The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature (Modern Asian Literature Series)

by Неизвестный

  ENCHI FUMIKO

  Enchi Fumiko (1905–1986) was the daughter of a famous scholar of the Japanese language, Ueda Kazutoshi, as well as a historian of literature in her own right. Her prose examines the feminine psyche using a knowledge of Japanese classical literature, making her translation into modern Japanese of the great Heian classic The Tale of Genji (Genji monogatari) particularly admired, as are a number of her novels. The story translated here, “Skeletons of Men” (Otoko no hone, 1956), is thematically tied to her most famous novel, The Waiting Years (Onnazaka, 1957). In it, Enchi weaves together several layers of narrative to present the stor(ies) of a manipulative man and the women in his life who are almost overcome with jealousy.

  SKELETONS OF MEN (OTOKO NO HONE)

  Translated by Susan Matisoff

  “Nice sash. Did you find it at Itoki too?” I asked, gazing at the old, heavy brocade obi Mikanagi Shizuko was wearing. A performance of the play Kinuta on the Kanze nō stage had just ended, while in the seat in front of me Shizuko continued jotting with a pencil in a little notebook, apparently drafting a poem.

  “This? You like it?” she asked, still writing.

  “Yes. When did you buy it?”

  Shizuko was a scholar of classical literature and a poet, one of my closest friends. She had a taste for wearing antique dyed goods and often checked out the high-class used clothing shops in the back streets near Asakusa. I supposed this was one of those obi, but I’d come to an overly hasty conclusion.

  “Unfortunately, this isn’t something I bought. It’s a keepsake from my mother. I’d kept it since the time she died, and then last month, on the third anniversary of her death, I remembered it. It’s not the sort of thing to keep tucked away in the bottom of a chest forever. It’s a bit conservative, but since I thought I’d try wearing it some time, I took out the lining. Even though the material is so thick, it had two layers of stiff cotton padding inside . . . so heavy . . . so very heavy.”

  As she spoke, Shizuko looked down and lightly tapped the obi with her fingers to show me.

  “Really this obi wasn’t my mother’s; it belonged to her mother. It’s a second-generation family keepsake. And since it seems to be from when my grandmother was rather young, it’s really a long-lived sash.”

  “A hundred years, goodness, could it be?” I said, fingering the edge of the bow, tied small and tight on Shizuko’s slender back. Tiny chrysanthemums and maples were embroidered densely on the navy blue background, and the brocade had a firm, yet pliant, feel. It was attractive and filled me with a sense of happiness tinged with nostalgia.

  “It’s probably from around the late 1870s. Nothing much by way of an antique, but old for something handed down within a family. Somehow when clothing gets to be this old, it almost seems to take on a life of its own. I’ve been thinking about quite a lot of things lately. I’ve been manipulated by the spirit of this sash.”

  Seeing my dubious expression when she mentioned the spirit of the sash, Shizuko smiled at me and said, “Later.” The story I am about to write is what Shizuko revealed to me, bit by bit, as we ate supper in a restaurant off the Ginza on our way home that evening.

  On a leaden afternoon in December while relaxing after assembling a selection of poems for a magazine, Shizuko took the heavy obi into her late husband’s studio and sat on the sofa. Using scissors she began undoing the stitching of the seam in the heavy cloth. Over the years, the finely stitched silk thread had become absorbed into the cloth as if it were a part of the brocade itself. The only way to unravel it was to lift it stitch by stitch with the points of the scissors. Simply to unravel about two feet near the center of the seam took quite a while.

  Rain had continued on and off since morning, and as she worked, the sky became even darker and more oppressive. After clearing away the unraveled threads, Shizuko opened the window a little for ventilation and found that rain, so fine it was invisible, had started to soak the leaves of the yatsude plants. If it went on like this, dusk would arrive without the day ever having become light, she thought, as she felt about with her hand thrust inside the partially undone obi. She grasped an inside corner and, nursing the stiff material along, pulled the right half inside out, lining and all. The colored threads on the densely embroidered background of the outside rose to the surface on the inside; their deep reds, creamy yellows, and purples, like satin, provided an unexpectedly gaudy luster. Once she had pulled the other half out the same way, the entire sash was inside out, just as when it was sewed. Now she could remove its lining.

  Then Shizuko noticed the tip of what appeared to be thin wastepaper poking out from between the two layers of lining where the stitching had been removed. Idly pulling it out, she discovered that what had seemed a single sheet was actually the corner of a surprisingly long letter on rolled-up paper.

  Startled, Shizuko picked it up and, in that instant, suddenly felt that this was probably the last testament of her grandmother Ritsu. Ritsu surely had held many secrets that she did not wish to reveal to others but couldn’t bear to keep stored away only in her heart. Yet when Shizuko looked hesitantly at the rolled letter, she saw written on the outside in a faltering hand the words “Chise’s blood letter.” This evidently was Ritsu’s handwriting.

  “Blood letter” was a strange expression, and Shizuko hesitated for a moment, but the letter was hardly something to be tossed out without examination. Contrary to her expectations, the inner contents were written in ordinary ink. The text was done in formal calligraphy and in an old-fashioned, unpunctuated epistolary style that was quite difficult to read. Moreover, the ink wasn’t very dark, making matters even harder. Shizuko read the letter, unconsciously mumbling while taking in the meaning little by little as she pieced the words together.

  The phraseology was neither testament nor memoir. Clearly it was a woman’s love letter to some man. It seemed to have been written in agony by a woman who was trying to rekindle the flames of passion in the breast of a man who had cast her aside. Ceaselessly she protested her affection, but with threatening phrases interspersed, like stabs of a dagger: “If you do not answer this letter, I do not know what will become of me” or “Suppose I become even more upset and say or do unthinkable things: that might damage your status.”

  It wasn’t clear just what the position of the letter’s author, Chise, might have been—a wife or a mistress—but in any case it appeared that she was also involved with some other man. Something written toward the end had made Ritsu append the notation “blood letter”:

  So that my words might penetrate your icy heart, I secretly cut myself in the thigh and squeezed out some blood, dissolved it in with the ink, and wrote this letter. I could have written the full length of this in blood alone, but I figured that might put you off and keep you from reading right through, beginning to end. So I chose this inconspicuous method. If you think this is a lie, look at the letter with bright noonday sun shining through, and you’ll recognize the color of blood mixed in with the ink. Since you were raised in a samurai family, you’re not likely to confuse blood for rouge.

  When Shizuko read these lines, she felt as if a freezing hand had clasped her wrist. She didn’t actually hold it to the light, and in the cold, rainy twilight, the very shapes of the characters themselves were scarcely visible.

  Shizuko hadn’t any idea of the identity of Chise, and yet she did have some understanding of the circumstances leading her grandmother Ritsu to hide this letter away inside her obi. Ritsu had often confided in her daughter about the lifelong torment she suffered because of her husband’s love affairs and self-indulgence. And the daughter had eventually passed these stories on to her own grown daughter, Shizuko.

  Ritsu’s husband, Sagane Yoshimitsu, had been a samurai receiving a small stipend from the Hosokawa domain; but at the beginning of the modern era he had come up to Tokyo and become a government official. Apparently rather smart and courageous, he became a high official in the Metropolitan Police Department after holding a sequence o
f posts in the provinces. In the period just before the promulgation of the constitution, he prospered as a gentleman-official. He also managed to acquire sufficient wealth to live out his life in luxury following his retirement.

  Considering that the better part of the Sagane family wealth was in Tokyo real estate, it seemed likely that he had taken advantage of his position while a government official, buying up much of the property at low rates. Of course Sagane wasn’t the only one who did this; this scheme for amassing wealth seemed to be employed by virtually every member of the newly risen class of government authorities.

  Sagane was one of the so-called nouveau riche bureaucrats who had risen from rural samurai families. As he was handsome, a bracing speaker, and shrewd in financial matters, he had been involved in many amorous affairs ever since he was a young man. In his own household he was extremely self-centered and an incorrigible husband for his wife, Ritsu, who, like him, had grown up in Kyushu.

  A high-class Shimbashi district geisha had apparently become so attracted to him that she offered her services gratis, and the principal of a private school, a woman scholar of exceptional education for those times, was constantly writing love poems for him. Ritsu was confronted right and left with rivals with whom she could not compete. It took her immense effort to avoid arousing the ire of her autocratic husband.

  For a time Yoshimitsu had been intimate with a married woman, though her precise status wasn’t clear. Even though she had a spouse, it evidently took great efforts on Yoshimitsu’s part to sever their connections, and even Ritsu knew only half the story. Perhaps Chise, the author of this letter, was that woman. Maybe she had sent her letter in an attempt to get through to Yoshimitsu, charging with blood the futility of her unquenchable love.

  It wasn’t clear just what had become of their relationship, but as Yoshimitsu suffered no social setback, the resentment felt by the author of the letter seemed to have finally settled down to her simply crying herself to sleep at night. With a bitter smile, Shizuko reflected that the heartless malice of a man pursued by a woman he’s grown tired of—his stubborn coldness, his comical haste to take flight—is a scene from the human drama that had remained utterly unchanged from past to present.

  “So, what did you do with the letter? Did you sew it back into the obi?”

  Shizuko shook her head vigorously in response to my question.

  After reading it, she left it overnight in a drawer of the desk in her husband’s studio, but she felt so constantly unsettled thinking of it that the next day she made up her mind, took it out into the back garden, and burned it along with some fallen leaves.

  The old, thin rolled paper turned to ashes all too soon, leaving no trace of the woman’s passionate attachment that had been hidden away in the lining of the obi for several decades. But before burning it, Shizuko had looked at it, letting the bright daylight shine through, and just as the letter said, there was a faded red color faintly mixed in with the ink. The traces were particularly clear at places where the brush had started to run dry after writing several characters continuously.

  Ritsu had kept these words by her body throughout her life, sewn into her sash; and Shizuko was moved to reflect more deeply on her grandmother’s emotions than on the letter writer’s feelings of frustration.

  Ritsu ended her days still married to Yoshimitsu, dying some ten years before him. But from their middle years, they were husband and wife in name alone. Yoshimitsu’s personal needs were taken care of by his young mistress Shiga, and the couple treated each other as virtual strangers.

  Yoshimitsu had two mistresses, both of them living in the family home. At some point one of them got married and went off elsewhere. Yoshimitsu was more than thirty years her senior, but Shiga, who had been purchased as an innocent young girl, served him as the only man throughout her whole life and remained in his household until his death.

  Yoshimitsu had terrible fears of deteriorating health stemming from his youthful excesses. Starting in middle age he rarely ventured out, carrying on the life of a feudal lord in his grand mansion. It was an existence in which a woman like Shiga—both servant and nurse—was utterly indispensable.

  When Shizuko was a little girl, taken along by her mother to her grandfather’s house at New Year’s time, the mistress whom everyone referred to as “O-Shiga san” would appear, busying herself with Shizuko’s care, helping her change clothes or preparing her food. Thinking back on it, Shiga was probably not yet forty then. But she was sensitive to cold and wore heavily padded clothes that rounded her back. And she tended to push her hands wearily into the ends of her sleeves. Shiga always created a tired, dull impression, and in the child’s eyes, there was nothing beautiful about her.

  Grandfather Yoshimitsu always sat facing the front of the parlor, supported by a back rest and with his legs wrapped in a blanket. Winter or summer, this was his unchanging posture. By his side he kept an array of boric acid eye-wash, mouthwash, a spittoon, and the like, and he was able to supply all his needs just as he sat there.

  With his high cheekbones and long face, he resembled Yamagata Aritomo;1 and there was a certain haughtiness in the way he consciously withdrew from his surroundings and remained in one place all day long, unmoving. His wife and his mistress, his sons and his servants meekly obeyed the orders of their aging master. The grandfather acted kindly enough toward his daughter’s child, Shizuko, whom he saw only occasionally. He would give her things she specially liked to eat, buy her gifts, and make a fuss over her. But with her child’s heart, Shizuko was never able to feel at ease with the frightening qualities she sensed behind her grandfather’s apparent gentleness. She never knew any real affection for him.

  Shizuko became interested in her grandfather long after his death. When she considered how gloomy and constrained the lives of both Ritsu and Shiga had been in the environment of Yoshimitsu’s forceful exertion of his own will, she felt she couldn’t just forget all about Yoshimitsu. The stories of the Sagane family that had been passed down to Shizuko were all from Ritsu’s point of view. But for Shiga, too, life must have been stifling. No matter how affectionately Yoshimitsu treated Shiga, and no matter how distant the relationship between him and Ritsu, Shiga endured many long years with Ritsu, the legal wife, like a heavy weight pressing down on her head. To the child Shizuko’s undiscerning eyes, Shiga had seemed like a moody, exhausted old cat. Perhaps that was a true portrait of her.

  Shizuko had no way of knowing how the scars caused by Chise’s love for Yoshimitsu might have healed in later years. But it was an absolute certainty that Ritsu and Shiga experienced the smoldering fires of a kind of living hell on account of Yoshimitsu. Yoshimitsu had grown up in Kyushu with its powerful traditions of male dominance and female suppression. He was probably quite unaware of the suffering he caused by keeping two women under one roof in a state of constant contention. On the contrary, he may well have taken undue pleasure in sensing the way they effectively kept each other in check.

  Neither Ritsu nor Shiga, nor even Shizuko’s mother, opposed Yoshimitsu’s lack of compassion. But his granddaughter Shizuko had begun to feel that his conduct was unforgivable. The evil of this man, whose treatment of women was so devoid of sympathy, who would so easily break a woman, and the dispositions of the women who learned nothing from that treatment but went on loving the man all the while they were being broken—both images tugged simultaneously at Shizuko like an insoluble puzzle.

  When Shizuko was a girl, her mother was rather sickly, and during her frequent illnesses her grandmother Ritsu often came to stay and would sleep with Shizuko. At those times, as they lay in bed together, Ritsu would tell Shizuko old-fashioned tales like the story of Ko Atsumori or Matsuyama Kagami. Among these tales was the story of Ishidōmaru’s father before he entered the priesthood.

  Ishidōmaru’s father was called Katō Saemon Shigeuji, and he was the governor of Kyushu. He had two beautiful women, his wife and his mistress, living together in his house. Katō Saemon Shigeuji w
as delighted by how well the two of them got along together.

  But one day, as he was strolling about in his garden, he noticed the scent of aloes emanating from the women’s quarters. Then he heard an uncanny noise, and when he crept up and peered inside, he saw his wife and mistress together. They had fallen into a deep sleep while playing a game of go, one leaning on her armrest, the other face down on the game board. Their black hair was standing on end, and the tips had turned into serpents that glared at each other with inflamed eyes. The serpents were undulating, intertwined, spitting flame-like tongues and biting at each other.

  As he looked at them, Shigeuji realized the evil of his ways and recognized the terrible hidden jealousy between the women. Immediately he abandoned his household and entered the priesthood.

  This was probably a story that grew out of Hinayana Buddhism or from some Chinese legend. And when Shizuko thought back on it after she was grown, she imagined the emotions Ritsu had felt in telling this story to her granddaughter. She could envision how, just as an author introduces emotions into a plot, Ritsu, for all her self-control, was including her own emotions in the telling of this story.

  Through the blind attachment of the two women, Katō Saemon came to recognize the truth of impermanence. That was the plot of a religious tale, and it was affecting enough, but most men, in real life, wouldn’t actually take up priestly practice because of something like seeing women’s hair turned into snakes. Certainly Sagane Yoshimitsu had been one those hard-hearted fellows. Still, the women also seemed to have harbored abundant foolish desires to dance like puppets manipulated by the strings of this nasty fellow’s conniving heart.