by Неизвестный
“Shall we get started?” said Mr. Shiga and left the room. Tokiko’s heart began pounding, and she went upstairs for the sole purpose of having one last look around her room. When she came back downstairs, there were tears in her mother’s eyes.
Tokiko’s sister saw them off to the station. “Just a token of my affection,” she said as she slipped a paper-wrapped parcel to Tokiko. “Take care of yourself, and send me a letter now and again.” She spoke with real feeling.
“I will,” Tokiko replied, her head down. She was dabbing her eyes with her handkerchief. “Please write to me, too.”
Jūkichi felt that if people had not been present, the two sisters would have held hands and begun to weep. Tokiko’s sister stood forlornly watching until the train carrying the newly wed couple was out of sight.
IX
Jūkichi had received Tokiko’s registry while in Kōfu, but he hesitated to send it to his own hometown and have it placed in his family registry, thus officially recognizing Tokiko as his wife. The aunt from Aoyama, who had sent a letter from the countryside inquiring about the matter, paid a visit to Jūkichi’s house, ostensibly because she was in the neighborhood, and after some small talk, asked, nonchalantly, what had become of Tokiko’s registry.
“I’ll send it off any day now,” he replied. After the aunt departed, Jūkichi removed the document from its envelope and read it. Ōhigashi, the old man who thought life was pain, had acted as the witness to the transfer of the registry, and he had marked his presence with his official stamp.
“Who’d act as a witness for me?” he wondered and tried to think of someone. He called Tokiko to come to look at the document. “I hope you understand. If I register this document, we’ll be married, and you’ll lose your freedom,” Jūkichi declared.
“Freedom? What freedom?” Tokiko asked as she studied what was written.
“You’ll be bound to me by the nation’s laws until you die. Make certain you don’t regret your decision.”
“But I have no choice.”
Placing the document into an envelope, she left the room to mail it, but she was suddenly overcome by doubt. The document itself made her feel secure, but she also experienced a sense of fear and loneliness she had never felt before. In Kōfu, when she had received the telegram from her aunt announcing, “Marriage arrangements complete,” she had also felt fear and loneliness, but these emotions had been joined with feelings of hope and anticipation. Now there was neither hope nor anticipation. She returned to her sewing box and picked up a piece of cloth she had been working on. As if in a daze, she stared blankly out at the garden.
A large camellia blossom had fallen on the dry ground. It was the most variegated and beautiful of the blossoms. All the flowers had fallen from the Japanese rose and bamboo grass, and slender stems were bending under the weight of verdant leaves. Bright sunlight glittered off the verdant foliage. A white butterfly fluttered amid the leaves and disappeared over the rustic fence.
Jūkichi also was gazing at the garden. It already was the middle of May. He could foresee that the rainy season, the heat of summer, fall, and winter would soon pass and that this year, too, would be gone before he knew it. He knew that this year as well would be fruitless. He suddenly felt himself growing old.
Dressed in his everyday clothes, Jūkichi left the house in search of some lively diversion.
After her husband left, Tokiko, on impulse, went out as well. Recently, other than shopping or visits to the public bath, Tokiko had not been out of the house.
She turned the corner at the mailbox where she had deposited so many letters to Kōfu. Eyes downcast, taking side streets to avoid people, Tokiko arrived at a broad avenue. She wanted to follow the street wherever it took her, but she also was concerned about being alone so far from home. Automobiles passed and cavalry officers went by on their horses. Dust from the road was blown up into her face.
Tokiko caught sight of what seemed to be the entrance to a small temple to her right. She had recently heard at the hairdresser’s that there was a temple in the neighborhood that was popular with believers. Perhaps this was the temple. She was moved by an impulse to visit the place. Walking on the stepping-stones, she headed for the glimmering candles set before the Buddha’s altar. Five or six women were fingering their rosaries and making the rounds from the eaves under the tin roof of the temple to the stone of a hundred prayers—a hundred journeys from stone to altar being a form of prayer entreating the Amida Buddha for his blessings. One of the worshipers was a woman in her late teens or early twenties. She was barefoot and dressed in a cheap, dirty, splash-patterned kimono tied with a faded muslin sash. Perhaps it was Tokiko’s imagination, but she thought she could read a great weariness and sadness in the expression of the young woman’s plump, dark-complexioned face.
Tokiko stood and watched the flurry of moving feet as the women hurried back and forth between the stone and the altar, and she was overcome by dark despair. The flickering light from the depths of the Buddhist altar took on a sacredness she had not felt before. Tokiko approached the altar, threw coins in the offering box, and prayed. She prayed for her husband’s good health and that he would come to love her. She felt the impulse to join the other women in their perambulations.
Tokiko waited at home until midnight, but Jūkichi still did not return. She sat next to a standing lamp, listening to the regular breathing of the old woman, and waited. When it came to her diary, she was written out. Leafing through the previous entries, she read the same sort of thing time and again. The sincerity of the repeated phrases moved her to tears.
“I’m not going to keep this diary anymore,” she declared, and roughly slapped it down on a corner of the desk.
X
“How’s she doing?” Mrs. Yazawa inquired, as she always did.
“Little Toki?” Jūkichi answered, imitating Tokiko’s sister’s provincial dialect. “She seems to be getting on well with the maid. They sit in the parlor and talk for hours.”
“That’s nice. She’s getting used to her new home, isn’t she?”
“I wonder,” he replied. “Still, she’s changed. She’s grown more adult, and her provincial accent is disappearing. She’s better spoken.”
“I told you she’d improve. Before you left for Kofu, we were quite worried about you two. You always seemed so dissatisfied.”
“It’s not as though I’m satisfied now,” he responded. True, Tokiko was growing out of her childlike sense of privilege and her provincial speech and mannerisms. She did not irritate him as she once did, but neither would she provide him with the pleasurable excitement he desired. “ ‘There is a natural separation to be observed between men and women, husband and wife.’ Mencius’s wise teaching is certainly relevant in the case of my marriage,” Jūkichi said with a rueful chuckle.
Mrs. Yazawa took the maid aside and asked discreetly whether the couple slept in separate rooms.
“No. But I do feel he treats her like someone’s daughter who’s been entrusted to his care.”
“When they have a child, that will change.”
Mrs. Yazawa no longer asked after Tokiko so persistently. Mr. Yazawa no longer cautioned Jūkichi and instead spoke of the circumstances leading up to Jūkichi’s marriage as if these were old stories of no consequence now.
“When it turned out that Otoku was already engaged, we looked for a replacement and found a likely candidate in the daughter of the president of a hemp-dressing company. But her father had you investigated and when he learned of your conduct with women, he immediately refused the match. That’s when we decided you’d have to be satisfied with Tokiko, and we urged you to accept the match.”
Jūkichi had not heard the story about this prospective match before. Mr. Yazawa told him that the young woman was pretty but that her nose was too large.
“I’ve never behaved in a manner to invite criticism from others. I haven’t had any opportunities to be so dissolute. I’ve never been obsessed with women. First, becau
se I’ve never found them that interesting. But since I’ve been married, I’ve begun to give in to a certain amount of dissolute behavior. Whether this really amounts to licentiousness, I don’t know, but in my heart I feel like I’m becoming a degenerate!” Jūkichi declared, and in the color of his voice something of his debauched mood was apparent.
“Men are such self-centered creatures,” Mrs. Yazawa exclaimed. She was having difficulty in understanding Jūkichi’s reasoning and intentions.
“Still, Tokiko probably won’t leave me now,” he continued. “Strange, isn’t it? I guess she likes the smell of men, even one like me who smells of tobacco smoke.”
The Yazawas now felt free to discuss the marriage with a frankness they had not shown since taking on the role of intermediaries. They did not hesitate to strip Tokiko naked and dissect her in their discussion of her faults.
“I thought being an intermediary was a thankless job. But you make it seem interesting. You learn about everyone’s weaknesses!” Jūkichi commented.
Tokiko stopped reading Virtues of Chaste Young Ladies and instead began reading in secret a copy of Hygiene for Women Only that she had purposely gone out to buy in a shop in the Kagurazaka district. She learned a great many things of which she had never had an inkling before.
“You’ve been looking pale lately,” Jūkichi observed one day to Tokiko.
“Yes. I’m losing weight, too,” she replied, stretching out her arm and examining it. Her arm was not noticeably thinner than before, but she seemed to need to believe it was. “The next-door maid is getting plumper day by day. I’m envious!”
“That’s why you should get more exercise and take better care of yourself. You’re just at the beginning of your life. You have things to look forward to. It would be a shame if you neglected your health.”
“Do you feel sorry for me?” Tokiko seemed starved for such sympathetic words.
“Sure, I feel sorry for you. But now I can’t send you home as a virgin. You’re stuck with me.”
“I do have a choice. I’m your wife,” Tokiko stated emphatically.
Jūkichi studied her face. It was not a lovely face. It struck him as strange that this face should belong to a person he should regard as “my wife.” He made no reply to Tokiko’s statement.
Their conversation ended.
At times, when her husband was out, Tokiko took pleasure in visiting the local temple to worship. She hesitated to take part in the hundred journeys from Buddhist stone to altar. However, she often washed a small stone Buddhist statue. She made a habit of buying sweets at the tea shop within the grounds of the temple and presenting these as snacks for her husband.
Soon a rumor about Tokiko’s frequent visits to the temple was circulating throughout the neighborhood. Jūkichi was unaware of the rumor.
NAGAI KAFŪ
Nagai Kafū (1879–1959) first became known and respected while still a young writer because of his slightly fictionalized, highly personal accounts of his travels in America and France. Throughout his long career, he composed ironic and elegiac stories and essays chronicling the tenuous existence of what he felt still remained of an earlier and elegant Japanese culture amid an ever more populist and tiresome present. An elderly recluse during the Pacific War, Kafū’s disdain for the military mentality made him a hero in postwar Japan.
Kafū’s collection Tales from France (Furansu monogatari) was finished in 1909, but the original publication was censored, presumably because of some erotic episodes. It first was published, in a revised form, in 1915. The collection provided a number of evocative sketches of the country that Kafū so admired and of his own adventures there. “The Mediterranean in Twilight” (Tasogare no chichukai), written on his way home from Europe to Japan, conjures up his nostalgia and also touches on his heart-felt love of Western music.
THE MEDITERRANEAN IN TWILIGHT (TASOGARE NO CHICHŪKAI)
Translated by Mitsuko Iriye
We passed the Gulf of Gascony and proceeded southeast along the shores of Portugal. And when we reached the Spanish coast and entered the Mediterranean, overlooking the land of Morocco and the pure white houses of Tangier to the south and watching the triangular Rock of Gibraltar to the north, I could not help but wish fervently that the ship I was traveling on would somehow be damaged or caused to sink by accident. Then I would be put on board a rescue boat and taken to the land on the other side that was clearly visible and stretching a mere three miles to the north and south. If that happened, I would be able once again to tread on European soil instead of going back to Japan against my will. I would be able to see the pleasure land of Spain, a European country but far removed from the center of its civilization, where men wore flamboyant clothes and played serenades under the windows at night and women, with roses in their black hair, danced and flirted all through the night, wearing mantillas over bare shoulders and bosoms.
The mountain over there that I see now so clearly from this side of the ship—the earth is dry under the scorching sun, there are few trees, and houses with white walls can be seen here and there amid valleys covered only with yellowish grass—if I crossed that mountain, wouldn’t I find myself in the Andalusia celebrated by Musset in his poems? Wouldn’t that be the native place of Carmen about whom Bizet composed that immortal music? Wouldn’t anyone who adores brilliantly colored costumes or passion-filled music and longs for carefree love dream of Spain, the homeland of Don Giovanni?
In that country, where the sun is hot and radiant, love simply means men and women frolicking with abandon and has nothing to do with such killjoys as morality, marriage, or home that people in the north talk about. If you tire of the beauty of the woman you pledged yourself to on the night of the festival, go immediately to the fair in the afternoon and make love to another woman. If she turns out to be a married woman, seduce her by hiding under her window at night and singing “Deh, vieni alla finestra, O mio tesoro!” (“Oh, do come to the window, my love,” from Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni). If you are caught, one sweep of your sword and bloodshed will take care of it. To live for the ephemeral dream of passion that flares up an instant, only to be extinguished in the next moment, must be the way of life in this passionate land. Oh, the tempestuousness of this country’s music, to which young Andalusian maidens, who beat time violently with their hands and feet to the accompaniment of tambourines, clicking castanets in both hands, dance exuberantly as they kick up their multicolored hems. Rapidly accelerating to its climax like a storm, the music and dance dazzle and mesmerize all who listen and watch, and when they suddenly come to an end, one feels as though a beautiful jewel has just been crushed into pieces, flung away, and scattered, making you sigh, belatedly, from exhaustion. Life in this country must be like this music. . . .
Yet the ship moved on, slowly, as if completely unconcerned with my unrealizable wishes, pushing away the water of the strait right and left, and reached far out into the sea. The protruding rock of Gibraltar was rising high in a blazing fire, reflecting the light of the sun that was just then setting behind it. Right in front of it and across the whole stretch of water, houses in Tangier and low-lying mountains in Morocco were changing their color from rose to purple.
By the time the twilight began to fade away, both the mountains and the rock had sunk below the horizon, far away to the west. When, after dinner, I came out to lean again against the railing, all I could see was the wide expanse of the water, whose navy blue color, glistening like velvet, was startlingly different from that of the Atlantic Ocean. But the color of this water, even more than that of the mountains, rivers, or lakes, caused me to indulge in indescribable, sweet daydreams. When I gazed at it, I felt as if I could readily accept as totally natural and reasonable the historical fact that ancient arts developed along the shores of this water, or the myth that the beautiful goddess Venus arose from its purple waves.
Stars began to twinkle. Their beams were sharp, their sizes large, and they gave the impression that they had the exact pentagonal shape
s seen in symbolic paintings. The sky was clear, and its dark blue color was exceedingly deep. The water had the same color as the sky, but the boundary between the two was sharply marked. Even though it was a moonless night, everything was bright beyond description. It seemed as if somewhere in this vast space where one could not discern even a mountain, some appropriate sense of order and harmony reigned. Ah, how exquisite was the night in the Mediterranean! Quite unexpectedly, it called forth in my mind the ancient nude statues with their clearly demarcated contours, the beautiful art of the classical period, and the rows of uniformly trimmed trees in the gardens of Versailles. How I wished my own work could match them! Enveloped in such nocturnal, indefinable melancholy, I could not help ardently wishing that my work would be like one of those brocade curtains that hung solemnly, having been woven perfectly by people touched by the sensations of color, sound, and fragrance.
I think it was in the evening of the second day after our ship entered the Mediterranean. We saw land very far away in the south. It must have been Algeria in North Africa.
When I went out on the deck after dinner, there was not a single wave in the sea in the evening’s calm. Its deep blue surface was glistening even more, like a polished gem, and it seemed as if my face were reflected on it when I looked down from the rail, that of a beautiful young boy. There was not a trace of a single cloud in the endless expanse of the sky. The sky had been the most transparent indigo color under the torrid sun, but now it looked dimmed and opaque, tinged with a pale rosy hue. The blue shimmers of twilight exactly like those I used to see in France were now shedding a gentle and mysterious shadow over everything on the deck—the gangways, railings, cabin walls, and various ropes. It was as if a strange life had been breathed into the lifeboats that had been neatly painted white.