ bed rest she would have undergone after a normal childbirth. Physically, this interval brought her much-needed repose. Emotionally, however, the three weeks became a daunting test of her endurance. Sōsuke made a small coffin for the infant’s body and conducted a funeral unwitnessed by anyone. After that he made a small wooden tablet inscribed in black lacquer with the posthumously bestowed Buddhist name of the deceased. Although the infant thus commemorated bore a sanctified name, what this small soul might have been called in everyday life, neither parent could say. At first Sōsuke kept the tablet on top of the chest of drawers in the sitting room, where in the evening, on returning from the office, he would without fail burn incense before it. The scent occasionally reached Oyone’s nostrils. Confined to the six-mat room, she was lying at some remove, yet her senses were keen enough for it to register. After a period of time something prompted him to take down the small tablet and place it in the bottom drawer of the chest. In this same drawer were carefully stored, wrapped separately in cotton cloth, the memorial tablets of the child who had died in Fukuoka and of Sōsuke’s father, who had ended his days in Tokyo. When the Tokyo home had been disposed of, Sōsuke had not wanted to be burdened with ancestral tablets as he wandered about the country; he deposited all of them at the family temple[49] and took with him only the newly made tablet of his late father.