Record of a Night too Brief

by Hiromi Kawakami

  “Well,” the woman announced suddenly, “time to hit the sack,” and then, without bothering to clear away any of the dirty dishes, she pressed herself against the wooden post in a corner. How she did it I’ll never know, but she managed to flatten herself out completely, wind herself against the surface of the wood, and slither round up to the very top. Once she reached the ceiling, she stopped, and, when I looked at her a second later, she was a snake. Looking just like an image that someone had painted of a snake curled up there, she closed her eyes.

  After that, she didn’t budge, and nothing I did—calling up at her, even bringing a long stick and giving her a poke with it—had any effect.

  The next morning, the snake was still there, in the same spot. I wondered if I wasn’t being a bit reckless, but I decided to leave her as she was, and set off to work.

  When I arrived, Mr Kosuga was standing outside raising the shutter. I could hear a sound like gunshots in the near distance.

  “Bird-scaring rockets,” Mr Kosuga said, before I’d even said a thing about the noise. “Do you know about bird-scaring rockets, Miss Sanada?”

  “No,” I said, and he proceeded to give me an explanation.

  Bird-scaring rockets, Mr Kosuga explained, are a kind of device—like guns but without bullets—that produce loud bangs, used by farmers to deter unwanted animal visitors from the rice paddies. They are about eighty centimetres long.

  “When we first set up shop, we had wild boars coming out of the forest. We’d hear shots all the time. It was like a full-blown battle raging. Huge bangs going off in the early morning.”

  He told me, chuckling, that for a time after he and Nishiko arrived in the area, whenever he heard the sound, he’d think her ex-husband had come after them and was taking potshots at him. Brought up in the city, he wasn’t used to the noise.

  And that was three years after Nishiko had left her Kyoto home, Mr Kosuga added. He left the filterless cigarette in his mouth unlit.

  “I assumed it was some sort of practice,” I told him.

  Mr Kosuga looked puzzled.

  “The Self-Defence Forces,” I added.

  “Ohhh,” he mouthed. The cigarette, stuck to his upper lip, made an upward movement in tandem.

  “Practice. Training. For battle,” he said. “Yes, I see.” He went on: “You can’t be too careful.”

  Unsure how I ought to respond, I just looked off to one side slightly.

  Mr Kosuga started singing some sort of song, in a nasal tone.

  You can’t be too careful…

  Keep hold of the things you love…

  Safe in our deposit box…

  The song seemed somehow familiar.

  The bird-scaring rockets went off faintly in the distance.

  When I went inside the shop, the air still had a chill about it. There was no sign of Nishiko. Every so often she didn’t come in, and today was probably one of those days. Her big toe was probably acting up. Nishiko suffered from gout.

  I dusted the items on the shelves, and sprinkled water over the pavement in front of the shop, carrying out Nishiko’s daily tasks. Then, rather than coffee, since that would be encroaching too much, I made green tea for two, sat down in front of the desk, and with nothing else to do, just sipped my tea.

  In a while the telephone started ringing, I had to note down orders, and go back to check what we had in stock—and before I knew it, hours had passed. Mr Kosuga came back from his deliveries, and as we were having our third cup of green tea the sun started to go down. In the hours I spent sitting there, the thought of the snake occasionally flitted through my mind, but whenever I tried to focus on it, the thought dissolved. Just once, during a telephone call from a priest from Shōsenji Temple, one of our long-time customers, I was sure I heard him say the word “snake”. But in fact he’d said “simple vestment”, slurring some of the syllables.

  However, Mr Kosuga brought the topic up as soon as he came back.

  “You know that snake that you mentioned,” he said, checking the items customers had ordered in the ledger. “If it comes to your place, you will send it packing, won’t you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That snake that you mentioned.”

  I looked at him. He looked back. I could see it dawning on him that the snake had already moved in with me.

  “So it’s too late,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “So you’re really sure you can’t do anything about it.”

  He was being a little insistent, it seemed to me, but the next instant he began to croon, in that high little voice, the same ditty he’d been singing that morning.

  You can’t be too careful,

  No, you can’t be too careful…

  Was he dreaming—engrossed in his own thoughts? Or was he in some sort of a tight spot? With Mr Kosuga, it was always difficult to tell. Maybe it was a bit of both. I was on the point of asking myself whether I’d been stupid to be so heedless, carrying on with my tasks, delaying coming to any decision about what to do with the snake, when it suddenly occurred to me where I’d heard that song. It was at a local festival, coming out of a float sponsored by a credit union near the station. Those lyrics, You can’t be too careful, set somehow to a musical arrangement, and recorded on a tape that ran on and on, had blared out while the float paraded through the streets. I had sat daydreaming inside the shop, which despite the festival had remained open for business, trying to stop the words of the jingle from entering my brain. But it seemed they had found their way in after all.

  “Send it packing.”

  “You think?”

  “If you can, I’d advise, yes.”

  “But can I?”

  Mr Kosuga rubbed his brow with the palm of his hand, and didn’t reply. He put some banknotes in a linen drawstring bag, and locked up the till. Facing a figure of the Buddha inside one of the glass cases, he muttered namandabu namandabu, then switched the gas taps to the closed position, and placed a little saucer with a mound of purifying salt by the door of the washroom. Finally, he pulled down the shutter and turned off the lights.

  “I’m not the wisest man in the world,” he said, “but there’s no need to take on responsibility for every stray that comes your way.”

  All very well, I thought. But sometimes you only know what you should take on and what you should not when you don’t have the choice. But I didn’t say this out loud to Mr Kosuga.

  I made my way home, wondering whether the snake would have left or whether she’d still be there. Already the snake was at the centre of my thoughts.

  The snake was there. She was in her human form.

  “Welcome back, Hiwako, dear,” she said.

  “Yes, I’m home!” I replied, feeling as if we’d been greeting each other like this for years.

  After that, she didn’t say anything else. I took a bath and did my laundry. Unwilling to take my clothes off in front of her, I did all my changing inside the bathroom, which was a bit cramped. When I emerged, in pyjamas that were still damp from the steam, the woman immediately brought out a beer.

  “Come, let’s have a drink,” she said.

  I was about to refuse, but the sight of the beer made me want to have some. Once I’d had a drink, the dishes of food started to tempt me, and then I had to have another drink. I glanced at the woman. She was looking completely relaxed.

  “Hiwako, dear, I wonder if you remember,” she began. The area around her eyes had started to flush a deep red colour. “That time you fell out of a tree?”

  Fell out of a tree? This was the first I’d heard of it.

  “Your little friend Gen from next door ran round yelling, ‘Hiwako’s mum! Hiwako’s had a fall. She’s fallen out of a tree!’ It gave me such a fright, I almost collapsed!”

  She was staring steadily at the air a few inches in front of her face, and her voice got a little loud. “I rushed over, and there you were sitting right underneath it. ‘So you’re OK,’ I said, and you said, ‘No, that
’s the end of me.’ That’s so typical of you, Hiwako dear, to give that kind of an answer.”

  I had no recollection of any such incident. “Are you sure you haven’t mixed me up with someone else?”

  “No. How could I be mistaken—your very own mother?”

  “My mother is in Shizuoka.” This was beginning to annoy me.

  The woman went on, regardless: “Yes, that’s true, but I’m also your mother.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “Hiwako, darling. Trust me. I know.”

  I felt the hair rise on the back of my neck.

  The woman’s skin had a glossy, damp sheen. She was looking remarkably like a snake. The thought went through my mind that I had, just this minute, taken on responsibility for this woman, like it or not. I’d had this feeling any number of times, but the specific details had faded from memory.

  The woman gazed at me with a doting expression.

  “Hiwako, dearest. I want to take care of you,” she said, in a cloying voice, and curled herself round into a ball. Then, before I knew it, she’d reverted to being a snake, and slithered up to the ceiling. She became like the image of a snake that someone had painted up there, and she wouldn’t be budged no matter how much I prodded and pulled.

  I laid out my futon in a corner of the room, as far away as possible from the snake. I didn’t expect to be able to sleep, but I dropped off immediately and slept soundly all night.

  “Miss Sanada, your voice seems weak today,” I heard Nishiko say from behind me as I sat checking sales slips, sipping my tea. I paused to take this in. She had only arrived in the shop a moment before, and we hadn’t yet said a word. Every so often Nishiko would come out with such statements. I’d arrive at work in the morning to be told as soon as she saw me, “You ate too much last night, Miss Sanada, didn’t you?” or “Today you’re going to feel down in the dumps all day.”

  But she was often on target. Today my voice was little more than a peep, and my eyes wouldn’t open wide.

  “Good morning,” I said, over my shoulder.

  “What did I tell you?” she said, and smiled.

  Mr Kosuga entered the shop, making a loud noise. The racket came from the object he carried in his hands. It was covered in a cloth. He put the object up on the glass counter of the case, and removed the cloth. It was a box. There was the sound of something moving around inside it, frantically.

  “What’s that?” Nishiko asked.

  Mr Kosuga put a finger to his lips: “Shh! You know—that.”

  “Oh, that.”

  I pretended to be taken up with the sales slips, and waited for what they would say next, but that was it. The smell of a lit cigarette reached me. I heard Mr Kosuga sigh.

  For lunch Nishiko called a local restaurant for delivery of three orders of tempura over rice, and the three of us sat in the little room in the back and had our meal. About once a month, they would treat me to a large deluxe order of ten-don, with one extra prawn and an extra-generous heap of pickled aubergine.

  Mr Kosuga recounted a story he had learnt from the priest whom he had made a delivery to that morning. The priest had told him about his son, whom he had been hoping to hand down his priesthood to, but who had, much to his concern, gone off to live in America. The boy was buying up quantities of old clothes, he said, sending them back to Japan, and selling them off at an exorbitant price. Is there really such a demand in Japan, nowadays, for old clothes? Mr Kosuga had enquired. And the priest had assured him that, yes, anything, so long as it was vintage, was a hot ticket for young people, who snapped it all up for huge sums of money.

  “So is that the kind of thing young people go for now?” Mr Kosuga asked me.

  I had no idea, so I replied, “Who knows?”

  Mr Kosuga looked at me in wonderment. “Come to think of it, Miss Sanada,” he said, “your fashion isn’t exactly typical of the youth of today.”

  Not quite understanding what kind of people he was referring to with that phrase “the youth of today”, I didn’t grace this with a reply.

  “Times have changed, dear,” Nishiko chimed in. “It’s not like the old days, when we’d get all dressed up just to stroll round Shijō Kawaramachi in case we ran into someone we knew.”

  “Mm, maybe,” Mr Kosuga replied, crunching on his prawn tempura.

  I was silently pondering how things were between the snake and me. With the snake, I never felt that sense of distance, of being separated by a wall, which I felt when I was in conversation with Mr Kosuga and Nishiko. Even when I was with people who might count as “the youth of today”, the students I taught when I was a teacher, for example, or my peers and colleagues—or even with my mother, my father, and my brothers—some sort of a wall would be there. Perhaps we only managed to get along because of the wall.

  Between the snake and me, though, there was no such wall.

  As usual, the tempura over rice sat heavy in my stomach. My voice was weak, and I felt lacking in energy, until evening time.

  As I walked through Midori Park, I recalled the story of my great-grandfather. My great-grandfather had been a peasant farmer, with just over an acre of rice paddies and tea bushes. One day he just disappeared. No news came, and my great-grandmother found herself having to fend for a family of five, and to work in the fields. Three years later, in the spring, my great-grandfather came back, and who knows what transpired between him and my great-grandmother, but they took up with each other again as if nothing had happened. Years passed without incident, and long after, when their children had grown up and had children of their own, and my great-grandmother had died, and my great-grandfather was old and frail, he began to tell people what he’d done during the time he’d been away.

  Apparently, he had gone off to live with a bird.

  The bird had come to my great-grandfather in the form of a woman one autumn day and seduced him, bewitching him with her lovely perfume and delicate hands. So he went off with her, abandoning his family. They lived together for two years somewhere far away, but by the third winter the woman started to treat him coldly.

  “It was the bird in her revealing its true nature,” my great-grandfather told people. “She started saying things like, ‘How am I ever going to lay eggs with a feckless husband like you!’ And one day she flew away, with a flutter of her wings, saying, ‘I want to build a nest!’ And so it was that I came back to my family.”

  I’d heard this story from my mother when I was a student in middle school, and I remember thinking it was a very odd fable. It didn’t seem to have any point to it. Even now I can’t really see any moral to be drawn. Was it that frustration inevitably awaited a man who abandoned his family for a beautiful but worthless woman? But my great-grandfather seemed to have enjoyed his life with her too much for that. Perhaps it was that women are utterly strange and unpredictable? But the woman’s reaction to my great-grandfather seemed, if anything, rational and understandable. Was it, then, that patriarchal authority in the Meiji period was so strong that a woman could say nothing, even when her husband left her for several years—and that modern women should be sure to assert themselves more? But my great-grandmother had not been exactly submissive to her husband, from what I had heard.

  Even if it wasn’t a fable, and was absolutely true, what was happening to me was a little different, I decided. Nevertheless, I remembered it the way a person who had once been nearly devoured by a shark might recall a story of someone who was swallowed by a whale.

  The dried leaves of Midori Park raced across the ground, blowing about in the wind. It was close to nightfall, but there were lots of children out in the park, playing and yelling. Some on bikes pedalled at breakneck speed on the park promenades. Any number of times a child on a bike came racing up behind me and whizzed by, and my hair would be whipped along in the air stream.

  I was conscious of something at the back of my throat, catching, making it difficult to breathe.

  “What are you?” I demanded, as soon as I set
foot inside the apartment. I wouldn’t be able to ask once she started plying me with food and drink.

  “Your mother, of course! How many times do you want me to say it?” the woman replied. She was absorbed in checking her hair for split ends. Though she normally wore it up, tonight she had let it down. Her hair was very long. When she wore it down, it made her look slightly older.

  “I don’t understand what you mean.”

  “You don’t understand?”

  She opened her mouth wide. I assumed that because she was a snake, her tongue would be forked, so I averted my gaze quickly. But my glimpse of it told me it wasn’t forked. It was an ordinary human tongue.

  “You’re always playing the innocent, aren’t you, Hiwako, dear. It doesn’t impress me.”

  All right, but I still didn’t understand.

  “I went for a little walk around here today,” she said, changing her tone. “It’s a nice area, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “There are too many children, though. Children these days are very badly behaved.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “I saw a goat. In a house belonging to a family by the name of Narita. Did you know they had a goat, Hiwako, dear?”

  While we talked, she brought out a bottle of beer, and we ended up having a meal. As I ate and drank, I felt sure she was secretly grinning to herself, laughing at me playing the innocent, and I stole glances at her, over and over. She was smiling, in fact, keeping my glass filled, and then heating up the clear soup on the stove. She looked lovely. I liked her face.

  Two weeks had passed since the snake had come to my place. In the shop, we were taking inventory. We did this every spring and autumn. There were three shelves from floor to ceiling arranged with supplies. I had to write down everything that was on these shelves, as well as everything on display, on memos made by Nishiko from scraps of paper clipped together.