by Osamu Dazai
VILLON’S WIFE
[Villon no Tsuma, 1947] by Dazai Osamu (1909-1948)
Dazai Osamu, a member of a rich and influential family, was widely known during his lifetime, particularly to the younger generation, for his dissipation and excesses. His writings are autobiographical at least to the extent that we find in most of them the personage of a dissolute young man of good family, but Dazai was also gifted with a fertile imagination. His celebrity as a writer came after the war, with such stories as “Villon’s Wife” and the novel The Setting Sun.
•
I was awakened by the sound of the front door being flung open, but I did not get out of bed. I knew it could only be my husband returning dead drunk in the middle of the night.
He switched on the light in the next room and, breathing very heavily, began to rummage through the drawers of the table and the bookcase, searching for something. After a few minutes there was a noise that sounded as if he had flopped down on the floor. Then I could hear only his panting. Wondering what he might be up to, I called to him from where I lay. “Have you had supper yet? There’s some cold rice in the cupboard.”
“Thank you,” he answered in an unwontedly gentle tone. “How is the boy? Does he still have a fever?”
This was also unusual. The boy is four this year, but whether because of malnutrition, or his father’s alcoholism, or sickness, he is actually smaller than most two-year-olds. He is not even sure on his feet, and as for talking, it’s all he can do to say “yum-yum” or “ugh.” Sometimes I wonder if he is not feeble-minded. Once, when I took him to the public bath and held him in my arms after undressing him, he looked so small and pitifully scrawny that my heart sank, and I burst into tears in front of everybody. The boy is always having upset stomachs or fevers, but my husband almost never spends any time at home, and I wonder what if anything he thinks about the child. If I mention to him that the boy has a fever, he says, “You ought to take him to a doctor.” Then he throws on his coat and goes off somewhere. I would like to take the boy to the doctor, but I haven’t the money. There is nothing I can do but lie beside him and stroke his head.
But that night, for whatever reason, my husband was strangely gentle, and for once asked me about the boy’s fever. It didn’t make me happy. I felt instead a kind of premonition of something terrible, and cold chills ran up and down my spine. I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I lay there in silence. For a while there was no other sound but my husband’s furious panting.
Then there came from the front entrance the thin voice of a woman, “Is anyone at home?” I shuddered all over as if icy water had been poured over me.
“Are you at home, Mr. Otani?” This time there was a somewhat sharp inflection to her voice. She slid the door open and called in a definitely angry voice, “Mr. Otani. Why don’t you answer?”
My husband at last went to the door. “Well, what is it?” he asked in a frightened, stupid tone.
“You know perfectly well what it is,” the woman said, lowering her voice. “What makes you steal other people’s money when you’ve got a nice home like this? Stop your cruel joking and give it back. If you don’t, I’m going straight to the police.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I won’t stand for your insults. You’ve got no business coming here. Get out! If you don’t get out, I’ll be the one to call the police.”
There came the voice of another man. “I must say, you’ve got your nerve, Mr. Otani. What do you mean we have no business coming here? You amaze me. This time it is serious. It’s more than a joke when you steal other people’s money. Heaven only knows all my wife and I have suffered on account of you. And on top of everything else you do something as low as you did tonight. Mr. Otani, I misjudged you.”
“It’s blackmail,” my husband angrily exclaimed in a shaking voice. “It’s extortion. Get out! If you’ve got any complaints I’ll listen to them tomorrow.”
“What a revolting thing to say. You really are a scoundrel. I have no alternative but to call the police.”
In his words was a hatred so terrible that I went goose flesh all over.
“Go to hell,” my husband shouted, but his voice had already weakened and sounded hollow.
I got up, threw a wrap over my nightgown, and went to the front hall. I bowed to the two visitors. A round-faced man of about fifty wearing a knee-length overcoat asked, “Is this your wife?”, and, without a trace of a smile, faintly inclined his head in my direction as if he were nodding.
The woman was a thin, small person of about forty, neatly dressed. She loosened her shawl and, also unsmiling, returned my bow with the words, “Excuse us for breaking in this way in the middle of the night.”
My husband suddenly slipped on his sandals and made for the door. The man grabbed his arm and the two of them struggled for a moment. “Let go or I’ll stab you!” my husband shouted, and a jackknife flashed in his right hand. The knife was a pet possession of his, and I remembered that he usually kept it in his desk drawer. When he got home he must have been expecting trouble, and the knife was what he had been searching for.
The man shrank back and in the interval my husband, flapping the sleeves of his coat like a huge crow, bolted outside.
“Thief!” the man shouted and started to pursue him, but I ran to the front gate in my bare feet and clung to him.
“Please don’t. It won’t help for either of you to get hurt. I will take the responsibility for everything.”
The woman said, “Yes, she’s right. You can never tell what a lunatic will do.”
“Swine! It’s the police this time! I can’t stand any more.” The man stood there staring emptily at the darkness outside and muttering, as if to himself. But the force had gone out of his body.
“Please come in and tell me what has happened. I may be able to settle whatever the matter is. The place is a mess, but please come in.”
The two visitors exchanged glances and nodded slightly to one another. The man said, with a changed expression, “I’m afraid that whatever you may say, our minds are already made up. But it might be a good idea to tell you, Mrs. Otani, all that has happened.”
“Please do come in and tell me about it.”
“I’m afraid we won’t be able to stay long.” So saying the man started to remove his overcoat.
“Please keep your coat on. It’s very cold here, and there’s no heating in the house.”
“Well then, if you will forgive me.”
“Please, both of you.”
The man and the woman entered my husband’s room. They seemed appalled by the desolation they saw. The mats looked as though they were rotting, the paper doors were in shreds, the walls were beginning to fall in, and the paper had peeled away from the storage closet, revealing the framework. In a corner were a desk and a bookcase—an empty bookcase.
I offered the two visitors some torn cushions from which the stuffing was leaking, and said, “Please sit on the cushions—the mats are so dirty.” And I bowed to them again. “I must apologize for all the trouble my husband seems to have been causing you, and for the terrible exhibition he put on tonight, for whatever reason it was. He has such a peculiar disposition.” I choked in the middle of my words and burst into tears.
“Excuse me for asking, Mrs. Otani, but how old are you?” the man asked. He was sitting cross-legged on the torn cushion, with his elbows on his knees, propping his chin on his fists. As he asked the question he leaned forward toward me.
“I am twenty-six.”
“Is that all you are? I suppose that’s only natural, considering your husband’s about thirty, but it amazes me all the same.”
The woman, showing her face from behind the man’s back, said, “I couldn’t help wondering, when I came
in and saw what a fine wife he has, why Mr, Otani behaves the way he does.”
“He’s sick. That’s what it is. He didn’t used to be that way, but he keeps getting worse.” He gave a great sigh, then continued, “Mrs. Otani, my wife and I run a little restaurant near the Nakano Station. We both originally came from the country, but I got fed up dealing with penny-pinching farmers, and came to Tokyo with my wife. After the usual hardships and breaks, we managed to save up a little and, along about 1936, opened a cheap little restaurant catering to customers with at most a yen or two to spend at a time on entertainment. By not going in for luxuries and working like slaves, we managed to lay in quite a stock of whisky and gin. When liquor got short and plenty of other drinking establishments went out of business, we were able to keep going.
“The war with America and England broke out, but even after the bombings got pretty severe, we didn’t want to be evacuated to the country, not having any children to tie us down. We figured that we might as well stick to our business until the place got burnt down. Your husband first started coming to our place in the spring of 1944, as I recall. We were not yet losing the war, or if we were we didn’t know how things actually stood, and we thought that if we could just hold out for another two or three years we could somehow get peace on terms of equality. When Mr. Otani first appeared in our shop, he was not alone. It’s a little embarrassing to tell you about it, but I might as well come out with the whole story and not keep anything from you. Your husband sneaked in by the kitchen door along with an older woman. I forgot to say that about that time the front door of our place was shut, and only a few regular customers got in by the back.
“This older woman lived in the neighborhood, and when the bar where she worked was closed and she lost her job, she often came to our place with her men friends. That’s why we weren’t particularly surprised when your husband crept in with this woman, whose name was Akichan. I took them to the back room and brought out some gin. Mr. Otani drank his liquor very quietly that evening. Akichan paid the bill and the two of them left together. It’s odd, but I can’t forget how strangely gentle and refined he seemed that night. I wonder if when the devil makes his first appearance in somebody’s house he acts in such a lonely and melancholy way.
“From that night on Mr. Otani was a steady customer. Ten days later he came alone and all of a sudden produced a hundred-yen note. At that time a hundred yen was a lot of money, more than two or three thousand yen today. He pressed the money into my hand and wouldn’t take no for an answer. ‘Take care of it please,’ he said, smiling timidly. That night he seemed to have drunk quite a bit before he came, and at my place he downed ten glasses of gin as fast as I could set them up. All this was almost entirely without a word. My wife and I tried to start a conversation, but he only smiled rather shamefacedly and nodded vaguely. Suddenly he asked the time and got up. ‘What about the change?’ I called after him. ‘That’s all right,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what to do with it,’ I insisted. He answered with a sardonic smile, ‘Please save it until the next time. I’ll be coming back.’ He went out. Mrs. Otani, that was the one and only time that we ever got any money from him. Since then he has always put us off with one excuse or another, and for three years he has managed without paying a penny to drink up all our liquor almost singlehanded.”
Before I knew what I was doing I burst out laughing. It all seemed so funny to me, although I can’t explain why. I covered my mouth in confusion, but when I looked at the lady I saw that she was also laughing unaccountably, and then her husband could not help but laugh too.
“No, it’s certainly no laughing matter, but I’m so fed up that I feel like laughing, too. Really, if he used all his ability in some other direction, he could become a cabinet minister or a Ph.D. or anything else he wanted. When Akichan was still friends with Mr. Otani she used to brag about him all the time. First of all, she said, he came from a terrific family. He was the younger son of Baron Otani. It is true that he had been disinherited because of his conduct, but when his father, the present baron, died, he and his elder brother were to divide the estate. He was brilliant, a genius in fact. In spite of his youth he was the best poet in Japan. What’s more, he was a great scholar, and a perfect demon at German and French. To hear Akichan talk, he was a kind of god, and the funny thing was that she didn’t make it all up. Other people also said that he was the younger son of Baron Otani and a famous poet. Even my wife, who’s getting along in years, was as enthusiastic about him as Akichan. She used to tell me what a difference it makes when people have been well brought up. And the way she pined for him to come was quite unbearable. They say the day of the nobility is over, but until the war ended I can tell you that nobody had his way with the women like that disinherited son of the aristocracy. It is unbelievable how they fell for him. I suppose it was what people would nowadays call ‘slave mentality.’
“For my part, I’m a man, and at that a very cool sort of man, and I don’t think that some little peer—if you will pardon the expression—some member of the country gentry who is only a younger son, is all that different from myself. I never for a moment got worked up about him in so sickening a way. But all the same, that gentleman was my weak spot. No matter how firmly I resolved not to give him any liquor the next time, when he suddenly appeared at some unexpected hour, looking like a hunted man, and I saw how relieved he was at last to have reached our place, my resolution weakened, and I ended up by giving him the liquor. Even when he got drunk, he never made any special nuisance of himself, and if only he had paid the bill he would have been a good customer. He never advertised himself and didn’t take any silly pride in being a genius or anything of the sort. When Akichan or somebody else would sit beside him and sound off to us about his greatness, he would either change the subject completely or say, ‘I want some money so I can pay the bill,’ throwing a wet blanket over everything.
“The war finally ended. We started doing business openly in black-market liquor and put new curtains in front of the place. For all its seediness the shop looked rather lively, and we hired a girl to lend a little charm. Then who should show up again but that damned gentleman. He no longer brought women with him, but always came in the company of two or three writers for newspapers and magazines. He was drinking even more than before, and used to get very wild-looking. He began to come out with really vulgar jokes, which he had never done before, and sometimes for no good reason he would hit one of the reporters he brought with him or start a fist fight. What’s more, he seduced the twenty-year-old girl who was working in our place. We were shocked, but there was nothing we could do about it at that stage, and we had no choice but to let the matter drop. We advised the girl to resign herself to bearing the child, and quietly sent her back to her parents. I begged Mr. Otani not to come any more, but he answered in a threatening tone, ‘People who make money on the black market have no business criticizing others. I know all about you.’ The next night he showed up as if nothing had happened.
“Maybe it was by way of punishment for the black-market business we had been doing that we had to put up with such a monster. But what he did tonight can’t be passed over just because he’s a poet or a gentleman. It was plain robbery. He stole five thousand yen from us. Nowadays all our money goes for stock, and we are lucky if we have five hundred or one thousand yen in the place. The reason why we had as much as five thousand tonight was that I had made an end-of-the-year round of our regular customers and managed to collect that much. If I don’t hand the money over to the wholesalers immediately we won’t be able to stay in business. That’s how much it means to us. Well, my wife was going over the accounts in the back room and had put the money in the cupboard drawer. He was drinking by himself out in front but seems to have noticed what she did. Suddenly he got up, went straight to the back room, and without a word pushed my wife aside and opened the drawer. He grabbed the bills and stuffed them in his pocket.
“We rushed into the shop, still speechless with am
azement, and then out into the street. I shouted for him to stop, and the two of us ran after him. For a minute I felt like screaming ‘Thief!’ and getting the people in the street to join us, but after all, Mr. Otani is an old acquaintance, and I couldn’t be too haish on him. I made up my mind that I would not let him out of my sight. I would follow him wherever he went, and when I saw that he had quieted down, I would calmly ask for the money. We are only small business people, and when we finally caught up with him here, we had no choice but to suppress our feelings and politely ask him to return the money. And then what happened? He took out a knife and threatened to stab me! What a way to behave!”
Again the whole thing seemed so funny to me, for reasons I can’t explain, that I burst out laughing. The lady turned red, and smiled a little. I couldn’t stop laughing. Even though I knew that it would have a bad effect on the proprietor, it all seemed so strangely funny that I laughed until the tears came. I suddenly wondered if the phrase “the great laugh at the end of the world,” that occurs in one of my husband’s poems, didn’t mean something of the sort.
And yet it was not a matter that could be settled just by laughing about it. I thought for a minute and said, “Somehow or other I will make things good, if you will only wait one more day before you report to the police. I’ll call on you tomorrow without fail.” I carefully inquired where the restaurant was, and begged them to consent. They agreed to let things stand for the time being, and left. Then I sat by myself in the middle of the cold room trying to think of a plan. Nothing came to me. I stood up, took off my wrap, and crept in among the covers where my boy was sleeping. As I stroked his head I thought how wonderful it would be if the night never never ended.
My father used to keep a stall in Asakusa Park. My mother died when I was young, and my father and I lived by ourselves in a tenement. We ran the stall together. My husband used to come now and then, and before long I was meeting him at other places without my father’s knowing it. When I became pregnant I persuaded him to treat me as his wife, although it wasn’t officially registered, of course. Now the boy is growing up fatherless, while my husband goes off for three or four nights or even for a whole month at a time. I don’t know where he goes or what he does. When he comes back he is always drunk; and he sits there, deathly pale, breathing heavily and staring at my face. Sometimes he cries and the tears stream down his face, or without warning he crawls into my bed and holds me tightly. “Oh, it can’t go on. I’m afraid. I’m afraid. Help me!”