Dandelions

by Yasunari Kawabata

  “You’re the one who said the tree was crying because the lunatics cut it up. You’re the one who wondered if they might go wild and chop it down.” Kuno gazed at Ineko’s mother. “The tree is Ineko, isn’t it? The tree that looked to you like it was weeping.”

  “A tree’s tears are just sap. Ineko didn’t shed a tear.”

  “She’s going to get better quickly and come home, that’s what she said. The tears were there, streaming from the back of her eyes into her heart.” Once more, Kuno turned to look back from where they had come. “I can see the hill with the clinic, but not Ineko. She really is there, isn’t she? Among the trees, and the lunatics? I’d like to go back and check.”

  “. . . . . . . . . . . .”

  “I begged you not to put her in the asylum, to let me marry her instead.”

  “Mr. Kuno, you remember what the doctor in Tokyo said. About the young somagnosic mother who killed her child. How she stopped seeing her baby’s head, and killed it.”

  “That was an infant. Cover a newborn’s mouth for a few seconds and that’s it — it’s dead. Just stepping on it will kill it. I’m not an infant,” said Kuno. “Ineko’s attacks won’t kill me. I’m strong enough to restrain her.”

  “I never thought she’d kill you. But she might have a child.”

  “. . . . . . . . . . . .”

  “That somagnosic mother put her hands around her baby’s invisible neck and strangled it. How is that possible? To be unable to see your own baby’s head, to wring a neck that isn’t even visible to you. Just hearing the story made me shudder.”

  “I was right there with you, listening to that doctor, and I thought that the woman’s family should have been more careful. Someone should always have been there, watching.”

  “It was her first episode. They couldn’t have known.”

  The week after she killed her baby, the woman had been transferred from the maternity ward to a mental hospital. Kuno and Ineko’s mother had heard her story from a doctor at a psychiatric ward in Tokyo. The doctor hadn’t known how to answer when Kuno asked the obvious question about why the woman stopped seeing the baby’s head when she could see everything else — though perhaps this, too, was only to be expected.

  “Was it the intensity of her love, was it too extreme?” Kuno asked, “Surely it wasn’t an intense, extreme hatred?”

  The doctor couldn’t really say. Madness, he explained, could stem from other emotions, too, not just love and hate.

  “Can you imagine a baby being so adorable, so utterly adorable that you just keep staring and staring until it dissolves away, and you don’t see it anymore?” asked Kuno.

  “Yes, I can. But that much seems normal.”

  A normal person, suddenly realizing she couldn’t see her baby’s head, might, in her shock and horror, seize hold of it, but she would let go before the baby died.

  “How many minutes did she keep her hands around the baby’s neck?” Kuno asked. “How long was the head invisible?”

  “It’s impossible to say. No one else was there, after all,” the doctor said. “Long enough for the demon to do its work.”

  “The demon?” Kuno asked, surprised. “Are there demons in medicine?”

  “Everywhere you look. Especially for someone like me, in psychiatry — I spend most of my time dealing with the moments when they show themselves. Sometimes I think that’s all human existence is. One such moment after the next.”

  “What rubbish,” Kuno muttered. Then, “Listen, I came to see you because I want to cure Ineko’s somagnosia through marriage, and I believe I can. I’d be grateful if you could at least assure Ineko’s mother that there’s no reason Ineko can’t marry, and tell her that marriage can sometimes work wonders. Maybe you can get her to come around.”

  The truth was, of course, that even a doctor’s encouragement was unlikely to help Ineko’s mother overcome her reluctance to allow the marriage. Ineko had never become blind to any other person she was with; it had happened for the first time with Kuno. Perhaps he himself had somehow triggered the condition. And then the doctor had gone and told the mother what had happened next, after that young woman killed her baby — that she had gone stark raving mad. His story left Ineko’s mother in a state of terror.

  The same doctor had introduced the Ikuta Clinic, and helped the mother decide to commit her daughter. Truth be told, there’d never been much of a chance that she would be swayed by Kuno’s entreaties, by the earnestness of his desire to keep Ineko out free.

  Still, she had needed him to go with her to Ikuta. His presence at her side as they walked back from the clinic without Ineko provided, she felt, the spiritual support she required. Her body brimmed with affection for him, as if by walking together she and Kuno could share the burden of her daughter’s fate.

  Again the mother stopped walking. “You commented earlier that you could see the hill with the clinic, but not Ineko. It’s not nice of you to say such odd things, Mr. Kuno. Now I can’t stop thinking about it.”

  “There’s nothing odd in that. It’s just as I said.”

  “You can’t see the clinic through the trees, and you can’t see Ineko inside the clinic either, not from here. That goes without saying.”

  “That’s what’s been scaring me lately — the notion that something exists, but you can’t see it.”

  “That’s nothing like somagnosia, like someone vanishing right in front of you.”

  “No, it isn’t. But can you tell me what Ineko is doing now, Mother, at this moment? Can you describe her to me, when we can’t see her? Please, I’ve got to go back to the clinic.”

  “If we went back, Ineko would think she’s worse than she realized.”

  “I could peek in at her, that would be fine. I’d like to see that big tree you said was crying, too,” Kuno said restlessly. “When I’m here with you, Mother, even our shadows are clearly visible, yours and mine. I don’t want to be separated from Ineko.”

  Ineko’s mother looked down. She realized, seeing how far their shadows stretched in the winter afternoon light, how late it was: they went all the way to the river’s edge, breaking at the top of the bank; the shapes seemed unsettled. She made sure, as they walked on, that their shadows didn’t overlap.

  There was a bridge at the end of the river over which the road to the station passed. The bridge crossed the river’s mouth, but from here it seemed to arc over the ocean itself. You could see ocean under the bridge. The river was no wider there than upstream, and where it flowed into the ocean there was nothing to see; the banks were a little lower, that was all. Both the ocean and the sky were peaceful.

  They heard the temple bell.

  “Ah, the bell,” Kuno said. “That’s Ineko.”

  “Ineko’s bell.” The mother glanced at her watch. “Three o’clock. The doctor said he would let her ring the bell at three.”

  They turned back toward the hill and raised their eyes. The tolling seemed to come from the sky, and stay in the sky. A temple in a country town like this one was unlikely to have a large and celebrated bell, but it was probably old enough. Its tone was dry rather than hard, with a gravely vibration at the tail. Even after it had faded imperceptibly into silence, the mood it created lingered in their hearts. The town seemed to have no sound. Neither the small river nor the ocean made any noise.

  “It’s so still now, it’s like time has stopped,” Kuno said. “As if the flow of time itself is waiting, hushed, in the interval between Ineko’s first strike and the next.”

  The bell rang out a second time.

  “She struck it on her own that time. I’m sure of it,” Kuno said. “It sounded even weaker than the first one, don’t you think?”

  The mother nodded silently, trying to hear the bell deep in her ears.

  Kuno continued. “The doctor said the nurses help the patients swing the striker. The first tim
e they hold onto the rope with the patient, pulling it back and striking the bell together. And then the second time . . . Here, go ahead and try it yourself.”

  “You sound as if you’re seeing it.” Ineko’s mother smiled.

  “Or maybe Ineko asked the nurse to let her strike it alone. You know what just occurred to me, though?” Kuno said, his voice louder than before. “We should have gone over to see the temple’s bell tower — if we had, we’d feel like we could see her, even from here.”

  “Ineko rang a temple bell once. Where was that, I wonder?” The mother’s eyes seemed to turn toward the past. “Oh, I know. It was Miidera. We’d gone sightseeing in Kyoto, and we went down to Lake Biwa to go around the Eight Views of Ōmi. You’ve heard of the evening bell at Miidera? They let visitors strike it for a fee. That really was a massive old bell — every bit as big as you’d expect at a temple like that.”

  “When was that? How old would Ineko have been?”

  “She was in middle school. Yes, it was the year she started.”

  “You went in the spring? To celebrate her getting in?”

  “It was winter. I remember we had duck hot pot at a restaurant they had built out over the lake, in a room with a tatami floor. It was near the end of the year. Sometimes Ineko still talks about the duck we had that time. I guess it made an impression, looking out over the wintry lake from that room. All that water under a low, cloudy sky. It was as cold on the lake as it had been in Kyoto.”

  “Ineko must have been adorable then, in her first year of middle school.”

  “She was a child.”

  “If only you had introduced us then, Mother, when she was still a child. Then she would have felt a different sort of affection for me, she wouldn’t have had to hold back, and I bet she would never have come down with somagnosia.”

  “Don’t speak nonsense,” the mother said, eyeing Kuno. “Just imagine her then, in middle school.” The bell rang a third time then, and she stopped.

  “She struck that one by herself, too,” Kuno said.

  “How many times will she strike it?” Ineko’s mother murmured.

  “I doubt there’s a limit. They’ve got lunatics hitting it, after all,” Kuno said nonchalantly. “They probably let them strike it as many times as they like.”

  “You can’t keep ringing a bell forever.”

  “I bet Ineko will keep at it for at least as long as you and I are walking on this riverbank, so it’s like she’s calling goodbye to us, since she knows we can hear.”

  “That’s ridiculous. She’d collapse from exhaustion.”

  “If she gets worn out, we’ll hear it in the bell’s tone. Didn’t the doctor say striking the bell is a kind of therapy? That you can tell how a patient is doing from the sound.”

  “He wasn’t so definitive. He said maybe you could tell.”

  The gonging came again. The unevenness of the rings, both their spacing and their force, proved that the person swinging the striker was inexperienced, and suggested Kuno had been right to infer that Ineko was striking it alone. Presumably the nurse was just standing nearby, keeping an eye on her.

  “Mother,” Kuno began, then paused, unable to go on. “Ineko will start crying before she finishes ringing the bell. I’m sure she will. Of course she will.”

  “Why Mr. Kuno, didn’t you just say it’s therapeutic? Maybe each time she strikes the bell the ringing draws out a bit of whatever it is that’s clouding her mind, the smudges in her head, and then those clouds just disappear into the sky.”

  “The sound of the bell speaks the emotions of the patient who strikes it. There’s only one bell hanging in the temple, and yet the sound alters with each person who strikes it.”

  “At least when the patient’s family is listening, as they are now.”

  “Let’s go back, Mother,” Kuno urged, “back to the clinic, while Ineko is still striking the bell. Think how lonely she’ll feel when it’s exhausted her, when the ringing stops — and how lonely you and I will feel. She’s striking the bell to see us off, but that ringing is the sound of her calling us back. If we don’t go, Ineko might just go on swinging the striker at the bell until she collapses in a faint. There, it rang again. She’s calling us.”

  “There’s a nurse with her, Mr. Kuno. We mustn’t lose our heads,” said the mother sternly. “I’m grateful, as her mother, that you say such things. But how do you think this would turn out if I were to let you stay with Ineko, even marry her, when you talk like that?”

  “I would settle down. At the very least, it would be better for Ineko than the asylum.”

  The mother walked on four or five steps, her head bent.

  “Please don’t take this badly. What if, speaking hypothetically . . .”

  “Hypothetically?” Kuno said.

  “Never mind.”

  “No, go on.”

  “What if, speaking hypothetically, you and she were together, physically, and she stopped seeing your body? Wouldn’t you mind? If she couldn’t see your face, your hands . . .”

  “That wouldn’t bother me.”

  “But don’t you think it would make her even crazier? Oh, how awful it would be! Of course, I can’t imagine she’d be strong enough to kill you.”

  “We’ve done something similar,” Kuno said. “I’d ask her to cover her eyes. Either way, it doesn’t really matter. You know what I mean . . . women close their eyes.”

  “Now really.” The mother’s face flushed, as if she were blushing on Ineko’s behalf. Then the moment passed. “You said something silly earlier, too, Mr. Kuno. Something nonsensical. That I should have introduced you when she was a girl, when she rang the bell at Miidera.”

  “Why is that nonsensical?”

  “Well, isn’t it? Ineko was in middle school, she had never met you, never even heard your name. And you, too — you didn’t know she was alive. To put it as you did before, as far as each of you was concerned, the other might as well not have existed.”

  “That’s an odd thought. Seeing as we were both alive and well.”

  “Until you met, of course. There’s really nothing odd about that — no one can meet everyone who was born at the same they were.”

  “But if we were going to meet anyway, why not bring us together sooner? That’s what I don’t understand.”

  “Now you’re being silly. That’s like saying . . . well, this is an utterly absurd example, but say you and Ineko were to marry someday, and you had a child — it would be like sitting that child down and saying, If you were going to be born anyway, why weren’t you born five or six years earlier?”

  “That’s not the same at all. An unborn baby doesn’t yet exist. But Ineko and I were both here, in this world — she was Ineko, and I was me. We just didn’t exist for each other. It’s strange, but that’s how it was.”

  “If you had known Ineko when she was small, though . . . who knows, Mr. Kuno. Maybe you wouldn’t have fallen in love with her.”

  “You have a shallow heart.”

  “What?” The mother was clearly taken aback. “I think people meet when the time is right, don’t you?”

  All throughout their conversation, Ineko’s bell had gone on ringing.

  “Tell me, Mother,” Kuno said. “Do you suppose Ineko is thinking of that time at Miidera, when she was a girl? While she’s ringing the bell now? I bet she is, poor thing.”

  “Ah, Miidera . . .” the mother replied. “She remembers it, I’m sure. We hardly ever went on trips together, you know, all three of us. Her father was alive then, he took us. We walked out from the bell tower to a spot where you could look out over everything, and there was Lake Biwa and all the buildings along the shore. The sky had a chill look to it.”

  “Ineko’s father died three years later, is that right?” Kuno asked, though he already knew the answer.

  “Yes. Ine
ko must have told you?”

  “She did.”

  “She was there when it happened. He fell off a cliff into the ocean.”

  Kuno nodded.

  “To this day, she blanches and starts trembling whenever she sees a horse.”

  It happened on the west coast of the Izu Peninsula, on a road that hadn’t yet seen local bus traffic or sightseeing tours. Ineko and her father were traveling on horseback.

  During the war, the father, Kizaki, had been a commissioned officer in the army during the war. His entire right leg was prosthetic, right up to the hip. He had been hurt fighting the Americans in the Philippines, and they amputated. He was serving again in Kagoshima at the time of Japan’s unconditional surrender. You would have thought that as an officer with only one leg he would have been allowed to retire for good, but they had called him back — perhaps because the military was understaffed, and perhaps, too, because he had experience planning guerrilla warfare in the mountains of China and the Philippines. If the Americans ever came ashore in Kyūshū, he was to command a guerilla unit made up of both soldiers and civilians. He had to know the land inside and out, so he’d mount his horse and ride all over the island, through the fields and over the peaks. Naturally, he never shied from paths that should have been too steep and treacherous for a man straddling a horse with a fake leg — paths that hardly deserved the name. He was confident in his horsemanship.

  When Japan surrendered on August 15, Kizaki abandoned his men, galloping off on his well-loved horse. It was rumored that he had ridden up into the mountains he had studied so well to find some secret spot to end his life, although as a superior officer this was hardly a responsible course of action. Then, five days later, he returned. He and his horse both looked haggard, and he had grown a beard. Ineko was three at the time.

  Two years later, Kizaki rather grudgingly went to work as an instructor at a riding club in Tokyo after a friend silently pulled strings on his behalf and urged him to accept the post. The whole country was still sunk in the numbness, poverty, and turmoil that followed the defeat, and so many horses had died during the fighting that there were almost none to be had; the whole notion of a horse club seemed not just ludicrously extravagant but genuinely immoral. At the same time, the club was a place where younger members of the prewar aristocratic and moneyed elites, whose status and fortunes were rapidly declining, could give vent in the most vivacious manner to their rebelliousness, their despair, their escapism. It was a place where men and women who had taken advantage of the defeat to line their own pockets — the up-and-coming masters of toadying and cozying up to the occupiers — could begin to taste what it was like to move up in the world, to be victorious. Every so often an American military family came to the riding grounds, too, or joined in longer rides, having been invited by such Japanese.