Toddler Hunting

by Taeko Kono

  Once, a year or two after they were married, Noriko, looking for wrapping paper, had discovered a department store package with a mailing label on it. It had been sent to Asari at the address where he had lived with his first wife. Though he’d told Noriko he had been divorced for three or four years before meeting her, it had been postmarked just the year prior.

  “Would you like to see what I’ve found?” she asked, showing it to him.

  “Where did that come from?” he asked, staring at the address label.

  “It must bring back memories,” Noriko teased. “It was in the closet, with the wrapping paper.”

  “That’s strange. I wonder how it got there.”

  “It is strange, isn’t it’ ” Noriko pointed at the postmark: “Especially this.”

  Asari didn’t seem to know what to say.

  “Oh, I remember,” he said, suddenly reassured. “Look. My brother sent it to me.”

  “Oh yes. He was in Hakata by then, wasn’t he.”

  “I’d been too busy to tell him I’d moved. . . . So he mailed it to my old place.”

  “And then?”

  “And then it was forwarded. I got it here.”

  Noriko started to laugh. “So it was in the mail for years?” she asked. “The post office forwarded it three years later? Don’t worry — it’s all right. I’ll let it go.”

  “You’re just like the secret police,” Asari said, scowling. He returned the package to her with a show of indifference.

  Noriko suspected, judging from the quantity and type of items left behind, that they had belonged to the woman Asari had lived with for a while after his divorce. If so, since he’d been divorced later than he’d originally said, he must have married and divorced one woman, lived with another, and then married her — all in a short space of time.

  But she didn’t think Asari had actually been unfaithful: true, there’d been signs that he had been dragged off to certain places by disreputable friends a couple of times. Maybe she’d let herself be fooled, but she basically trusted him.

  And this trust might account for Noriko never having felt any jealousy about the women in his past. She herself had had a lover before meeting Asari, though they’d broken up completely. The fact was, neither had a right to object to the other’s past — and anyway those relationships weren’t worth getting upset about.

  If anything, Noriko felt a certain intimacy with Asari’s first wife as well as with the imported accessories’ owner, which only increased when she learned that he had been involved with all three in such quick succession. She came to think of the three of them as some harem in a primitive land, all sharing the same husband and coexisting in harmony.

  Asari must have sensed her feelings: “Hey, Noriko,” he would say, showing her some little thing he had come across. “Look what I found — would you like it?” He didn’t go so far as to say that it had belonged to a woman with whom he had been involved; but he didn’t have to, it was obvious.

  “Oh, yes,” she would say, gratefully, “Give it to me.” And the truth was that she’d also been gratified by the discovery of the package with that mailing label.

  Noriko now started to feel that same sort of intimacy toward Asari’s future women: surely his third wife wouldn’t object to meeting her amid Asari’s things. The two of them might enjoy reading her messages together. The new wife might even declare that, of the three women in his past, she liked her, Noriko, best of all.

  Thinking this, Noriko wanted to send a little note to Asari’s ­wife-­to-be. Since he hadn’t discarded the packaging or the other woman’s things around the house, he would probably be just as lax preparing for his third spouse. Noriko didn’t worry that her note wouldn’t be found.

  “Hello, how do you do? I’m so glad to meet you. I’ve been wanting to have a chat. There are so many things I’d like to share with you.

  “Perhaps I should start by telling you the bad things about Asari. He won’t buy you anything, you know, unless you ask him a thousand times. As you must have realized, he’s very tight with money and for some reason, he’s particularly stingy about our clothes. He’s very clever in the way he gets out of it: ‘Don’t buy that,’ he’ll say. ‘Let’s shop around and get something that really suits you.’ So you must make him buy you as many clothes as you can — get him to buy you what he didn’t buy me.

  “Also, please help yourself to any of my things, though I doubt they’ll be of much use to you. I used his other women’s belongings — I’d love it if you did the same with mine.”

  Realizing that Asari might again renew his family register for his third marriage, and that her name would mean nothing to his new spouse, Noriko signed the note: “From the deceased wife.”

  She tore off the page, and left it on the desk with the other notes. Later she would put it in the crate of her summer glassware. She took up the pen again and started another note: “Well, I see that you are now quite settled in. I’m very happy to see you being so good to him. I hope you won’t spare any effort to see to his every need. . . .”

  Writing this, a picture began to form in Noriko’s mind of the way Asari and his ­well-­settled-in wife would live. The living room would be much more cramped — cramped and untidy. They would have rented the second floor to an office worker and Asari’s desk would have been brought down, and all sorts of objects would be piled on top of it, and around it. One of his wife’s soiled workaday kimonos would hang on the wall. The table would be laid with food, a strange combination — curry, and then squid cooked with radish in soy sauce. Asari and his wife would be eating in silence, their eyes on the television.

  “This singer looks like our lodger,” the wife would say.

  Asari would not reply.

  “Oh, speaking of the lodger,” she would continue, “I think he’s going to get married soon. Something tells me.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “I don’t know. Just something. He’s got his nerve — staying on all this time, paying the same rent. You can tell he’s a hick.”

  “You were the one who wanted to rent it out.”

  “Well, we need the money, don’t we, if we’re going to build a house. We’ll never do it on your salary.”

  “The rent doesn’t make that much difference, does it?”

  “Every little bit helps. We couldn’t hope to buy a house without it. Look how little you earn. And you like to drink.”

  Asari, who that night would be abstaining, would grimace, his chopsticks moving, his eyes on the screen, but his wife would continue, undeterred.

  “You know how much last month’s liquor bill was? Eight thousand yen!”

  “So what!” Asari would snap, finally facing her, and a violent altercation would ensue.

  But a few hours later, in the bedroom, the wife would say: “You know, the sooner we have our own house, the better.”

  And Asari would reply: “Well, I probably can’t even find a plot of land within an hour and a half of work.”

  Noriko had never grumbled about Asari’s meager salary. They had no children, after all, and she’d been able to make ends meet. It was true that they were only renting. Asari was always regaling her with grand plans about the dream house he would build for them in the future, and so she’d stopped even thinking about owning their own place. As a result, both of them seemed tacitly resigned to renting for the rest of their days.

  In other words, Noriko realized, she had never, not once, broached the subject of owning their own house. Was it appropriate, then, to consider themselves “husband and wife”? She found herself forced to look at her life with him in a new light. She went back to the letter she was writing.

  “Thinking about it now,” she wrote, “maybe Asari and I weren’t really married, after all. Maybe we were only lovers who happened to end up living together. Legally speaking, we were marrie
d; we lived together for six years — a record for Asari; and we loved each other, or so I like to think. But I have a feeling that we lived together the way lovers do, not like a husband and wife. People often say that couples who don’t have sex can’t really be married, but it’s in the opposite sense that we weren’t really married. I would guess that some of those other couples were more truly husband and wife than we were.

  “You will try, won’t you, to be really married. Please let him experience this — contrary to appearances, he never has before. . . .

  “Why do I say we were not husband and wife? Well. . . .”

  Noriko let the pen fall from her hands. The truth of her life with Asari was bearing down upon her so closely, she had a hard time assimilating it.

  Yes — that was right, Noriko admitted, still lost in thought. They hadn’t been husband and wife; they had simply chosen to live together. Sometimes they were like brother and sister, each in turn playing the older sibling, and at other times like parent and child. But they had never been husband and wife. Their life together hadn’t been what marriage is supposed to be.

  Yet as Noriko looked back over her relationship with Asari, her strongest impression was of their happiness. And so was it really that important, not having been husband and wife? She couldn’t help being disturbed, though, by having been all this time under the illusion that they were truly married.

  They were both at fault for not becoming a true married couple, it seemed to her: perhaps they simply hadn’t bothered. Of course, they hadn’t been young when they met; Asari had been married before; and they didn’t have any children. But all these factors didn’t get at the root of the trouble. Their dispositions — Asari nonchalantly giving her former lovers’ belongings, and her eager appropriations — she wasn’t certain, but Noriko suspected their dispositions were somehow to blame. All she knew now was that all sorts of evidence was suddenly assailing her that their marriage had been a sham.

  All the time they’d been together, Noriko had seen to Asari’s every need — if he washed his face, she’d be there to hand him a towel. Every day he had a choice of clean underclothes, a variety of dishes to eat, and freshly aired sheets and futon. She tolerated his drinking, hardly ever losing patience with his coming home late after an evening out, in his cups, and still eager to hit the bottle; or when he got so drunk that he was throwing up and kept her awake all night. She never sulked the next morning. Asari, who didn’t seem to know what a hangover was, would get up looking reinvigorated, and just at the sight of him she would feel refreshed. Far from discouraging him when he wanted to go out for drinks with his friends, she let him have all the spare money.

  But now she knew a wife wouldn’t have been so tolerant or devoted. A husband returns in a drunken stupor in the middle of night — a real wife would be angry the next day, and resentful, and refuse to speak to him. He’d have to sit there, suffering a terrible hangover, in silence. Perhaps more than his constitution played into Asari’s freedom from hangovers.

  Had she been a wife, she would never have given Asari all their money when he went out drinking: she’d been more like a doting mother spoiling her son. Of course, the roles were often reversed, and she was the daughter looking after the house for her father.

  Sometimes, toward the end of the month, she’d ask Asari in the morning: “Can I have some money?”

  “You’ve run out?”

  “Yes, I have.”

  “You’ve got to be more careful. Well, on my way back home tonight I can buy meat or something — or we can eat out.” Asari would search in his pocket, and leave two hundred yen: “This should do for lunch.”

  She had no interest in hoarding up the monthly household account money, the passion of so many wives, and he didn’t have affairs, but didn’t both these facts really mean they were united only by love and nothing else? If they’d loved each other as husband and wife, surely, he would have been thrilled by the prospect of love affairs, and she by hoarding money.

  And they never fought — there just didn’t seem to be anything worth fighting about. True, she thought he was stingy; she’d written as much to his next wife. But perhaps she’d exaggerated, hoping to get a taste of conjugality. All in all, their life was extremely calm and harmonious. Except, of course, when Asari got terribly drunk, or irritable because he was trying not to drink. They had been happy. She hadn’t assumed that for the rest of their days they would never know any sorrow. But it had never crossed her mind that she’d find herself rethinking their relationship in the final moments of her life.

  “I’m home,” Asari called, opening the front door. She went out into the hall.

  “There’s an odd letter in our mailbox,” he added, with a wave toward the front gate. He threw the evening paper, which she’d forgotten to bring in, at her feet. Slipping on some sandals, Noriko pushed past him taking off his shoes, ran out, and opened the mailbox flap to find the ­red-topped salt shaker inside.

  “You didn’t do it?” Asari asked, as she hurried back in with the shaker. He stopped unknotting his tie and mimed sprinkling salt on himself.

  Noriko’s parents had taught her the custom of shaking salt over oneself before going inside the house after a funeral. Her mother and father never forgot this act of purification. She remembered one summer evening her mother had called from the front door: “I’m home. . . . Can someone bring me the salt?” She’d been on her way to the theater that night, not a funeral: Noriko had gone out to the hall. Her mother’s face was deadly pale.

  “Where’s the salt? Quickly,” her mother had repeated. Noriko brought a jar of coarse salt from the kitchen. Her mother scattered handful after handful over her shoulders and around the hem of her kimono. When she finally entered the house and sat down, she explained that a young woman had committed suicide by throwing herself in front of the train.

  “She was about your age,” her mother had told Noriko, then just twenty. “Not married, apparently. It was so awful, I couldn’t look. But I heard them saying, ‘That’s a leg,’ and ‘That’s an arm,’ and ‘There’s a lump of flesh.’ And such a smell . . .”

  It was probably the memory of that incident which caused Noriko to carry on the salt ritual herself. Her mother’s white face at the door, the young woman her same age whose body had been turned into lumps of flesh in the space of a second . . . Her mother’s ghastly expression made Noriko imagine she might be possessed by a ghost. The look was gone by the time she came inside and Noriko could see her in the light. But who could tell whether, had she come straight in, that thing might not have come in too, and still be hovering in the air?

  Whenever Asari returned from a funeral, Noriko would make him wait at the door as she hurried to fetch the salt.

  “Don’t bother. It’s silly,” he would say, coming straight in to remove his shoes. But Noriko would insist on taking him back outside and shaking salt over him. Her parents had always used coarse salt, which wasn’t available these days, so Noriko made do with the ordinary table variety, though it left something to be desired.

  One day as she sprinkled him with salt, Asari had asked her: “What’ll happen if you die before I do? Will you shake salt down on me from somewhere in the sky when I come back from your funeral?”

  Whenever Noriko knew that she’d have to purify herself, she would leave the salt shaker in the mailbox as she set out — as she had done today.

  “I must have forgotten,” she told Asari, putting it back on the dinner table, and forcing a smile. “Which do you want first: dinner or a bath?”

  “What would you prefer?” Asari said, adjusting the front panels of his kimono before tying his sash.

  “I don’t mind either way.”

  “I’ll go later, then — I’m starved.” He added: “Tonight, I’ll do without.”

  But Noriko didn’t want him not drinking tonight: the last thing she wanted was for him to go off to the
Showa. On the other hand, if he stayed home, he’d only get irritable, and it would be even worse if he started after dinner: he might get very drunk.

  “Well,” she replied, “Feel free to change your mind.” This was her habitual response these days when he announced that he’d do without. But tonight she chose to say this for a special reason: she wanted him to drink, not too much, just enough so he’d stay and talk with her.

  In the end, Asari did break his resolution — not through weakness, but at her suggestion.

  “Would you mind if I had a beer, though?” Noriko asked, using the same embarrassed tone Asari adopted if he changed his mind. “I’m really thirsty.”

  “All right,” he said. He grinned. “Since it’s a request from someone who rarely indulges, I’ll make an exception and have some too.”

  “But we’ll have to go at my pace.”

  “What do you mean, your pace?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Whatever you say.”

  Noriko brought over the bottle, and Asari reached out to open it.

  “Let me do the honors,” he said. “Now, you can purify yourself with beer, since you forgot the salt.”

  Noriko silently gazed at the filling glass. Asari stopped when it was half-full.

  “Is that all I get?”

  “I’ll give you some more in a minute. You’re not a drinker, after all.”

  Noriko took the bottle from him, poured his beer, and by the time she’d set it down, he was already swigging. “Aren’t we going to toast, since I so rarely indulge?” she asked.

  “Oh, that’s right.” But all he did was put down his glass and seize his chopsticks.