by Неизвестный
In a low voice, as if he were joking, Kenkichi said: “If you would just once be nice to this old man, I might lend you the money.” O-Yasu, giggling, replied, “Yes, I will.”
Two or three days later, O-Yasu had neatly coaxed fifty yen out of Kenkichi. But she hadn’t particularly enjoyed being “nice” to the old man.
Shortly afterward, Kenkichi started to build a house for himself next to the plant shelves. Apart from hiring a helper to carry the wood and tiles, he did everything himself, from the kneading of the mud for the walls to the splitting of the bamboo for the laths. It was all done by hand, right down to the shutters and translucent paper doors. He’d also installed opaque paper doors. The villagers who came to watch were startled by the morning glory that he trained to grow up the wall of the parlor, and by the privy hole that he made through the wall to the cesspool. Although one could say it was the laziness of an old man, it was surely the first time that a privy had been built into the parlor, the gossip ran. Even if it was all right in winter, in summer it would be a breeding place for flies and maggots. If nothing else, the stench alone would be unendurable, it was thought. In winter and summer, however, Kenkichi stuck twigs of cedar in among the tendrils of the morning glory. Every morning, he would change the fragrant-smelling sprigs, so that the cedar was always fresh and verdant among the blossoms.
O-Yasu could not tell how much money old man Kenkichi had. He didn’t seem to have a post-office savings account, and she hadn’t heard of any dealings he’d had with the bank. For about two years, O-Yasu had continued her peculiar relationship with Kenkichi. Little by little, though, the times had turned harsh. Losing her job as a waitress, O-Yasu had left the Fishing Hole and gone to find work in Osaka.
At the end of the year before the year the war ended, Yōjirō of the Fishing Hole died of a heart attack. His wife, Tomi, a longtime sufferer from rheumatism, let the place run down after his death. It was taken over by a tobacco factory in Awa-Ikeda as a hostelry for its employees. At the end of the war, the proprietress, Tomi, also died, and her adopted daughter Chiyo inherited the Fishing Hole. As a woman who had gone to Tokyo and worked for a while at a restaurant in Tsukiji, Chiyo had a ready eye for the opportunities of postwar economic conditions. Having a boat built so that customers could fish for freshwater trout, she remodeled the parlor in the latest Tokyo style. And over time, she hired two or three waitresses. —One day, the second year after the war, O-Yasu suddenly reappeared in the village of Hakuchi. Her color had darkened, and she had lost a lot of weight. One would not have recognized her as the O-Yasu of the past.
O-Yasu was surprised to learn that old man Kenkichi was still alive, hale and hearty. Remembering their intimacy of the past, she went to visit him in his solitary house.
Even though his eyes were dim and he had grown hard of hearing, Kenkichi seemed extremely lively. Black hairs were still mingled among the gray. In the middle of the room, a table had been placed with an inexpensive little terrestrial globe on it. His bed, as always, was unmade, and cedar twigs were still stuck in among the morning glories. From the ceiling, entirely blackened with soot, an electric cord dangled, white with accumulated dust. The plant shelves were even bigger than they’d been in the past. Also the hedge had been replaced by a board fence.
From the stonemason’s out front, unchanged from the past, came the sound of his mallet as he chiseled his gravestones. When he saw O-Yasu, Kenkichi stood up and came over from the far side of the table. For a moment, he simply stared at her. Perhaps because his memories of O-Yasu, whom he hadn’t seen in four years, had become tenuous, he didn’t seem to recognize her at first. In a loud voice, O-Yasu announced: “It’s Yasu. The Yasu who went away to Osaka. Old man, do you remember who I am?” She was shouting. Finally Kenkichi— did he remember her?—grinning ear from ear, put on a pot of tea for her. Even though it was a cold day in February, the smell of the privy hovered in the room. How can he stand living in such a place, O-Yasu thought. Even the tea he served her smelled of the privy.
Even when O-Yasu told him how her rented house had burned down in an air raid, Kenkichi merely said, “Oh, is that so?” He was the same old disinterested Kenkichi she’d known during the war. “How old are you now?” Kenkichi asked her. “Oh, I’m already an old woman. I’m twenty-six.” Indeed, O-Yasu seemed to have aged. Since she had never been good-looking, even during her young hey-day of fair-skinned plumpness, O-Yasu had looked older than her age. Now that she had grown lean and dark complected, she looked like a mature woman of thirty. She had made up her lips crimson red and was wearing Western-style clothes. But they were the artless attire of a country bus conductor.
Stepping up onto the step into the house, O-Yasu advanced toward the table. On this side of it was something that looked like a half-carved memorial tablet. It was an impressive piece of work. O-Yasu remembered hearing stories from Kenkichi about how in the old days he had made memorial tablets out of wooden clogs and sold them.
Afterward, O-Yasu resumed her former relationship with Kenkichi. Now, however, rather than the full-fledged sexual intercourse of the past, Kenkichi simply stroked the soles of O-Yasu’s feet. In her waitress days, O-Yasu had slept with many men. But perhaps because she had never been made love to in such a strange way, for the first time in her life she had the curious feeling that she was being deprived of her virginity. There even were times when Kenkichi licked the soles of O-Yasu’s feet. Was this what was called an eccentric habit? Whatever, it was the most that Kenkichi was capable of.
Occasionally, O-Yasu would coax spending money out of Kenkichi. Now that she had returned to her native village of Hakuchi and had settled down in her old nest, perhaps because of the waters of the Yoshino River, O-Yasu’s skin became fair and white again. Little by little, she put on weight. Kenkichi was very fond of O-Yasu. He even thought that when the summons from hell came, it would be good to leave all his shelves of azaleas to O-Yasu. But sometimes he would change his mind. When he went to bed with the lamp brightly burning and woke up in a fright in the middle of the night, O-Yasu would seem very dear to him, and he would think that he should leave her not only the azaleas but all the things he’d hidden away as well. But then when dawn came, he would completely forget about O-Yasu and not feel like leaving her anything. Recently, when Kenkichi lay awake in bed, he had often gotten up and worked on his own memorial tablet. —One night, this kind of thing happened. It was shortly after O-Yasu had come back from Osaka. The two having gotten together again, she would sneak over at bedtime, spend a little time with Kenkichi, and return to the Fishing Hole. Late on one of those nights, Kenkichi was awakened by knocking on the rain shutters. Thinking that O-Yasu had come back, he listened intently. The shutters were smoothly slid all the way open. There, by the translucent paper door that opened on to the veranda, someone seemed to be standing and peering inside. Kenkichi lay absolutely still. The paper door smoothly slid open. A figure in a red kimono—he could not tell whether it was a man or a woman—glided past the head of the bed. Maybe this is the messenger from hell, come to fetch me, Kenkichi thought.
The figure was looking backward, so that Kenkichi could not see its face. The skirts of its kimono trailed far behind it. There was a rustling sound—pasa, pasa—as of silk. Although Kenkichi was not in the least bit frightened, he shut his eyes tightly. The sounds the figure made as it moved about cut through the stagnant air of the room. There was one sound—ku-u, ku-u—as if it were clearing its throat. Something on the table fell over with a clatter. Soon the apparition began to walk around on top of Kenkichi’s bedding. Although it was weightless, walking on the quilt with no pressure, the sensation of being walked on made Kenkichi go all numb. From outside the house—was it raining?— there was a streaming sound, za-a, za-a, like a torrential downpour. Kenkichi opened his eyes. It was pitch dark.
With the lantern out, it was as if he’d been dragged into the depths of a bottomless swamp. It was a weird, scary feeling. There was a sound as if someone were sewing a
tatami mat. Kenkichi, burrowing into his bedcovers, prayed to the Buddha for forgiveness. His breath seemed about to stop. He had the feeling that any minute now the ghost would crawl into the bed alongside him. Kenkichi remembered the woman for whose death he had been responsible forty years ago. It was as if the spirit of the woman with whom he had failed to die in the sea off Matsushima Island had come for him. After the woman’s death, Kenkichi hadn’t felt the slightest affection for her memory. Until the moment of their attempted love-suicide, as if driven to it, he had thought of nothing but dying. But once he had survived, it was unpleasant even to think about the woman.
The next morning, Kenkichi could not for the life of him decide whether the apparition of the night before had been a ghost or a dream. Going over to the Fishing Hole, he tried asking the women there if it had rained last night, but they all agreed that it had not. There did not seem to have been any power failure. Saying it must have been an evil spirit after all, Kenkichi asked Chiyo to let O-Yasu come and stay with him for a few nights. Smiling, Chiyo summoned O-Yasu in a loud voice.
“Please go and take care of the old man. He says he feels lonely unless you’re there.”
Inasmuch as nobody envied her her relationship with Kenkichi, O-Yasu felt embarrassed about it. From that night, her bedcovers in her arms, she went to stay with Kenkichi. But her co-workers all laughed at her behind her back. Poor Yasu, they said, she has to keep Old Man Piss Pot company.
But even O-Yasu could stick it out at Kenkichi’s place for only four or five nights. Kenkichi had taken to intoning the nenbutsu in bed, invariably in the middle of the night. Abruptly getting out of bed, stark naked, he would grope his way over to the table and sit down in front of it. His eyes heavy lidded with sleep, he would mutter some syllables of the prayer formula. The old man’s nakedness reminded O-Yasu of a skeleton. The thin, dried-out, yellowish brown skin was no more than a bag for his bones. Even more pathetic, the sad old testicles that hung down between his thighs like a dirty scrap of cloth seemed comical to O-Yasu. She gazed vaguely at the naked old man seated in the formal prayer posture. There even were wrinkles on his stomach, on his chest. His shoulders seemed hung up like a bone rack from which the rest of the body was suspended. Folded under him, his legs, nothing but skin and bones, left an opening between the emaciated thighs. Wouldn’t he catch his death of cold, O-Yasu wondered.
Slowly getting to his feet, Kenkichi took down the sacred picture from the ornamental alcove and stroked the wall. Getting out of bed, O-Yasu held him in her arms as she gathered his nightclothes around him. —Four or five days later, making it her excuse that the room reeked of the privy, O-Yasu refused to go any more to Kenkichi’s.
She didn’t tell anyone about his getting up out of bed stark naked in the middle of the night to pray. In her heart of hearts, she thought that the old man was not long for this world. That was the kind of feeling she had about him.
Time passed. It was May.
Word came from his relatives in Iyo that Masa san of the barber shop had been repatriated from Siberia. Today was the day that he was due to arrive in Awa-Ikeda. Given leave from the proprietress Chiyo, O-Yasu had dolled herself up and was on her way to welcome him.
Kenkichi had a broad smile on his face. And yet . . . O-Yasu, having merrily primped herself like this, did not give him a good feeling. If she were to marry the repatriated Masa san, his own relationship with O-Yasu would be over. Already there were not even memories to console him.
“You’re certainly made up to kill. . . .”
“Yes. Today’s the day of Masa san’s homecoming. . . .”
“Are you happy about it?”
“Happy? Of course I’m happy. It’s a matter of human feeling.”
Not saying anything, Kenkichi had gone out to the rows of plant shelves and was examining the hearts of the flowers. “Old man,” O-Yasu, as if dazzled, called out. “What?” “Come over here.” There was a flirtatious note in her loud summons. Sulkily, Kenkichi came back to the veranda. O-Yasu thought for a moment, and then, putting her lips to Kenkichi’s ear, said: “Masa san got dyed red, so I don’t know whether I’m marrying him or not.” Kenkichi did not understand what O-Yasu meant by “got dyed red.” On his terrestrial globe, the territory of Russia was a rose pink color. He couldn’t tell what Masa san had been up to getting himself dyed red. Kenkichi had never even met Masa san. “He’s come back with radical ideas, so they say it’ll be better if we just leave things as they are for the time being. Even so, Masa san is a good person. I like him. They say he was in the southern part of Siberia, in a place with some tongue-twisting name, like Krasnobodusk. . . . I’m told he had a photograph of me with him. That made me want to go and welcome him. Until I see him, I won’t know whether or not we’re getting married. I’m already a disreputable old maid, so it doesn’t matter who I marry. But if Masa san says he doesn’t mind, I’m thinking I might marry him. . . .” Puffing on his Japanese pipe, its tiny bowl stuffed with shredded tobacco, Kenkichi thought about Masa san’s “radical ideas.” He didn’t understand what was meant by the term, but he supposed it might be something like the hot blood of youth. Whatever it was, it was all right. Just like a river, the hot blood of life flowed rapidly, a never-failing stream. That vigor would eventually wear away, weather away into an aged, smelly creature like himself. Yet even so, in the faraway past, even I had hot blood in my veins, Kenkichi thought. I haven’t passed through this world without doing anything. Back in the old days, when he was a public works contractor and the money was coming in like nobody’s business, his student houseboy had often recited Chinese poems for Kenkichi. “The sagacious horse, returning home, now gallops, now flies. . . .” Man’s life passed like the shadow of a bird. Even the hot blood of youth soon cooled into age. Under the watchful eyes of his wife and children, a man became a money-grubbing captive in the prison of domesticity. Finally, his clear purposes fallen into confusion, he died. . . . That was the story of life. No doubt “radical ideas” and hot blood were different somehow, but it was no great matter. Kenkichi just couldn’t accept the way that O-Yasu had gotten herself all gussied up. Didn’t she feel any nostalgia for the truly human relationship they had developed, the indescribably refined intimacy and absence of constraint? With an old person’s willfulness, Kenkichi grew angry at O-Yasu.
For her part, O-Yasu remembered that night when she had seen the old man naked, skinny, a mere skeleton. She’d been shocked by the dirty thing between his thighs.
O-Yasu took pleasure in imagining what kind of person the as-yet-unseen Masa had become. Just the thought that he was a man who had kept her photograph under the distant skies of Siberia made her heart dance. If she remembered correctly, this year Masa san would be twenty-eight. Although he had a solid, squarely built physique, Masa san’s fingers were soft and cold.
“Old man, I’m going now. I’ll be back.” Kenkichi pinched the brim of his ancient straw hat. O-Yasu wanted unbearably to be on her way. Life is short, but there are many things in the heart, a proverb said. Kenkichi could not bring himself to give up O-Yasu. Had even taking care of the azaleas become a tedious chore? From some time back, a hornet had been hovering about the flower shelves with its peculiar high-pitched drone. If the stamens and pistils were damaged, the flower would soon wither away. Going around to the back of the house, Kenkichi brought out his bamboo broom. Swishing it, he chased away the hornet dancing over the flowers. The hornet, a burnished golden color, vanished into the bright sky. When Kenkichi stared up at the sky, from out of nowhere, like a flung pebble, another hornet dive-bombed the flowers, leveling off just above them. Brandishing the broom, Kenkichi drove the hornet away with several brisk passes. But this time, some pure white flowers went flying, too. With a violent clatter, one of the unglazed earthenware pots toppled from the shelf and smashed into pieces on the ground. It was a flower that had had two or three days of life left. Of the variety of azalea called “Double Phoenix,” a large flower like a lily, it bloomed like a
flowering of sea spray. Getting down on his hands and knees, Kenkichi gathered up the scattered flower petals. The hornet continued to circle slowly above the flower shelf. Somewhere a turtledove was singing. Clutching the flower petals, Kenkichi stayed there on the ground, without getting up.
HIRABAYASHI TAIKO
Hirabayashi Taiko (1905–1972) began her writing career in 1926 as a member of the anarchist movement. Then, in 1937 and 1938 she was imprisoned because of her associations with the Communist Party (although she was never a member herself ), and she contracted tuberculosis in jail. With the end of the war and an improvement in her health, Hirabayashi was able to begin writing again. Her later works are generally autobiographical and often critical of society and government. In 1946 the adoption by Hirabayashi and her husband of his younger brother’s daughter provided the background to “Demon Goddess” (Kishimojin, 1946), the work translated here.
The title of the story is based on the legend of Kishimojin (Kishibojin), an ogress who devoured children. The Buddha tried to reason with Kishimojin, pointing out that as the mother of ten thousand children herself, she should understand the love of a parent for a child. When she still did not stop, the Buddha kidnapped her youngest and favorite child and hid him in his begging bowl. Finally Kishimojin repented her ways, becoming the deity of safe delivery and the guardian of children.
DEMON GODDESS (KISHIMOJIN)
Translated by Rebecca Copeland
“Just as wide as it is short! What curious things children wear.” Keiko scrutinized the garment for the first time as she undressed Yoshiko. That morning when changing the child out of her nightgown, she had mistakenly put the little dress on backward, letting the girl out to play like that.