by Taeko Kono
Indifferent about her own clothing, Akiko was obsessed with garments for little boys — so naturally her taste in these had become extremely refined. The people selected to receive her gifts would be dumbfounded. How could this woman, who wasn’t a mother herself, find such wonderfully appropriate clothes? Some thought they could guess the motive behind these fits of generosity: unfulfilled maternal love.
Akiko bought the shirt and left the shop with a box under her arm. In no time at all, she had marked out the recipient of her next gift.
She’d heard that the opera troupe of which she’d once been a member was now performing Madama Butterfly, and that the son of one of her old colleagues was playing the part of Madame Butterfly’s child. She trained her sights on this little boy.
When Akiko had quit the company, she’d had good reasons. Her prospects weren’t improving: she was over thirty; she couldn’t be a member of the chorus forever; and besides, a bout of tuberculosis had damaged her health. Rather than having quit, it might be more accurate to say that circumstances had forced her to fade away.
And yet, back when she had graduated from the college of music, her achievements had been impressive. She had given solo recitals, winning praise from a famous music critic. “Such a feel for the music,” he had written in a review, “especially in the last piece, Mozart’s ‘Longing for Springtime.’ ” The fact was that she’d been on the diva track, but as things turned out, she had landed in the chorus — a source of anguish for Akiko. Even now, she found it difficult to ignore the opera world — though all news of it brought her terrible fits of distress. She’d made no effort to stay in touch with her onetime colleagues.
But that evening — just as Madame Butterfly and Suzuki were singing their lines, Is poverty upon us? This money is all we have! — Akiko appeared backstage, astonishing the company.
“I heard Noguchi Masayo’s son is performing,” she remarked, but her business wasn’t with these people. She’d timed her arrival to coincide with the end of the opera, when the child was onstage, and she didn’t have to wait long before he appeared.
“I saw an article about it in the newspaper,” Akiko said, when Masayo stepped into the dressing room, her little boy in tow. “How exciting! Your son onstage!” She leaned down to look at the boy, who was hiding behind his mother.
Masayo had made her debut several years after Akiko, playing roles like Annina, the maid in La Traviata, and the gardener’s daughter in Le Nozze di Figaro. She was a cut above the chorus: when she sang, her photograph appeared in the program. Today, however, she was there to look after her little boy.
“Is this the star himself? And only four years old! Is everything going well?”
“Oh yes. He’s a gutsy little guy, really,” Masayo replied. “And anyway, he doesn’t have to do much. He seems to be managing pretty well.”
“Oh, I’m not surprised. You can see it in his face!” Akiko said, her gaze lingering on the boy’s soft, plump earlobes and his cheeks, tawny and smooth like little biscuits.
“Do you sing too?” the child inquired.
“Me?” Akiko was slightly taken aback. “No, Auntie doesn’t. . . .”
“Yes, what are you doing now?” Masayo asked, as if sensing Akiko’s discomfort.
What was she doing? Well . . . generally people who are asked such a thing aren’t expected to give any impressive reply. Akiko was no exception to the rule. She decided to take the question as referring to how she was making ends meet.
“Oh, I manage with my Italian skills,” she replied vaguely.
“Of course, I remember — there aren’t many people who speak it as well as you. . . .”
Akiko’s Italian was, in fact, splendid. She had shown a remarkable aptitude for the language, now much more than a vehicle for singing opera. In the chorus she’d never had a hope of making a living, and she’d been thrown back on her language skills to survive. She had earned extra money by translating articles for fashion magazines, and tutoring younger company members.
Nowadays, she worked part-time at a compressor factory: she was called in whenever the company had to correspond with Italian clients. The technical language had posed difficulties at first, since no Italian-Japanese dictionary was complete enough. She’d taken the words she couldn’t decipher, with their English and German counterparts, to the Engineering Section to ask for help. This was where she’d gotten to know Sasaki, who usually dealt with her queries.
“You’ve got a good deal,” he remarked when they first chatted at length, “not having to work nine to five.” But the part-time pay was a pittance. It was impossible to meet expenses with her Italian alone, even with other odd jobs here and there. She’d found extra income as a dictation assistant to one of the translators working on a complete set of opera libretti. This job allowed her to indulge herself by buying little garments for little boys.
But preferring to steer Masayo away from these topics, she cheerfully pressed the parcel into her hands and said: “This is a present to celebrate his debut.”
“Oh, my goodness! You didn’t need to. . . .”
“That’s all right — I wanted to,” Akiko said, directing her last words to the boy.
“What is it? What is it?” he asked.
“I wonder now whether I shouldn’t have brought a toy,” Akiko said. “Won’t you try it on?”
Masayo was still hesitant to accept, but Akiko, tearing off the wrapping paper, pulled out her gift.
“Oh, it’s a lovely . . .” Masayo was getting more and more uncomfortable. Akiko, however, had already removed the boy’s costume and was getting him into the shirt she had chosen.
“What do you think? Isn’t it cute?” she asked.
“Oh, yes. And it’s a perfect fit.”
“What a lucky boy!” a girl who was packing up her costume nearby chimed in.
“Does the little lad have a name?” Akiko asked. “I remember seeing it in the papers, but I . . .”
“Darling, this lady wants to know your name. You can tell her yourself, can’t you? And don’t forget to say thank you.”
“My name is Noguchi Shuichi. Thank you.”
Akiko laughed. “Can you get take it off by yourself, Shuichi?”
The child nodded.
“Go on then, show me.”
The boy in his comfy red-and-blue shirt shrugged petulantly: “I don’t want to.”
“You like it, don’t you,” Masayo said. “Even children know when something’s extra special. Will you wear that home, Shuichi?”
The child looked up at his mother and nodded.
Akiko was thrilled: the shirt was a good fit and also a great success with the boy. But she couldn’t resist one last shot at getting to watch him try to get himself out of it.
“It’s still a little warm for this shirt, you know,” she said. “You don’t want to sweat, Shu. Let’s take it off and have Mommy carry it home. We can wear it as much as we like when the weather gets cooler. What a big boy,” she added, before he could object: “Shu can get undressed all by himself.”
Akiko unbuttoned the neck of the shirt, and placed her hands on the chubby little arms sticking out of the short sleeves. She crossed his arms, one over the other, savoring their softness and perspiration, and made sure that each hand grasped the hem.
“Now lift your arms up over your head. Got it?”
Just as she’d imagined, the child started to twist and turn about, wiggling his bottom. Akiko backed off to get a better look, but to her chagrin, Masayo decided to lend him a hand. Catching the shirt from behind, she pulled it up, and slipped it off over his head in no time.
“Easy, isn’t it?” Akiko said, crossing her own arms. “Like this, then up and over.” The child nodded. He copied her, crossing his arms, bringing them up and letting them fall loosely over his bare belly.
“Perfect!�
�� In an excess of joy, Akiko laughed out loud, showing off her soprano voice for the first time in years. “You little darling!”
“I thought you didn’t like children, Miss Hayashi,” remarked a member of the chorus, standing nearby.
Akiko knew perfectly well what she meant — and Masayo was probably thinking the same thing. Some years ago, when Akiko was still with the company, a woman — now on tour in Europe — had played Madame Butterfly with her own child on stage. Akiko was so blatantly repulsed by that child that it had become something of a scandal. The mother, who had joined the troupe at the same time as Akiko, was the star of the company, and her colleagues had concluded that her loathing sprang from jealousy. “She doesn’t have to take it out on a four-year-old!” she’d heard them mutter.
Only Akiko knew the real reason: that the child was a girl.
But tonight Akiko passed it off as a change of heart. “The older you get,” she replied, “the more you appreciate children.”
On the way home from her transcription job, Akiko bought some things in the shops in front of the station and reached her apartment as dusk fell. Her last purchase, the block of ice, had almost completely soaked its newspaper wrappings, and her fingers were frozen numb. Struggling to hold her shopping, the evening paper, and a postcard from her mailbox, she could barely turn her key in the lock.
As she stepped inside her apartment, she felt something underfoot — a telegram had been pushed under her door, from Sasaki. He’d been due to visit her place that night, following his morning return. The telegram had been dispatched from the Osaka central post office. He’d had to go on to Hiroshima, Sasaki said, so he’d be delayed two or three days. “In touch soon,” the closing words ran.
The delivery time was stamped at 8:30 that morning — she must have just missed it on her way out. Strange, that that had been the requested delivery time. Sasaki had most likely been instructed to go on to Hiroshima by the Tokyo office, or by a superior who’d joined him on the trip. But however the change of plan had been announced, he was bound to have become aware of it some time yesterday between nine and five. Why had he delayed letting her know until 8:30 this morning?
Taking a second look, she saw that he had actually dispatched the telegram last night at 11:37, after which he would have taken the night train to Hiroshima, with an easy morning arrival. It had no doubt simply slipped his mind to send the telegram earlier. He must have been out on the town, and then wanted to avoid giving her a shock in the middle of the night. Akiko tossed the slip of paper aside. To think she had gone to the trouble of buying ice. “In touch soon” — what did he mean? “Forgive me,” he should have said!
“Miss Hayashi!” It was her superintendent’s voice: “Do you have a delivery from the liquor store?”
Akiko went downstairs where a delivery man was depositing three bottles of beer just inside the entrance. Hovering nearby was the superintendent, an old woman whose rimless eyeglasses gave her an officious air: “You got a telegram, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Everything all right?”
“Fine,” Akiko replied shortly, gathering up the bottles.
Back in her room, Akiko set about stabbing the ice block with a pick used to open milk bottles. Putting some of the ice shards in a glass, she topped them up with beer. She didn’t usually drink, and she didn’t particularly like the taste, but it was pleasantly chilly, and she downed two glasses one after the other. Remembering the potato chips she’d flung down on her way in, she reached for the bag and tore it open. But after one bite, she stopped. Her heart was racing — a rush of heat came over her. She had to lie down. She remembered the ice: she could wrap some in a towel for her forehead: that would make her feel better. But it was too much trouble to get up. She lay where she was, sprawled out on the floor.
When she opened her eyes, the room was dark. The luminous hands of the clock stood at a little past eight o’clock, and crickets were chirping outside. It was September, and while the days were still hot, there was a nip in the evening air. She had perspired and her clothes felt cold and clammy against her skin, now that it was no longer flushed with drink.
An unmarried woman past thirty losing her temper because a man two years her junior didn’t keep his date; who got drunk on the beer she’d bought for him and that was far too strong for her; and who came to her senses in a pitch-dark room — whoever heard of such a thing! After sneezing several times, Akiko forced a bitter smile.
She stood up, turned on the light, pulled a blanket out of the cupboard, and lay down again. A woman is supposed to weep at a time like this, she thought, not smile.
“It won’t be a long drawn-out thing when we break up,” Sasaki had once told her. “One day we’ll have a fight, and that’ll be that.”
“Well — you chose the right person, didn’t you!” she’d retorted, and was immediately angry at herself. Why did she have to be so disagreeable? This sourness of hers was precisely what made him say such things.
Had Sasaki been pointing out her danger in being such a willful woman? No, that interpretation was too romantic — he’d only meant that he was aware of how little she was committed to him, or, for that matter, to any aspect of her life.
“We both chose the right person,” Sasaki had replied. “So we should try our best to get along.”
Though they were single and still relatively young, the subject of a future together rarely came up for discussion. They didn’t even try living together.
About the sort of marriage he’d want, Sasaki had any number of typical requirements. He would no doubt settle down late in life with a nice little wife able to meet them. Akiko didn’t have these qualities, nor did she care to develop them. But she couldn’t, on the other hand, tolerate fussy older men, and was bored by ones of high standing in business or society, who would in all likelihood be married anyway.
They understood these things about themselves, and about each other — and were aware of their mutual knowledge. For him, she was a stopgap companion. For her, he filled a superficial role as her partner. And the one thing that kept them together was their compatible sexual tastes.
Akiko remembered the first time she was distinctly attracted to Sasaki was when he’d told her about a night he spent helping a woman in labor. It had happened when he was still a student, right after the war.
“I was getting ready for bed,” Sasaki had told her, “when my old landlady rushed into my room, all in a panic: ‘The baby’s coming! The baby’s coming!’ ‘Well, don’t you think you’d better lie down?’ I asked. Her belly was out to here, you know. ‘Don’t be an idiot,’ she said to me, very offended: ‘You know I’m a widow.’ It was the woman on the second floor who was having the baby. Her husband was a drunk of a journalist — he never came home, and he wasn’t around that night, either. And the baby was already halfway born, so she couldn’t be taken to the hospital — the whole second floor was in an uproar. The old lady told me to heat some water on the first floor, and take it up to them.
“I’d put the water on to boil,” Sasaki continued, “when the old woman came to my room again. Now she made me go find a midwife. The first person they’d sent out hadn’t returned. Well, finding a midwife in the middle of the night isn’t easy, you know. I finally spotted an advertisement for one pasted to a telegraph pole, and raced over to the address, only to be told the woman had moved away five years back. By this time I was getting pretty fed up, I can tell you. But I had to do something for the poor woman, and I finally found another old woman. But by the time I brought her back, it was all over. Still, it’s good to get the umbilical cord cut by someone who knows what they’re doing.
“I headed back to my room, and there at my door was the old woman again. Now they needed someone to get rid of the afterbirth water, she said. Well, I did what she told me, me and the guy who lived in the next room. She told us to throw it away on some
farm patch, as far away as possible, but you weren’t going to catch me carrying a tub of water like that any farther than I had to. Sloshing all over the place, scum splashing me right in the mouth. Anywhere will do, we thought — and sluiced it down a drain right there on the corner.”
“Was it a boy or a girl?” Akiko had asked.
“The baby? A healthy little boy.”
Sasaki’s story had had the most unexpected effect on Akiko. Why had she felt so attracted to him? Because of some story about an escapade helping a woman in labor, someone he didn’t even know? She couldn’t figure it out — was it his freshness, his boyishness? No, it couldn’t have been just that. What had drawn her had been the ruthless streak she detected beneath that innocent story of helping a woman in trouble. That had gotten to her. And her hunch had proven correct: later, she’d found out that Sasaki possessed just the predilections she liked.
From the way he said, “a healthy little boy,” though, Sasaki appeared to also have a paternal streak: how did this fit in?
Akiko remembered the postcard in her mail from Noguchi Masayo. Reaching for it, she started reading: Masayo began with the customary seasonal greetings and some words about the joy at seeing her after so many years.
“. . . Last night was closing night,” she continued. “Shuichi normally wakes up early in the morning, but today he dozed past nine. He must be relieved now that the opera is over — it’s funny to think of children feeling that way. He loves the shirt you gave him. He’s always telling me he wants to wear it. We can’t wait for this hot weather to cool down. . . .”
Akiko wasn’t as annoyed as she’d expected. “Shuichi normally wakes up early in the morning. . . .” She enjoyed turning the words over in her mind. But, just as she never bought little garments with a particular child in mind, to arrange another encounter with Shuichi to see him wearing her gift was out of the question.