Record of a Night too Brief

by Hiromi Kawakami

  During the festival season we are visited by swarms of insects, and the residents of the apartment complex are always concerned about what steps to take against them. The insects are about as large as a person’s thumb. In colour and shape they resemble the rhinoceros beetle, though they’re somewhat smaller in size. They fly around making a loud droning sound and sting people. Once someone is stung, the skin swells up with bumps that are the size of a coin, and these bumps then become blisters, which take a long time to heal. The best thing would be if we could spend the whole of the festival indoors and so not risk any contact with the bugs. But we have to go outside: the festival always takes place in the grassy area in the middle of the complex. A festival held indoors wouldn’t be a festival.

  This year my father and my brother no. 2 were going to act as “living pillars”, that is, humans who would lure the insects away from the crowd. The practice involves someone covering themselves all over with a lotion having a particular sweet smell that bugs find irresistible, so that they will fly straight towards the smell and thus be ensnared. So why not rub the lotion on an inanimate object? Because the insects are not lured simply by a sweet smell: it’s got to be a sweet smell smeared on a human being.

  On the night of the festival, it was decided that Hiroko would be allowed to come and observe. Ordinarily it would be strictly taboo to go to the apartment block of the family of one’s husband-to-be before marriage, but since her husband-to-be was going to be one of the living pillars, she was given special dispensation.

  When Hiroko came over, it was discovered that she had covered herself with a thick layer of insect-repellent ointment. “You didn’t need to go that far,” my mother admonished. “We will have the living pillars, after all. But you’re not one of us yet, are you?—so you’re not familiar with our ways.”

  Hiroko blushed, embarrassed. “I’ll take care from now on,” she said, apologizing. “I’ll be one of your household soon, I’ll take care not to do anything wrong.”

  My father and my brother stripped down to their underwear; the sweet smell they had smeared on their bodies permeated the air, and the bugs swarmed round them, buzzing loudly. My father and brother stood stock-still, their faces taut.

  In a few seconds their faces and bodies were a crawling mass of insects. “Are they really going to survive that?” Hiroko exclaimed in horror, clearly wanting to throw aside the restraining hands of my mother and the officials of the residents’ association and rush to help the human sacrifices. It was difficult to know if my father and brother could hear her. They were covered from head to toe with insects, but they stood bolt-upright and didn’t move.

  Hiroko started screaming. “Why do you have to do this stupid thing? Why don’t the rest of you let yourselves get stung?”

  But no one paid her the blindest bit of notice.

  “If you want to change things so radically you could always stand for election as a member of the residents’ association committee,” a committee member said to her.

  “All right. As soon as I’m a member of the family, I will!” Hiroko replied, indignant but with resignation. And with that she lost consciousness.

  Immediately the insects swarmed over to her, but not one would land on her because of the strong insect-repellent.

  My mother and I sighed as we pressed cool towels on her forehead.

  With the festival over, my father and my brother no. 2 took to their hammocks and didn’t get up for a whole month. Their entire bodies were swollen and covered with blisters: it was a month before the blisters burst and formed scabs. The scabs were on their feet, hands, bellies, eyelids, and ears—whatever patch of skin had been left exposed—and as the scabs hardened they got extremely itchy: in the last week or so, my father and my brother were scratching themselves constantly. There were scabs even inside their ears, which meant that communication during the telephone calls between my brother no. 2 and Hiroko was impossible.

  “Can’t you do anything about those scabs?” Ten would plead with us on her occasional telephone calls. Hiroko was apparently missing the sweet nothings she exchanged with my brother no. 2 so much that she was growing wan and thin. Her voice did seem to my mother and me—we were now taking her calls—to be growing pitifully weaker. Despite the communication difficulties, Hiroko still made her calls every day at the same time, and attempted to discuss this and that. Hiroko would always end every call in tears.

  How is someone who is so sensitive ever going to become one of us? my mother and I wondered. It’s not something you say out loud, so we didn’t express it. But we each knew this was what the other was thinking. I strongly suspected that what had made Hiroko so delicate was her family’s custom of breathing in the fragrance of parsley and mugwort. Or maybe it was those pipe fox things they kept over in her family.

  On nights when Hiroko seemed particularly disconsolate we went and reported to my brother no. 2 how very sad she was, and he would react with amazement. His heavy, scab-covered eyelids would widen as he stared in surprise.

  Why on earth is she letting it get to her so much, he seemed to want to say.

  “I think it might be because she loves you,” I would reply. And then he would make a face that said:

  “Well, I love her too. I want to marry her, don’t I? But why does she have to cry about something like this?”

  “It’s not clear.”

  “Do you think she’s a bit peculiar?”

  “No. She comes from a different family, that’s all.”

  When all the scabs fell off my brother no. 2’s body and he was able to have a normal conversation on the phone, he put a call through to Hiroko. Hearing his voice, she immediately broke down in tears. The entire family was listening.

  “I love you so much!” Hiroko said, sobbing uncontrollably.

  “You love me so much it makes you cry?” my brother no. 2 replied, in a bored tone of voice.

  “Yes! Yes! I do!” Hiroko replied. And then, bursting into another fit of sobbing, she blew her nose loudly. I was sure that Hiroko’s relatives were all ranged around her and listening, in the same way that we were with my brother.

  After thinking for a while, my brother no. 2 spoke.

  “My love for you,” he declared softly, “is wider even than the floor area of the largest apartment in this apartment complex.” There was the sound of applause at the other end. At that we on this end started to clap too. The ripples of applause kept on coming, one after another. In the brief pauses between them we could hear Hiroko blowing her nose.

  It was the day of the wedding at last. Dressed in bridal robes embroidered with gold thread, Hiroko made the journey over from the Hikari Housing Development. Her family accompanied her. All of them came over in a slow-moving procession, having loaded Hiroko and her furniture onto a truck decked out with banners of white and red, in accordance with instructions given them over the telephone by Ten. Hiroko’s sisters and I were the bridal attendants, and Hiroko’s grandfather read out the Shinto prayers, and in this manner the wedding ceremony proceeded without a hitch. There were the usual delicacies for a sit-down meal, and everyone ate their fill. When it was over, Hiroko’s family expressed their profuse thanks and took their leave. And then off they went, piled onto their festively decorated truck.

  Hiroko sat with a distracted air surrounded by our family, still dressed in her kimono embroidered with gold thread. My brother no. 2 seemed to find the kimono amazing, and constantly pulled at its sleeves or lifted up the hem. Hiroko looked as if she wanted to brush his hands aside, but she didn’t and simply sat there looking uneasy. My mother took them to the room where their hammocks were hanging, and closed the door. This was the rite of the first marital night.

  As we stacked up the lacquer platters which the sushi had been delivered in and washed up the saké cups, we listened intently, just as we had when they talked on the telephone. But no sound, not even the faintest rustle, came from the room. No vows of love, no screams, no whisperings. My mother opened th
e doors very slightly, and made a few gestures of encouragement, but neither my brother no. 2 nor Hiroko made any movement in response. Waiting until dead of night, the family entered the room to take to their hammocks. My brother no. 2 and Hiroko were each fast asleep, each in their own hammock, snoring. Hiroko was fully dressed in her gold-embroidered kimono.

  Then, suddenly, there was my brother no. 1. Hiroko awoke: in the early hours after the night of the wedding, as she lay there in her gold wedding dress, she was in pain—she was gasping in agony. Something was weighing heavily on her chest. Everyone else rushed out of bed and tried to calm her, stroking her, rubbing her, but her pain continued unabated.

  Only I could see my brother no. 1. There he was, sitting astride Hiroko’s chest, looking quite unconcerned and kissing her. He looked very happy as he put his lips to hers. Perhaps my brother no. 2 got an inkling of his presence because he was calling out to him, Nii-san, Nii-san, and trying now to shake Hiroko. But he couldn’t see my brother no. 1, I could tell, because he was addressing his attentions to entirely the wrong spot.

  “Hey,” I said softly to my brother no. 1, “you’re hurting her.”

  “No, I’m not. She likes what I’m doing,” he said. And kissed her again. Hiroko started to get flushed and swollen in the places where he put his lips. Her cheeks, the area under her arms, her breasts, everywhere swelled up, in exactly the same way as the people who’d been stung by the insects. My mother and father and my brother no. 2 paced around the room in a dither.

  “Don’t you think you should stop?” I asked.

  My brother no. 1 replied sadly:

  “I’m only doing it because by rights she’s my wife.”

  There was nothing I could say to that.

  “Are you still sad?” I asked.

  My brother no. 1 didn’t answer, but only started to kiss Hiroko more passionately. Hiroko creased her forehead in pain. In a few minutes she fainted, and the tension left her body. In that instant my brother no. 1 vanished from sight.

  My brother no. 1 was no longer visible to anyone now, and we all busied ourselves with caring for Hiroko. I found myself feeling a little envious of her. I wanted to be kissed by my brother no. 1 like that too. I wanted to curl up on his lap and have him kiss me like that, passionately.

  “I can hear a crane crying,” Hiroko started to say. She would say it as she stood next to my mother at the sink polishing our tin cutlery, or as she was massaging my father’s stiff shoulders. She would suddenly tilt her head at an angle and interrupt our conversation to come out with it. As soon as she said it, her body would shrink one whole size smaller, with an accompanying throbbing sound: hyun.

  No one else in the family could hear the sound of the crane—none of us could recognize the cry of a crane in the first place. My father and my mother and my brother no. 2 stared at Hiroko in bewilderment. With her body now appreciably smaller, Hiroko kept mumbling those words as she continued with her tasks—as she polished the cutlery or kneaded my father’s shoulders. Since she was now considerably reduced in size, the tin cutlery was far too unwieldy for her, and her tiny hands were quite ineffective for massaging. My brother no. 2 had stopped exchanging love talk with her once the wedding was over. My mother tried whispering to him discreetly that Hiroko had probably started mentioning the crane’s cries because she was unhappy about not getting sweet nothings from him. After listening to this with an impatient look on his face, my brother no. 2 made a perfunctory attempt at murmuring into Hiroko’s ear, but Hiroko simply listened with a blank look in her eyes. My brother no. 2’s sweet nothings didn’t have the passion they’d had during their engagement. Hiroko wasn’t the only one—the whole family no longer cared to listen.

  These days, though I heard no crane, I frequently heard another sound: Goshiki muttering kuna-nira, kuna-nira. The words would reach my ears as I walked the frozen paths in the early morning, or the dark roads behind the housing development at dusk. Goshiki! Goshiki! I would call, and Goshiki’s voice would get a little closer. Every time I heard Goshiki calling, in the exact opposite way to Hiroko, who would shrink when she heard the cry of the crane, I got fatter. As I walked along the frozen paths, Goshiki’s voice came pouring into me, and my body got bigger and bigger, swelling up like a bag getting filled with warmth.

  Hiroko was diminishing in size by the day; my brother no. 1 hadn’t appeared again, and it began to seem that Hiroko was having difficulty fitting in with our family. She became so tiny that she could be held in the palm of a hand. At night when we went to bed we would have to pick her up in our fingers and place her gently in her hammock. And she became completely useless at kitchen tasks. The few times my brother no. 2 tried to talk to her, she would stick her fingers in her ears and tell him: “You’re too loud!” All she did was sweep the tatami room from dawn till dusk using a tiny broom. But no matter how energetically she swept, it would be night by the time little Hiroko had finished. At supper, we would find it unbearable to see her listlessly eating her carrot and mustard-cress salad, repeating that sentence, “The crane is crying.” In the end my mother decided that it was time to call Ten.

  Everyone listened in intently on the conversation.

  “Hiroko’s shrunk!” my mother said.

  All of us heard Ten huff and puff on the other end of the line.

  “So she hasn’t matched up, then.”

  “No, she hasn’t matched up.”

  During this conversation, my brother no. 2 was lying in a corner of the room, chiselling a bit of wax. Hiroko was in the tatami room, still her diminutive self, sweeping the floor.

  “Well, maybe we should return her,” said Ten.

  And it was decided that’s what we would do.

  “I wonder why all my recent marriages have gone bad!” Ten grumbled.

  “Is it just the recent ones?” my mother said, her voice curious. Ten huffed and puffed grumpily again.

  “I haven’t had a single success in all of ten years!”

  We’d never heard any talk of her record of matchmaking failures before, so this was quite a jolt. Ten carried on huffing and puffing for a while, then reverted to her usual tone.

  “How about letting me try with your girl?”

  By girl, of course, she was referring to me. I’d been suspecting this might happen. Ever since I’d started to hear Goshiki call to me more frequently and my body had started to swell, I had been pretty much resigned to it. Immediately Ten and my mother started discussing how to get me out of the family and off into a new one.

  As soon as my mother and Ten had decided on how to settle the matter of Hiroko, they began discussing a suitable family to whom I could go in one month’s time. My father and I listened in on the conversation between my mother and Ten, but my brother no. 2 gave his attention completely over to his piece of wax, and all Hiroko did was sweep the tatami room. It almost seemed as if there was no sense of their presence—as if they had disappeared. Even things that have disappeared leave some trace of their presence, but these two were still visible to the eye and yet seemed to have vanished completely. As if to take the place of these two presences that were absent, my brother no. 1 now appeared by my side and started listening in attentively on the conversation between my mother and Ten. My brother no. 1 started kissing me passionately and caressing my breasts, and I began to swell up like a bag filled with water, making soft liquid sounds, and swayed in pleasure from side to side.

  Matters with Hiroko were settled with a minimum of fuss. She had now shrunk so much she was as tiny as an aubergine seed, and so we put her into a glass container with a gauze cover to make sure she wouldn’t be crushed, and waited for her family to come to retrieve her. Hiroko’s family brought back the kelp and the dried cuttlefish that we had taken over to them, and we carefully handed over Hiroko in her glass bottle.

  “Do you often have family members who shrink?” my father asked, when it was all nearly over.

  “We do—often,” Hiroko’s grandfather replied, in a confid
ential tone.

  My father and my mother exchanged glances.

  “Members of our family disappear,” my father declared.

  Hiroko’s grandfather nodded gravely. “Every family has something about it, doesn’t it?” he said.

  Suddenly my brother no. 1 made an appearance. He was intoning a prayer in the centre of the room. My brother no. 2 was as weak and lifeless as he had been since Hiroko started to shrink. He was still chiselling his pieces of wax.

  “Do I hear something?” said Hiroko’s grandfather, seeming to sense the presence of my brother no. 1. Goshiki’s voice started resounding loudly in my ears. Kuna-nira, kuna-nira… Overlaying the tones of the tuneless mumblings coming from my brother no. 1, it drowned out, inexorably, every other sound.

  Hiroko’s family were just on the point of closing the front door as they left when my mother asked, as if the thought had suddenly struck her:

  “Do pipe foxes really have a marvellous smell?”

  Hiroko’s family looked at my mother in wonder. “Pipe foxes?” Hiroko’s grandfather repeated.

  “Yes, pipe foxes,” my mother replied.

  “What on earth are they?”

  My mother and my father twitched slightly, but recovered in a second.

  Once little Hiroko and her family had taken their leave, my brother no. 1 disappeared and Goshiki’s mutterings ceased. I asked my mother and father to tell me about pipe foxes. They both looked baffled. “What are you talking about?” my mother replied. My father shook his head adamantly.

  “Well, then, can you tell me about my brother no. 1?” I immediately asked.

  At this, my mother and my father looked even more mystified.

  “You’re talking nonsense, girl. Goodness, what a tiring day. I’m all worn out,” my mother said, pounding her shoulders. And my father echoed her words.

  “I wonder if Hiroko will ever go back to her previous size.”