Toddler Hunting

by Taeko Kono

  Noriko took a sip.

  “How old was your friend who died?” Asari asked.

  “My age.”

  “An old lady like that?” Asari covered his mouth, pretending that had slipped out. “Who let her get behind the wheel?”

  “She gave me a ride once.”

  “That was stupid. You’ve got to be more careful. What if you’d been in the car when she had the accident? You’d have died, and I’d have had nobody to sprinkle salt over me after funerals.”

  Noriko picked up her glass, and drank a little beer.

  “It was safer then. She had a sticker in the window that said ‘I just got my license. Thank you for your cooperation.’ ”

  “People don’t pay any attention to those stickers.”

  “No, but that’s how careful she was.”

  “Anyway, I don’t want you to ever get in a car with a woman driver.”

  “You don’t mind if the driver’s a man? Even on a very long long trip?”

  “I’m serious.”

  “I know.”

  “I hope so. But you know, going so unexpectedly like that — I think that’d be the worst.”

  “So you’d rather I came and said goodbye?”

  “I meant if I died. Well, it would be pretty bad if you did, too. . . .”

  “You think so? Tell me, what would you want to take care of before you died? Do you have a mistress?”

  “Possibly. Actually, at one time I thought a lot about what would happen if I did die unexpectedly. Right after I got out of school my father died, and my mother divided up the family property for the children. Some land was bought for me in Setagaya — Mother planned on my building a house there, and moving in with me when I got married, but it was years before I did marry, and in the meantime I sold the land and squandered all the money.”

  “You’ve told me this story.”

  “But she never knew. Every time I went home, my mother would tell me to go ahead, get married and build my own house, she’d help me financially. And then prices went up. I’d sold my land when it was cheap, and there wasn’t any left. Back then, you know, I really drank — I don’t drink at all now in comparison — I ended up not being able to pay the rent. I brought all my things to the pawn shop, my suitcases and trunks were empty. Once, I counted up the tickets from the pawn shop, you know, and I had eighteen. But I kept hitting the bottle. Sometimes I’d wake up on a bench in some train station: what would happen if I died now, I’d wonder. Those pawn tickets would loom up before my eyes. I couldn’t stand the thought of Mother finding out I drank the land away, debts piled up, and had nothing but a stack of pawn tickets. I’d have to get rid of those tickets, I’d have to have time for that, at least, I’d tell myself.”

  “What would you do if you were going to die now?”

  “Well, first of all, this, I suppose.” Asari raised his glass, and gulped down some beer.

  Noriko picked up hers. It was nearly empty. As she drank, the foam on the top sank down to the crystal bottom, the bubbles dispersing. Asari’s face, the size of a bean, came into view.

  “Want some more?” he asked.

  Noriko held out her glass, and as he started pouring, she warned, “Oh, not too much.”

  “You were complaining a minute ago how little I gave you,” replied Asari, deliberately taking his time complying.

  Noriko took two sips in a row. Her glass was more than half-full.

  “You sure you’re all right?”

  She paused. “Yes,” she answered, glass in hand, and the next moment, she finished it off. Pretending to be engaged in draining it to the last drop, she immersed herself again in that distant, miniature, cheerful world sparkling in the bottom of her glass. Seated at a cute little table scattered with dishes, Asari looked small enough to hold in the palm of her hand. What would he do, she wondered, if she told him she only had a few hours to live? Would he kill her before 3:19 tomorrow, with his own hands?

  “I see what you’re doing,” said Asari, who was copying her. “You look so tiny.”

  “So do you. It’s pretty, isn’t it?” And then, after a pause, she asked: “Tell me, did you ever think of leaving any notes behind for people to read after you died?”

  “No.” Asari put down his glass and Noriko did the same. “My only hope was that my mother would die, so she wouldn’t see me end so miserably. That was my one try at filial piety. Now,” he changed the subject: “How about some sake?”

  Usually he found it difficult to stop once he got onto sake.

  “If we’re going at my pace,” replied Noriko, “that’s it, I think. But we could eat. How do you feel?”

  “That’s fine with me,” Asari acquiesced, mildly.

  As they ate dinner, Noriko asked: “I wonder how we’ll turn out, growing old together, you and I.”

  “What do you mean, how we’ll turn out?”

  “You know, how we’ll lead our lives.”

  “Same as we do now, I’d guess.”

  “You mean like young newlyweds, or like friends who get together over a cup of tea — for the next twenty, thirty years?”

  That’s not a true married life, she wanted to say. But Asari seemed oblivious.

  “What a great way of putting it!” was his reply.

  He glanced at the clock above the cupboard. “Guess what — it’s not too late for the movie at the Showa. I don’t mind taking you, if you’d like to go.”

  Taking the ticket book from the letter rack, he flipped open the red cover. “Only one left. Want to buy me another booklet, and use one yourself?”

  Noriko said yes.

  They set out, walking along close to the hedges that lined the neighborhood roads. In the gardens they could see light from the houses, soft lights that spoke of spring evenings. These houses all looked so peaceful and assured to Noriko’s eyes. In the past, she had once been terribly lonely after being abandoned by her first lover, and she remembered that the light from other people’s windows had always looked so warm and inviting. When she returned to her lodgings and switched on the light in her small bare room, she would think that nobody, not even a person dying of cold and hunger, would look with envy and longing at her window. Now, as she strolled along with Asari, she wondered about the light from their living room window. Did it glow, calm and confident, like these? Or was it the weaker, uncertain kind that shines from an inn or dormitory?

  They reached the shopping district and crossed the railway tracks. The Showa Cinema was a small theater beyond the station, specializing in foreign films.

  “Hmm, I wonder what’s playing,” Asari said aloud to himself, looking at the movie stills in the window: a western and an Italian film, apparently.

  “One book of tickets, please,” Noriko said, handing over the five-hundred-yen note she’d tucked into her sash.

  “I thought you were going to buy me a few,” Asari grumbled next to her.

  They went inside and as Asari opened the door, Noriko made out lines of backs ranged in all the seats. But when her eyes gradually adjusted to the darkness, she saw several empty places near the front.

  “Let’s go over there,” Asari said. Crouching, he headed down the aisle. Once seated, they looked up at the screen: the Italian film was playing. A shot of a peaceful country village in beautiful muted colors; then a train station; and in the next scene appeared a woman, obviously recovering from a serious illness, accompanied by her husband: they were leaving a health spa. Not long after they got home, a visitor came, a friend of the husband. From what the men said when the woman was out of the room it became clear that the marriage was no longer passionate — in fact the couple hardly felt anything for each other any more.

  Not like herself and Asari, Noriko thought: they still felt strongly about each another. Not one day passed without her being aware of his heart beating, and it
was surely the same for him. Yet she did wonder about the kind of light shining out of their home. A legal bond, cohabitation, sex, and love were supposed to be the four pillars of marriage. But they don’t alone suffice — any more than four pillars constitute a house. Neither of them had bothered to do any work on their four pillars, it seemed to her. They hadn’t put a roof over them; they hadn’t even painted the walls — the things that would keep a house up when a pillar got wobbly. But their marriage had nothing supporting it. Their life together only amounted to a simple succession of days.

  In other words, she reflected, they hadn’t known the hardship or the happiness of true conjugal life. But if only they’d been aware that they were lovers, and not husband and wife, and lived out their relationship as it really was, their experience might have been totally different. True, they might have been ostracized, and they would have lost their easy tranquillity — but they might also have felt a keener, more intense kind of joy.

  If she did write a letter to Asari before her death, Noriko told herself, she’d have to be honest with him. “What I regret,” she would say, “is dying without ever finding out what our relationship might have been, had we tried to be husband and wife — or known that we were, in fact, simply lovers living together.”

  The movie was still depicting the husband and wife becoming more and more estranged. One or the other would occasionally attempt a reconciliation, but each time both felt betrayed and ended up feeling more hopeless than ever.

  “Your wife will never get better unless you encourage her more,” the husband’s friend told him. The husband immediately followed this advice.

  “You look wonderful this morning,” he said to her. “Your cheeks are so rosy. The worst must be over by now.”

  The wife took this as a sign of his impatience with her weak condition and forced herself to pretend that she did feel better. At this, her husband said that since she was doing so well, he would be able to take her to a party he’d been invited to the following week.

  A few days later, their little boy ran a fever. They both nursed him through the night.

  “Mommy and Daddy are here, Son,” the husband told the boy, his arm around her shoulders.

  “Darling,” the wife said, addressing their son. “How many days do you want to stay out of school? Daddy can do everything; if he can cure people, maybe he can arrange for you to be ill as long as you like.”

  The man’s arm fell from her shoulders.

  “I want to get better quickly,” the son said.

  “All right. I’ll make you get well very soon.”

  On the day of the party, the wife came into her husband’s room, dressed up and ready to go out. He had forgotten all about the party, and hurriedly started shaving.

  Despite how badly they got along, there were no fights: only short ironic exchanges between this husband and wife showed how distant their hearts and minds had become. And so the days passed, without any incident that might have led to divorce.

  Noriko turned her now heavy head to look at Asari sitting beside her. His eyes fixed on the screen, his face was bathed in its light. Would he understand if she told him she didn’t think they had ever truly been married? They were nothing like the couple in the movie. But their bond of simple love and affection had allowed them to interpret each other’s words in purely positive ways — the way that he had taken it as a compliment when she said at dinner they were half like newlyweds and half like friends visiting over a cup of tea. The couple in the movie drifted farther apart because they always interpreted each other’s words negatively; but she was Asari’s accomplice in a similar sort of crime, continually inferring only good things in what was said, without really listening.

  She could imagine the way he would reply if she did say to him, “Please listen to me. I’m wondering now if it’s a good thing that we’ve never had a fight.”

  “It is a good thing!” he would say. “Trust me. I know.” And the urge to tell him what she wanted to say would fade, just as it did for the screen couple who never bothered to explain any true state of mind. . . .

  They got home just past ten o’clock, after staying to watch the western.

  “I think I’ll go take a bath,” said Asari.

  Noriko stopped herself from saying she’d go too.

  “That’s good — see you when you get back.”

  When he left the house, she went upstairs, sat at the desk, and took out some paper.

  “I must tell you that if I had to die now, I would have regrets and disappointments,” she wrote.

  She went on to describe her fears that, even though they had been legally married and lived under the same roof, united in mind and body, they hadn’t been a married couple. After listing her reasons, she continued:

  “Today, waiting for the bus on my way to the funeral, I looked at my watch: it was just past one o’clock. At that time the day before yesterday, my friend was still alive. She’d eaten lunch, and left the house, just as I had. The thought of death was probably the furthest thing from her mind. When I imagined her driving, without the faintest idea of what was going to happen, I got so frightened that the ticking of my watch scared me. As you said, it must be the worst thing to die unexpectedly. My friend would have had so many things to do, had she known her fate — if she could only have had one more day. . . . That idea made me think about what I would do if I had to die tomorrow afternoon. I didn’t stop thinking about it, even after I’d come home. I started to wonder about your next marriage, which I imagined as something quite different from our own; and then that made me reflect on our life together.

  “My dear, our choice was either to become husband and wife in the true sense or consciously live out the relationship that we have — simply a man and a woman who love each other. And I want us to do one or the other now — even if it brings conflict and pain. What I don’t want is to continue to believe that we’re living a married life when we’re not. . . .

  “And you know, when I do finally die, I think I would like a few final moments. Because even if they bring on other regrets and disappointments, at least I’ll be able to feel that I’ve lived my life fully.

  “In any case, I’m sure I won’t regret my friend’s death making me reflect on the life I’ve led with you.”

  As soon as Asari came back, Noriko said that it was her turn.

  “What? You didn’t go yet?” he asked. “We could have gone together.”

  “Only we would have had to lock up the house again,” Noriko replied, gathering her toiletries.

  “There’s an odd letter in our mailbox,” she called back to him, the moment she was out the door.

  No sooner had Noriko put her shoes in the bathhouse locker and taken the key, than the outside light over the entrance was turned off. A few people remained in the changing area, putting on their clothes: only one other person was undressing.

  “Good night,” a woman called as she was leaving to the girl tidying up the baskets.

  Wooden pails lay scattered over the bathing area tiles. Four or five women, at some distance from each other, were washing themselves, and one started to wash her hair. That’s nice, Noriko told herself, stretching out in the tub. Thanks to her, she could take her time.

  At that moment, over on the men’s side of the bathhouse, someone started whistling. It was a straightforward happy tune, a children’s song from a ­well-known musical. Whoever it was, he was whistling very exuberantly.

  Noriko tried to conjure up a picture of the man who was whistling. Perhaps he was a young manual laborer from one of the better factories — maybe he had worked overtime tonight. His shift finally over, all that he had to do now was go home and sleep, without a care for tomorrow. . . . That was why he could be so ­happy-­go-lucky, whistling. As Noriko listened, he came to the end of the song, managing the instrumental part with skill. Then, he started all over again wi
th even more enthusiasm. Noriko felt her own heart ease and lift.

  Conjurer

  Majutsushi, 1967

  On stage, the conjurer, a Western woman in a skimpy costume, lifted a large green jar off the table. Holding it over another vessel, she turned it upside down: a stream of water poured from the one to the other. She placed the jar back on the table. Her assistant, a man, took hold of the second container and poured the water straight back into the jar, holding it up high so the audience could see. The conjurer, lifting up the jar a second time, pretended now to stagger under its weight — much to everybody’s amusement. Meanwhile, her assistant pulled the table back onto two legs to expose its underside, rapped its top smartly, and set it down again. Placing the jar on the table, the conjurer drew back a few paces.

  “What do you think will come out of it now?” she asked the audience, pointing to the green jar.

  “Doves!”

  “Flags!”

  “Colored paper!”

  Children yelled suggestions, one after the other, and the conjurer replied to each in English, “No.” This didn’t mean, of course, that she understood everything they were shouting: she only had to know the Japanese for whatever object she was about to produce.

  “Underpants!” a man shouted from somewhere, as the children’s voices died away. Everybody laughed.

  “Panties?” repeated the conjurer, jerking her head back in exaggerated surprise. As if deciding this was quite enough audience participation, she approached the table and picked the jar up by the rim as if it weighed nothing at all. Wrapping one arm around its belly, she plunged her hand inside and, bringing it out, released a fistful of cherry blossoms. There was a burst of applause. The woman dipped her hand in again and again, scattering petals all over the stage and exciting more cheers and clapping from the crowd.

  Then she gave the jar to her assistant, who went off with it into the wings, wheeling the table ahead of him. He returned with a Japanese parasol. This the conjurer took, and showed to the audience, after snapping it open: a simple ­waxed-paper parasol. Next she held it out with the handle extended toward them, displaying its underside. Then she closed it. As she reopened it, the strains of a waltz, Strauss’s “Voices of Spring,” came over the loudspeakers. The woman started to step back and forth on the ­petal-strewn stage in time to the music, opening and closing the parasol. There was another burst of applause: a dove had fluttered out. One after another, a whole flock of pure white doves rose up into the air — though it was difficult to tell when they emerged, so fast was the parasol’s fluttering.