The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature: From Restoration to Occupation, 1868-1945: vol. 1 (Modern Asian Literature Series)

by J. Thomas Rimer

  “I’m not using my car, so why don’t you take it?” the surgeon said. “Mr. Kikawa, you could go with her to Motomachi.”

  I decided to borrow Dr. Yamazaki’s small car because of the rain. The thought of visiting my cousin came to mind for a moment, but there was no time to mention it. Kikawa and I drove through the rain in the small car.

  At the foot of a bridge misty with rain, a makeshift wooden building, painted pale blue, came into view.

  “There it is!”

  Even before Kikawa pointed it out, I had guessed that it must be Mitsuko’s house. It was a little bread and milk store, which had the friendly, inviting look peculiar to this town. From the car, I could see bread, candy, soft drinks, and milk in a showcase in the middle of the dirt floor. Inside was a man in his fifties, his hair getting thin. I caught a glimpse of the back of a girl in a shabby, black dress, but she disappeared through a door in the rear of the store.

  “She’s changing her clothes,” the elderly man said to me and smiled good-naturedly after Kikawa had spoken to him. Seating myself on a board at the foot of the entrance and holding the gift I had brought in my lap, I waited for the girl. Then she appeared, and my breath stopped. This small girl must have been the one I saw in the black dress going inside.

  It was not a girl but a monstrosity. Her deformed face and hands stood out even more grotesquely because she had put on her best clothes, a pure white blouse and a skirt with a flower pattern in crisp white. It seemed as though she was deliberately thrusting herself at me. Her face was expressionless and she didn’t even greet me. I broke down weeping, slumped on the wooden board, shuddering but unable to stop my tears. I wished I could stand up, reach out to the monstrous body of the young woman and embrace it. However, Japanese people, and I especially, are not accustomed to expressing their emotions in that way.

  I still couldn’t stop weeping, sobbing loudly, my face pressed to the wooden board. The brazen instincts of the writer deserted me, and I was no more than a plain, defenseless, human being. The girl, standing motionless in the middle of the dirt floor, was observing me. Then she came nearer.

  “It’s all right. I’ve learned to accept it,” Mitsuko said and lifted me up in her arms. I was going to say, “Don’t accept it!” but the words wouldn’t come out. Still sobbing, I placed the gift in Mitsuko’s hands. Her fingers were burned exactly the same as Kikawa’s, and they bent inward. The skin was shriveled and dark brown.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, continuing to cry. “I’m not a reporter, but because I’m a novelist I came here to ask you a few questions. I have a pad and pencil in my handbag. But I can’t ask you anything today. . . .”

  Mitsuko, who was young enough to be my daughter, said gently, “Would you like some milk?” She poured milk from a bottle into a glass and brought it to me with a straw. Kikawa, sitting in a chair, was drinking a bottle of soda pop, I was still feeling deeply depressed, and I thought I would become ill if I lived through many more tear-filled days like this one.

  “Why don’t you come inside and sit down and relax,” Mitsuko said, seeming to open up to me, probably because I was crying so hard and because I had told her that I wouldn’t ask her any questions. Pushing open a door, she led Kikawa and me into a room overlooking the river. The floor was tilted, the ceiling seemed about to fall in, and the walls were crumbling.

  “Half of this house almost fell into the river that day. Later we pulled it back up and repaired it so we could at least sleep here,” her father, the elderly man we had seen earlier, explained as he sat down beside me. The mouth of an inlet near Ujina Bay was barely visible in the rain. Then he started talking about things I wanted to know.

  “My daughter’s face got like this when she was fourteen. I want her to have some operations or something as soon as possible, but she’s only nineteen now. She’s still a child and the doctor said it wouldn’t be any good for her to have operations now while she’s still growing. That’s why we’ve put it off.”

  “Please give her the chance to have an operation as soon as possible, so she can get better, even a little. . . .”

  “We raise oysters in Ujina Bay, and every year the typhoons practically wipe them out. Oyster farming’s our business, but if the beds are destroyed, we have no way to get through the following year. So there’s not enough money, even though we want her to have operations.”

  I wanted to get the conversation off such grim topics. Turning to Mitsuko, I asked, “About the oyster beds—can anyone farm oysters?”

  Mitsuko, who had not shed a tear in my presence, replied in an ordinary tone of voice, with no trace of gloom.

  “Oyster beds are like farmland—you buy so many lots. So you can’t just go on and on buying lots.”

  Kikawa smiled. “So when they’re wiped out, it’s like losing a year’s worth of crops. That’s pretty bad!”

  I leaned over the railing of the window for a while and gazed at the line where the sea and the river meet, my favorite kind of scenery. Then I drew a rough map showing how to get to Teiko’s house and handed it to Mitsuko.

  “I’ll come again, but please stop by when you feel like it.”

  “I will. I’ll bring some fish from my father’s catch,” Mitsuko replied quickly. The rain was coming down harder. Shortly after we had gotten into the car and started off, Kikawa asked thoughtfully, “What do you think about this idea? I’m planning to take the signatures of the A-bomb sufferers to General Mac-Arthur’s headquarters in Tokyo. Maybe they would contribute some money for rehabilitation. I want to go right away if possible.”

  “Don’t do it!” I said, “The more you look to them for help, the more you’ll be disappointed. If they had had any thought about the sufferings of A-bomb victims, they wouldn’t have dropped such a thing in the first place!”

  “You don’t think it would work?”

  I had in mind an article I’d read in a newspaper. It was about a women’s group that organized a protest against the raising of electricity rates. They went to see the director of resources at General Headquarters and asked him to support the movement, but all he did was shout at them, “It’s only been forty years since Japan first began using electricity. Electricity is a luxury for you! If you don’t like the rate hike, then get some candles!” I didn’t know whether that’s actually what happened, but I told Kikawa the story anyway because it seemed symbolic to me.

  “Is that so?” he said, “But I’ll go at least once. Regardless of what happens, I intend to.”

  “I sometimes think I should take ten girls like Mitsuko Takada and stand them in line so those people could see their faces. But I don’t know how they’d react.”

  The heavy rain continued to beat down on the small car.

  5

  Since I had been staying up late almost every night, I was still in bed a little before noon. Someone seemed to have come. I thought I heard the clear voice of a young woman calling from the dirt-floored area, one step in from outside, that served as the entrance hall to Teiko’s shack, and then I thought I heard my mother’s voice. And yet after that the house was silent.

  Teiko was not at home because of her work, and Kumi was at school. I started dozing off again when I heard my mother sobbing. It sounded as though her chest were choked with pain. Her weeping continued for some time. Then she came and knelt down beside where I was sleeping.

  “Miss Takada, the one you told me about, is here.”

  “All right.”

  I got up quickly and took off my night clothes. With my mother’s help I folded up the bedding.

  “You’ve told me about her, but what an awful face she has! So sad I couldn’t help crying. . . .” She continued to weep as she put the bedding away. Mitsuko came in. She was wearing the same white skirt with the flower pattern that I had seen last time, along with a white jacket. Her outfit was very cheery. But her walk lacked the carefree ease common to young women her age. The radiation had burned and shriveled even her toes, so that Mitsuko walked like
a cripple, with a tottering gait.

  “I’ve brought you something you might like.”

  As soon as she came into the six-mat room and sat down, she untied the knot of the bundle she was carrying. With her twisted brown fingers, she pulled open the purple wrapping cloth.

  “What is it?”

  I unwrapped the newspaper from around the bundle, not expecting to find anything of great value. When I finally got it all open I discovered it was full of river crabs.

  “My father and I caught them in the river and boiled them. Please eat them if you’d like.”

  “Thank you.”

  I remembered that my aunt had died suddenly at the age of twenty-nine after eating river crabs, but I could hardly tell Mitsuko that. Mitsuko said she was going to a Shochiku musical show today because she had gotten a ticket through the storekeepers’ association she belonged to. The troupe was performing at the new culture center that had been built on a burned-out field in the old military ground.

  “Miss Saeko Ozuki is performing with the troupe. The show starts at one o’clock, so I wanted to come to see you before that.”

  I felt odd when I thought of this girl’s face among the audience watching Saeko Ozuki dance with the Shochiku troupe.

  “Then why don’t you have lunch here?”

  “Thank you, but I brought a box lunch. Still, maybe I won’t go to the center. I guess I won’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t feel like going anymore.”

  “You don’t want to be stared at, is that it?”

  I pressed ahead with more questions. I felt that I was trying to win the heart of a little girl. The calculations of the writer consciously rose in my mind. By making friends with this young girl, I’ll be able to understand what’s in the bottom of her heart. But as though to transcend such calculations, my mind adopted a cool approach.

  “I don’t mind them looking at my face. I go alone to movie theaters without any hesitation, and I walk proudly down the center of the main street,” she said. It was a sad statement.

  “At the spring festival held by the storekeepers’ association this year, I got up on stage and danced. I knew it made the other people feel uneasy, but still I went up on the stage with this face. . . .”

  She paused for a moment.

  “I was dancing around, laughing and crying, and I thought I must look like a monkey or an ogre or something. Then the audience started crying out loud.”

  My eyes were full of tears. And yet Mitsuko’s were dry. She didn’t shed a single tear. She seemed to be trying to take revenge on somebody. Mitsuko talked in bursts, with short pauses in between.

  “For a while I was going to church. I’d heard they would save people. But not people like me. Because we don’t have any real intention of looking to them for help.”

  “So you quit going? Why?”

  “A foreign lady was coming to the church, and she always stared at myhands with a sorrowful expression on her face. And then she went to a lot of trouble and made a pair of gloves out of red yarn specially designed to fit my hands. After that, I quit going to church once and for all.”

  Two-year-old Konomi came in with a candy bowl full of rice crackers and put it down between Mitsuko and me. Konomi sat down and stared at Mitsuko’s face without blinking.

  “I guess there must be different kinds of foreign ladies. Another lady took a couple of pictures of me, and then she turned aside and started looking for something in her handbag. She pulled out fifty or sixty yen and pressed it on me. I didn’t want to take the money, but then her interpreter said I should because refusing it would he even ruder than accepting.”

  “Maybe they don’t know anything about Japanese money.”

  “Yes, they do. Some people slip about twenty yen or more into my hand. They think I’m some kind of exhibition from the zoo. It’s written on their faces.”

  As I grew accustomed to looking at her face, I realized that there was a certain expression in her eyes, where the skin around them was burned and stretched vertically. Her eyes were calm and seemed to be smiling gently.

  “My eye is shining, isn’t it?”

  “Shining?”

  “After that day, this eye shines more than the other. I can feel it myself.” Then, after being silent for a while, she said, “I want to be a gentle person.”

  “What would you like to do in the future?”

  “I want to grow up fast and help people who’re having a hard time. I wish I could be thirty years old right now. I keep thinking about it.”

  Mother fixed lunch for two. Konomi tried to lift up the table with a childish grunt. Mother and Konomi together brought in the food. Mitsuko spilled rice when she ate. Her lips were askew and the lower lip, having lost its natural shape, drooped in an unsightly fashion. Any kind of food was bound to drop out of her mouth. She had no choice but to push it down her throat as she ate. After eating only a little, she put her chopsticks down on the table.

  “Don’t you have to go to see Saeko Ozuki?”

  “I don’t feel like going today,” she said. “If you don’t mind, I’d rather spend some more time with you.”

  I took her for a walk. I had an impulse to take this monster-like Mitsuko and parade around town with her. And yet I found myself walking in the direction of the deserted places.

  “Shall we go to the old castle site?”

  “All right.”

  Between the rows of makeshift huts such as the one Teiko lived in, summer flowers were blooming here and there along the narrow paths. Every shack had flowers and vegetables growing in its fenced-in yard. They seemed to be a sign that people don’t want to die but just want to go on living.

  The water in the moat was stagnant and green, with duckweed floating on the surface. We came to the stone wall. The stones looked as though they were burning. They were on fire with bright and rusty reds, light greens, and faint yellows burning in a melancholy fashion, like the printed cotton of olden times.

  “Right here they’re going to put up a monument to a poet who committed suicide.”

  “I read about him in the paper. Why did he commit suicide?”

  “Nobody really understands about suicide. Some people say Tamiki Hara had suicidal tendencies anyway, even if he hadn’t been terrified by memories of the bomb. Maybe they’re right. But I can’t help but think that Mr. Hara’s suicide had something to do with the A-bomb,” I added, as though talking to myself. “As long as ‘Summer Flower,’ ‘Requiem,’ and ‘The Land of Heart’s Desire’ exist,” I said, naming some of Tamiki Hara’s works, “I have to think so.”

  “When the monument is erected,” I said, “please come here sometime to see it. I can’t come here that often from Tokyo.”

  “I’ll certainly pay a visit on your behalf every August 6.”

  “The anniversary of his death is March 13. Will you remember that for me?” Mitsuko and I walked across the former training ground toward the downtown area. We came to the streetcar stop at Aioi Bridge. Without any real purpose in mind, we got on a streetcar.

  I got back to Teiko’s house after dark. The smell of grass filled the space between the rows of huts. I used the old horse trough as a landmark in finding my way to Teiko’s shack. A firefly flickered in the grass.

  The fireflies were not big enough to fly yet. I squatted down. Here and there the slender fireflies were flashing their lights in the clumps of grass. I picked one up.

  “Mr. Soldier!” I said. “You must be the ghost of a dead soldier. Can’t you break away? Shortly after you people died, the war ended. You’re not soldiers anymore, so fly! Fly up high!”

  I tried tossing the firefly high up into the air. It floated down lightly. Down in the grass, all the fireflies were glowing.

  It seemed to me that it was not only the fireflies that were the ghosts of the dead soldiers. I came to feel the same about the slugs that slithered around the shack from evening till late at night. Even after Mother, Teiko, and the children h
ad fallen asleep, I was still awake. The three-mat room was like a house for slugs. I said to them, “You must have been soldiers. You come here every night because you have something you want to say. Can’t you ever rest in peace?”

  That is a frank expression of the way I felt.

  SHIMAO TOSHIO

  Like so many others of his generation, Shimao Toshio (1917–1986) entered military service, an experience that colored his attitudes toward himself and his society for the rest of his creative life. As if to echo his own difficulties, his wife later suffered a mental breakdown, and he was forced to care for her for many years. This complex relationship is treated with immense power in his novel The Sting of Death (Shi no toge, 1977).

  The story translated here, “The Departure Never Came” (Shuppatsu wa tsui ni otozurezu), published in 1962, chronicles the sort of reprieve from death that can only increase anxiety. It is one of Shimao’s most admired works.

  THE DEPARTURE NEVER CAME (SHUPPATSU WA TSUI NI OTOZUREZU)

  Translated by Francis B. Tenny

  If we did not depart, the day should be no different from any ordinary day. After a year and a half preparing for death, reliable orders from the defense command came finally on the evening of August 13 to undertake the suicide attacks. Knowing our final day had come at last, we clothed ourselves, body and mind, for death. Because we received no signal to depart, however, we marked time and suspended our preparations for approaching death.

  As I have had no experience with death, I could not imagine the shape of this battle closing in from afar and testing me. If even the smallest event does not occur, it does not become mine but forever remains unknown territory. The death that I had thought certain and imminent was now not caught up in that merciless jumble of flesh and blood but had become the source of a mysterious loneliness. The important contingency that had brought us this opportunity, whether by the capricious steering of enemy commanders or the hasty decision of our own headquarters, induced a feeling of emptiness I could not fathom. I was troubled that it had not come from a source more difficult to disobey. In place of the icy tension from facing a still unseen death, I was struck by a weariness from the discontent I had evaded and from the lack of sleep.