by Taeko Kono
The woman could only trust that circumstances would arise in which her lack of money presented no obstacle. She felt she would like to burn it all — the man’s things, and her own, and the place. If she too were to burn up with them, she thought, so much the better. But she merely hoped for it, and made no plans. Strangely, for a woman who wanted even herself to be destroyed in the conflagration, she was inclined to be wary of fire. She always recalled one late winter night in her childhood, when there was a fire close by and she saw an old man from the burning building, with a padded jacket slipped on over his flannel nightshirt, being swept along in the crowd, barefoot on the asphalt where water streamed from the fire hoses.
Now she was even more careful. She was tortured by the fear that if she were to start a fire accidentally it would seem like arson. When she went out, especially, she felt she had to check for fire hazards two or three times, all the more so if she was in a hurry. Once, after she had locked the door and taken a few steps, she suddenly became uneasy. Unlocking the door and reentering, she checked the outlets and gas jets. She held an already wetted ashtray under the faucet in the kitchen and ran more water in it until the ashes floated. Reassured, she went out, but she hesitated as she was about to drop the key into her handbag. She couldn’t help recalling an impression she had had just now. When she picked up the ashtray she had been reminded of how she had smoked half a pack of cigarettes the man had left behind. Ordinarily, the woman smoked only her own brand. When she ran out, even if the man had some, she found it unsatisfying to make do with a brand not her own, and she would take the trouble to go and buy some. However, the day the man left, or perhaps the next day, when her cigarettes ran out, she was so distressed that she did not want to go. Her eyes fell on the half-empty pack the man had left, and in her agitation she thought, Oh good — any brand, as long as there are cigarettes. All that the woman had disposed of among the things the man had left behind was the discarded toothbrush, the old razor blades, and the cigarettes. A moment before, when she had held the ashtray in her hands, she had the dreamlike feeling that everything would, happily, burn to ashes like the cigarettes. She felt then, suddenly, that when she had first locked the door she had already taken care of all possible fire hazards. Having gone out a second time, she found herself worrying that she might now have unthinkingly contributed to an outbreak of fire. And again she had to use her key.
Winter was almost over, and from time to time a springlike sun shone. The woman recalled how, last year about the same time on just such an afternoon, she and the man had gone out together. Where they had gone and with what purpose, she had forgotten, but she retained a vivid impression of the window of a shop where they had stopped to buy bread on the way home, and of various sorts of bread in steam-clouded cellophane wrappers.
As she waited for her bread, the woman looked again at the loaves heaped in the window and noticed a glass case next to them. In it were a number of whole chickens glowing in an electric rotisserie, roasting as they revolved. She took the bread and, glancing around at the man, moved toward them.
“Are you going to buy some?” the man said.
“I thought I might,” she replied.
“Are the ones here good?”
“Hmm, I’ve never bought any from here before. . . .”
Inside the glass case each row of four chickens, richly glazed, rose, turned, and sank back down. As they rose again, with hardly a trace of the severed necks, they seemed to be lifting their wings high. The row of plump breasts rose, then began dropping out of sight, and the bones that peeped out from the fat legs as they rose made the chickens appear to be falling prostrate, palms up, withdrawing in shame.
The woman stood waiting for the man to speak and watched the movement of the chickens. The man, too, seemed to be watching them and said, finally: “Would you mind not buying any? Lately they’re fattening chickens with female hormones. It seems a man shouldn’t eat too much of it.”
The woman wondered if he weren’t thinking of American chickens. She had been present when one of his friends, home from the United States, had spoken about cooking for himself there. He said that he had often bought small fried shrimp that were sold cheaply at the market, and salted and ate them. He had often bought halves of roast chicken cheaply too. “They weren’t so tasty, though. They’re fattened with hormone injections,” he had said, pantomiming an injection. The woman didn’t remember for certain whether he had said simply “hormones” or “female hormones,” nor did she know whether Japanese chickens were so treated or not, but she wondered if the man weren’t misremembering that comment. She didn’t say anything, though. She realized she could hardly claim they didn’t often have roast chicken.
“I see. Well, shall we have oysters? On the half shell?” Although that too they certainly had often enough.
“Yeah, that would be better,” the man agreed this time.
They went into a department store. What with the heat from the steam that clouded the inside of the bread’s cellophane wrapper, and the store’s intemperate heating system, the woman breathed a sigh of relief when she stood before the cool abalone-filled glass water tank of the shellfish stall in the basement. Pointing to the oysters in the glass case next to it, where frost had crystallized on the horizontal bars, she asked for ten of them. The clerk picked out ten of the larger ones and put them in a short, wide oilpaper sack, and then on a rear table wrapped it up in two sheets of paper. As she took the parcel, the woman could feel the same bulk and weight as always.
She had become skilled at opening the oyster shells. In the beginning the man had opened them, and she had enjoyed watching him do it. But he relied on strength alone to break open the shells, always leaving their contents in a sorry state, so the woman learned from someone else and undertook the task herself. With the rounded side down and the hinge toward her, she held one firmly on the cutting board, tilted at an angle away from her. The brownish color and rippled surface merged so that it was hard to tell the seam from the shell. Searching for the point near the middle of the edge where the inside of the shell peeked through, or, if she couldn’t find it, somewhere in that area, she inserted the knife forcefully, blade turned outward, taking care not to damage the oyster, then turned the blade sideways, slipped another small knife between the shells, and with the tip of that blade scraped downward, cutting the hinge. Then the top shell would loosen abruptly and she would catch a whiff of the seashore. But if the top shell had not been cut loose completely she once again turned the blade in the opposite direction and sawed upward. That usually did the trick.
That evening, too, the woman opened the oyster shells in this way and laid them on a plate of ice cubes. She added lemon wedges and carried it to the table.
“Go ahead and have some,” the man said, taking one from the center of the large plate, dropping it with a clatter on the small plate before him, and trickling lemon juice over it.
“Mm,” she replied, but did not reach for one.
“No, really,” the man continued, lifting the edge of the oyster he was about to eat with his fruit fork.
“Mm,” she again replied, but took pleasure in not reaching for one.
She watched the man’s hand, clenched so tightly around the fruit fork that it appeared even more delicate, as he maneuvered it right and left, trying to cut loose the hinge muscle. He seemed to have done it neatly. As he lifted the oyster to his mouth, seaweed still clinging to its shell, he worked it slightly with his fork and the sound carried the smell, taste, and freshness of the seashore.
“Is it good?” the woman asked. The man nodded, laid aside the shell, and with the same hand took another from atop the ice on the large plate. He placed it on his small plate and the woman squeezed lemon juice over it.
When he had progressed to his third and laid the shell on the table, the woman transferred one of the shells he had discarded to her own plate.
“H
ave some of these,” said the man, indicating the large plate.
At this, she took even greater pleasure in not doing so, and instead scraped with her fork at the bit of muscle left by the man. At last she got a tiny piece of white meat on the tip of her fork, and rubbed it against her lips. She liked to hold the morsel of meat pressed firmly to her lips and feel her tongue become instantly aroused with the desire to have its turn. The hinge muscle lay in a slight hollow of the shell, and she had still not taken quite all of the meat the man had left there. She again moved her fork toward it, urged on by lips and tongue that had already finished off the first piece. As her hand holding the fork responded violently to the impatience of the urging, she found herself struggling with the bit of meat. This made it that much more difficult to get loose; once loosened, more difficult to get hold of; and when at last she lifted it to her lips, her hand trembled. Holding both her fork and the empty shell aloft in her hands, she savored the eager rivalry of her lips and tongue for the meat.
The woman did not yet lay aside the shell. All that was left of the oyster was a brownish arc in low relief, where some flesh was still attached. She sliced at it with her fork and, bringing the shell to her mouth, tipped it up. The woman felt that all the parts of her mouth were contending for the taste, the smell, the freshness of the seashore. So it seemed, from the intensity of the rivalry in there. But it also felt to her as if all of these many parts stirred simultaneously with the pleasure of gratification. Before her, she could see nothing but the glistening inside of the shell, with its matchless white, pale purple and blue, and yellow. All the parts of her mouth reverberated at once with pleasure when she put that last brownish ridge of meat to her lips, because it seemed that this fresh glistening flowed in, too, with a rush.
“Ah, that’s good,” the woman sighed, at last putting down the shell.
“That’s because you’re only eating the best part,” the man said.
“True. . . .” Nodding emphatically, she took the next shell that lay beside the man’s plate.
“Shall I give you one?” the man suggested after a few minutes, speaking of the oysters on the bed of ice. “Or maybe I’d better not.”
“Let me have just one,” the woman said, holding her fork in one hand and a shell with a bit of meat attached in the other.
“For you, that’ll be plenty.” He pointed to the shell in her hand.
“Don’t say that — please give me one,” she said.
The man quickly picked one off the ice and laid it with a clack on the small plate in front of her.
“Try it and see,” he said. The woman, with this departure from the usual order of things, felt somewhat at a loss. He went on: “They don’t seem to be as good as usual. I was hungry, so at first I didn’t realize it.”
The woman put down the shell she was holding and, cutting loose the oyster the man had laid on her plate, she sucked it from its shell. In an instant the entire cold, slippery thing slid through her mouth that had leapt so at just the tiny morsel of meat.
“How is it?” the man asked.
“Well, I can’t really tell,” she replied. What she could tell was that it was not nearly so good as the taste of the hinge muscle scraped from the empty shell or the other bit of meat that had given her such ecstasy. And it seemed distinctly inferior to the flavor, the smell, the freshness of the seashore called up in her mind by the voluptuous sound the man made when he raised the shell to his lips and sucked out the oyster. Even the flavor evoked by that sound amounted to little more than imagining a long past and much faded sensation. For the woman, the whole raw oyster always tasted the same. She could by no means tell by tasting one whether tonight’s oysters were as good as usual.
“They don’t seem quite so good to me,” the man said.
The woman noticed that it was unusually bright and sunny for a winter’s day. “Are they diseased, I wonder?”
“No, you could tell right away. The taste is completely different.”
The man took another from the large plate. He loosened the oyster, but did not squeeze lemon over it; picking it up in its shell, he raised it to his mouth with an air of examination.
“Maybe it’s just me. They look all right, don’t they?” he said. He laid one from the large plate onto the woman’s plate and one on his own. There remained one more on the large plate. When she had finished hers, the woman ate that one too.
She gathered the empty shells on the large plate of melting ice and carried it to the drainboard. She washed the knife she had used in the preparation, put it in the dish drain, and picked up the cutting board from where she had left it. As she was rubbing it clean under running water at the faucet, something broad and sharp pricked her palm. She shut off the water and felt the board to see what it was, then took the board to the man.
“Look here.” She took his wrist and placed the palm of his hand on the board. He withdrew it immediately.
“What happened? It’s so rough,” he said, touching it again lightly with his fingertips.
“This is where I opened the oysters. When I stick the knife in hard, the edges on the bottom are crushed and cut into it. It always happens.” The woman spoke as though in a dream. It did happen every time, but for once, instead of smoothing it with pumice as usual, she couldn’t resist bringing it to show him, because she felt dissatisfied that the scene they always played when they ate oysters on the half shell had not been followed. The man took her hand and stroked it. She wished she might feel that on another part of her body.
“Do you think it’s all right?” she asked.
“It’s a cutting board. So it can’t help getting bloody sometimes.”
That evening, however, which ended without the usual fulfillment of the scene she associated with the taste, was the last time they ate oysters together. Before too many more days passed, spring was upon them and the raw oyster season was over. The summer passed and autumn came, and by the time the air again began to turn cold, the man had already left.
This year as the days turned more and more springlike, the woman had grown very thin. The man’s belongings, as always, remained with her. To him they were invisible, but they weighed upon her whenever she was at home. These troublesome belongings of his, and her own which for lack of money she could not abandon, and the place, became all the more unbearable to her, and she frequently saw herself being swept along the crowded late-night street flooded by the fire hoses, barefoot, with something thrown quickly over her nightgown.
It was about this time that the man’s stored belongings, which weighed so on her conscious mind, gradually began to obtrude on her vision. It was as though the top drawer in the wardrobe had changed into some semitransparent material, so that the man’s underwear within it shone white and what seemed to be his socks shone black. Little gauze-covered windows appeared here and there in the thick paper sliding doors of the closet, and the bulky shapes of his suitcase, the umbrella package, his clothing boxes, his rucksack, and his pillow showed through. From within one of the drawers he had used in the desk, too, a plastic box began to be visible.
The woman herself thought that she must be terribly weak. At meals, she must try to eat as much as possible. She must gain some weight. She must get stronger. If she didn’t, perhaps the wardrobe drawer, the closet door, and the drawer in the desk would turn to glass. Perhaps too the man’s suitcase and clothing boxes would become glass cases, and his rucksack and canvas shoes would become like the nylon pillow cover, or a cellophane bag. At this rate, she might very well find herself being swept along barefoot in the night in the crowded street flooded by water from the fire hoses, with only something slipped on over her nightgown. It might happen she thought, if she didn’t eat a lot at mealtimes and recover from this weakness.
But when she tried to carry out her resolution, the woman realized that she ate even less. It had always been a peculiarity of hers that when
she was excited — pleasantly or unpleasantly — she would become strangely hungry. She seemed to give way to the excitement and gorge herself whenever she had been aggravated into saying “I’d be better off without you!” and meaning it, and especially during her agitation after the man left her. But she had by now lost the energy and the momentum of the excitement, and her appetite no longer asserted itself even in that form. No matter what was set before her, after one or two bites she could not proceed.
Since girlhood, the woman had hardly been what could be described as plump. However, from about the time the man began gradually bringing in his personal belongings, she had started to gain a little weight.
Their tastes concurred, and they both liked dishes with bones or with shells. The woman was poor, and the man’s prospects, up until about the time he abandoned her, had not looked good, so in order to serve such dishes often, they had to economize on their other meals. Even so, it was mostly the bones or shells which went to the woman. But although she seldom ate richly, she began to gain weight.
The woman recalled this odd phenomenon as not odd in the least. The man would attack a boiled tuna tail avidly and set the plates rattling, and although the woman called what little was left a “bone-tail,” the flavor that could be drawn from each hollow in it made her want to exclaim: “Are there such flavors in this world!” Likewise the sight of the scarlet-wrapped slender morsel of flesh bursting from the single lobster claw granted her made her want to sigh. All those varied bone and shell dishes began to give her the feeling that a sense of taste had been awakened throughout her body; that all her senses had become so concentrated in her sense of taste that it was difficult for her even to move. And when she awoke the next morning, she felt her body brimming with a new vitality. It would have been odd had she not gained weight.
Even after she had noticed a change in the man’s behavior and had become critical of him (though not yet to the point of being unable to refrain from saying “I’d be better off without you!”), the two of them continued to enjoy these dishes with bones or shells. Whether because of that or because their relationship had not yet deteriorated too badly, she continued to gain weight.