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

by Неизвестный

  “You don’t mean to tell me that there’s a pocket on the back of that dress!” The wife next door had sounded the alarm from where she knelt gathering greens for the morning’s soup.

  “Oh dear! Ha, ha, ha!” Keiko had no choice but to laugh. Yet she felt a fissure had opened in her heart, allowing a glimpse into her feelings. She was more than a little embarrassed.

  Unforeseen circumstances had brought Yoshiko into her life. Although Keiko had accepted the little girl with open arms, the suddenness of the child’s arrival had left her little time to prepare. She lacked a mother’s basic knowledge about children’s clothing, and she had no ideas about child rearing. In fact, it would hardly be an exaggeration to say that Keiko was like a blank sheet of paper as yet unmarked by maternal love. Each new movement that this small creature made, each new expression, came to her as a fresh discovery. A spark of wonder would ignite in her heart—just a brief flash really, the kind made by striking flints, but a spark nonetheless—and this thrilled Keiko.

  Keiko took Yoshiko’s dress by the hem and pulled it over the little girl’s head. Before she picked up the warm washcloth to scrub the child from head to toe, she absentmindedly squeezed the girl’s arms and patted her thighs. The soft, supple skin on Yoshiko’s arms and legs reminded Keiko of the flesh of calves and lambs. She recalled the delicate, almost insubstantial flavor of their meat. Keiko had been raised with animals; they had been part of her life ever since she could remember. Now, whenever she tried to understand children, she found it most expedient to think of them in terms of animal young.

  Yoshiko squirmed and squealed so happily under Keiko’s touch that she very nearly wet herself. Finally, when she could stand the tickling no longer, she shouted, “I’m cold!”

  “Oh? Well then, let’s get started.”

  Keiko unfolded the warm cloth, and holding the girl’s fruitlike face in one hand, began to wash her with the other. The child’s sparkling eyes were more lustrous than the finest, most highly polished mirror. They were pretty, Keiko reasoned, because being still brand-new, they had not reflected much of humanity. Her tiny nipples were like summer grapes. Keiko imagined how the glands and nerves, as slender as silk threads, were sleeping inside, ripe with the promise of bloom. Those perky little buds would not alter their shape but swell to maturity like pumpkins on the vine.

  The child’s belly button was dewy and soft and seemed to suggest that the point of connection between mother and child had not yet withered and dried. It was not dead but was growing still with a life of its own, separate from the girl’s body. Keiko was compelled to recall her own raisin of a belly button. She felt that it spoke vividly of the distance now between herself and her own mother.

  When she had finished washing Yoshiko, she pulled the dress back over her head. Yoshiko hopped off toward the living room on one foot. Her pink cheeks glistened in the sunlight that filled the blue sky and poured in through the window.

  From the very first, Keiko had been aware that the eyes she focused on Yoshiko were almost too unclouded. Most mothers are myopic when it comes to their own children; they are as nearsighted as a barnyard hen. Maternal instinct spews forth a fog that blurs everything in sight. Keiko could not help but laugh at this myopia, yet at the same time she yearned to make it hers. Suppose a child were carelessly to relieve himself on the floor, right there by the dinner table. All the adults would scowl in disgust, but the child’s mother would no doubt blurt out proudly, “My, what a healthy stool! And such good color!” Keiko found the prospect of ever becoming such a mother terrifying . . . but also appealing. Even so, it seemed her vision was just too powerful, too clear to permit her to be pulled out to that foggy sea.

  How does love grow? The only point of reference Keiko had was the love she shared with her husband, even though the relationship between a man and a woman could hardly be compared with that between a mother and child. She and her husband, Yoshizo, had come together twenty years ago for no particular reason and without so much as the slightest pressure. Like a lock and key they had fit smoothly together, a single unit, and thus had plunged into the sea of love, a sea far deeper than any mere ocean.

  The more sophisticated a lock’s inner mechanisms are, the easier it is to close. So it was with Keiko and Yoshizo. An impartial observer would no doubt claim that a variety of circumstances had led them to each other. But it would be difficult to determine who was first attracted to whom, who pushed and who pulled. The participants themselves could recall only a sudden bolt of lightning. When they had come to their senses, they already were deep at sea.

  There had been no lightning between Keiko and Yoshiko. Even so, whenever she stroked the little girl’s short silky hair, Keiko would tell herself that this was no cause for concern. She knew from experience that like all things in life, human relationships take form through one of two processes: the slow process, like the path up a gently sloping hill, and the sudden process, a sharp spurt of water. She wondered whether the love she shared with Yoshiko wasn’t taking the slow path up the gentle slope. Her love for Yoshiko and her love for her husband were of different colors, different shapes. And that was as it should be, Keiko felt.

  To tell the truth, when she was young, Keiko had ventured down the rainbow paths her dreams had unfurled. She had struck out bravely over fields and mountains where no one else had gone, living the fullest breadth of a woman’s life.

  Once, she had fallen ill. Her lover had been thrown in jail, and she herself had ended up in a home for the indigent. She remembered laying her head on the hard pillow and weeping hot tears. Then again there had been a time when, with the piety of a magician seeking to gain all by casting all away, she had taken advantage of the nihilism sweeping the country with its darkness and des-pair, handling the men dealt to her by fate as if they were so many cards. Emboldened by her pose, she had pushed open the doors of a great bank, where even men had faltered, and had demanded money that by rights was not hers to have. At that point she felt the same thirst for life that Sophia Perovskaya must have felt.1 She, a simple Oriental woman, had accomplished without a moment’s fear what the great Western philosopher had longed for when he said: “I want to experience ten thousand lifetimes in the course of one.”2

  But Keiko was now nearing forty and, with it, the crest of life. This was not to suggest that the spring of womanhood that had once gushed within her was soon to run dry. Yet Keiko could hear a fervent voice telling her: “You have lived the breadth of a woman’s life, now plumb its depths with similar passion.” It was just at this point, just as Keiko stood at the crossroads of indecision, that Yoshiko had entered her life, filling the void.

  When she was younger, insensitive people would tell her that she should adopt a child from some family overburdened with offspring. Sensing an ulterior motive at work, she would turn to the person and say, “Really? Well, I don’t know. My house is so small, where do you suppose I could keep it? Do you think I could keep it out in the yard?”

  But Keiko had left that perverse, affected nature of hers far behind. Now, like an oyster that diligently transforms into a pearl whatever foreign object has been thrust into its shell, Keiko was determined to devote herself to Yoshiko. And yet a foreign object is, after all, a foreign object.

  It had been Keiko’s idea to place a little futon between hers and her husband’s where Yoshiko could sleep. When she first told Yoshizo of her plan, his face lit up like a common fishmonger’s, just as Keiko knew it would, and he began to pontificate on sleeping “snug as bugs in a rug.” Keiko had known what to expect, but even so she could not help but turn away, her face puckered with distaste. These all were new experiences for her, and she responded to them much as if she were a blank sheet of paper suddenly splashed with ink. She had wanted to channel her emotions into a mental image of the three of them sleeping together, before Yoshizo had launched into his hackneyed exposition of “bugs in rugs!” How should she judge the sensibility of the person who had first coined this phrase? Was
the phrase meant to be so ridiculously domestic? Or was it the exact description of a sweetly beguiling scene? Keiko thought about it briefly and then came up with a version that best answered her needs.

  The tiny household she shared with her husband was not really any different from those of other families in the surrounding tenements. And yet when she spread their futons out side by side to sleep “snug as bugs,” just as the saying had it, Keiko felt strangely awkward, as if embarrassed by her actions. And it wasn’t the child sandwiched between them who seemed out of place. It was her husband there on the other side. She felt as if she were seeing him for the first time.

  Having been in nonstop motion all day long, the child’s arms and legs now glowed with warmth like little pocket heaters. They refused to remain covered. No sooner did Keiko tuck the blankets around the girl than Yoshiko would wiggle and squirm, and there she’d be sprawled across the tatami again, imprinting the weave of the matting on her forehead.

  Children, Keiko had recently discovered, became vastly heavier after they were asleep—all the world like magical creatures in a fairy tale. The sleeping Yoshiko was so limp she dangled heavily from Keiko’s arms as if half her body had turned to liquid.

  In the pitch black of night, Keiko became aware of her husband’s arm lying near hers, sensing his warmth in the languid sensuality of her half-sleep state. Having the child between them, like a neutral zone in a battlefield, was a new experience for them both. Even before going to bed, they had been aware of the novelty. Keiko imagined groggily that the mood still had them it its grip. Now that they had donned the guise of “Mother” and “Father,” they would have to reconsider their identities as husband and wife. But this was something that all couples, from all walks of life, must surely face when they first become parents.

  Keiko moved her own arm toward the thick, heavy arm she was so used to grasping. Yet what met her touch was soft and velvety. Yoshiko! Keiko was shocked by her mistake.

  It wasn’t just the fact that she had been mistaken. On other occasions, when her instinctive response might prove correct, would she still be able to control her sensuality, distinguishing appropriately between Yoshiko and her husband? For years her husband had been the only physical presence in her life. Apparently, long habit had rendered her incapable of responding to any physical contact except as an overture from him. Perhaps it was selfishness on her part; perhaps it was willfulness; perhaps it was even a deformity in her nature—but from the very beginning, Keiko’s heart had come equipped with room for only one. There was little she could do to alter that fact now.

  “Shall it be my husband or the child? I’ve space for only one.” This was all she could think, and it made her sad.

  Today, like all the other days, Keiko took the warm water she had heated in the large kettle and began to wash Yoshiko. Various emotions swept over her in various shades of intensity. She was now storing up knowledge of Yoshiko in her heart, little by little, a fact that produced an ecstasy in Keiko that far surpassed the ecstasy of love.

  She had had barely a fortnight in which to gather the feelings and facts that other mothers could acquire at a leisurely pace, from the day they first learned of their pregnancy until their children reached Yoshiko’s age. From a distance Keiko watched herself trying greedily to catch up.

  “Mommy!”

  Yoshiko would call out to Keiko like that from time to time for no apparent reason. It was as though she had suddenly remembered something. Each time Keiko would be mildly alarmed, fearing her unpreparedness had been found out. But that voice!

  The pure timbre of the child’s voice would have put the finest songbird to shame.

  “Um, yes? What is it?”

  Keiko’s own voice seemed rusty in comparison and somehow clumsy. She was amused that she snapped to attention whenever Yoshiko called, like a plebe at roll call. But she couldn’t help herself.

  Whenever she heard the child call out to her, Keiko’s answer would be nothing more than an echo of the girl’s voice. Once Yoshiko heard her mother’s response, she would peer up at Keiko with bright eyes, trying to confirm what she had heard. Her gaze flew with the sharpness of a hornet, leaving Keiko stunned. Keiko would try to return the child’s gaze, but the eyes looking down and those looking up never quite connected. The realization left Keiko full of shame.

  Keiko suddenly recalled how the novelist Arishima Takeo had taken the age-old proverb “You understand the debt to your parents only when you become one” and had altered it to “You understand your debt to your child only when you have one.” The former, as implausible as it was, had never applied to Keiko, and the other adage did not agree with her experience either. However carefully Keiko thought about it, she could believe only that children served the purpose of intermediaries and little else: They take you by the hand and lead you to “something”—a something for which Keiko felt the deepest reverence. That was why she felt such awe as well as shame in the presence of children.

  And what was this “something” to which a child will lead you? Keiko could not put her finger on it exactly; it was too vague a concept. For want of a better word, she referred to it as a third entity, something beyond parent and child. All she could say was that it had caused her breasts, woman that she was, to swell like rising bread and had opened a window onto a new and bracing wisdom, a wisdom that she had never known existed.

  Keiko began to rub the warm washcloth over Yoshiko’s body, as she always did, working her way gradually to the space between the little girl’s plump thighs. Her pretty little private parts reminded Keiko of a half-ripe peach cleft in two by a perfect line. Lately Keiko had grown determined to increase her understanding of the child’s body, believing that it was her right, even her duty, as a novice mother. But even she doubted that her rights permitted her to go so far as to illuminate this particular feature of the child’s anatomy. And yet every time she ran the washcloth along the little girl’s legs, she was enthralled by the way the tiny peach would split open at the cleft with each movement the girl made. The red flesh inside, unfurled like a bolt of silk, formed a half-opened mouth. Here, Keiko realized, was the essence of that which was “woman,” an essence she longed to explore. Having no reason to be reserved with this slip of a girl, she could explore to her heart’s content.

  For a woman of Keiko’s age still not to know the basic facts about female physiology would seem impossible. But it was true. Here she was—while regarding it a disgrace to use a word without knowing the proper way to write it, she still had no idea where her own urine came from, despite the thousands of times she had urinated in her lifetime. It was nothing short of ridiculous. And yet it was society’s odd notion of common sense that kept this kind of knowledge from women, even from women like Keiko.

  “Yoshiko dear, it’s dirty here. We’ll have to wash you here today, OK?”

  Keiko pressed the washcloth against the girl’s thighs, trying to force a little leeway between her legs.

  “No! It tickles!” Yoshiko clamped her legs together with surprising strength.

  “Now stop misbehaving! I’m going to wash here today.”

  “No,” Yoshiko would not be persuaded, and with her legs held tightly together, she refused to budge. Her resistance was so intractable that Keiko felt it must be born of some innate female instinct for self-protection. It was, in fact, awe inspiring. Caught completely off guard, Keiko had been laid bare before the fierceness of the girl’s denial. Backing off now with an idiotic look on her face, she began to chuckle stupidly, peering into Yoshiko’s eyes.

  “Well then, Yoshiko dear, I’ll give you something nice . . . something that starts with ‘P.’ ”

  Keiko was disgusted with herself for stooping to such a trick. She was quickly losing what little pride she had left.

  “Please open up . . . just a little, OK? Please, Yoshiko.”

  “No! You’re stupid!”

  And with this exchange they both stripped away the thin layer of emotion they had sto
red up between them—feelings of parent for child and child for parent. They emerged to confront each other with the naked faces of strangers.

  “I’m going to wash you here. Mommy has to!”

  With a perverse strength, Keiko thrust her hands between Yoskiko’s legs and roughly pried them apart just as if they were chopsticks. Yoshiko reeled and then burst into tears as she tumbled to the wooden floor. Keiko gazed down at the wet floorboards, her eyes opened wide as if she had just awoken.

  Yoshiko’s violent sobs lashed the ears of this idiot mother like an icy wind. Keiko did not try to comfort the girl but dejectedly turned her gaze inward.

  “For my own self-fulfillment . . . for my fulfillment as a woman . . . is it necessary to sacrifice this innocent child? How much more blood must be spilled?”

  According to an old proverb, a woman born in the Year of the Fiery Horse will devour her husband. Even though she was not born in the Year of the Fiery Horse, women like Keiko possess an animal’s will to live. Tethered as they are, they eat and eat whatever is in their reach—devouring poisonous grasses along with the sweet—and thus they strain to grow. But more prevalent still are those who, so afraid they’ll eat all there is to eat until not a blade of grass remains, never even test the limits of their ropes.

  Keiko was suddenly reminded of the child-eating goddess Kishimojin, and realizing that she, too, should declare herself by that name, she was beset by loneliness.

  HOTTA YOSHIE

  In bad health as a young man during the war, Hotta Yoshie (1918–1998) was never conscripted but worked in China after 1945 for several years, an experience that brought his strong political consciousness to bear on his numerous writings. In 1951 he won the Akutagawa Prize for his novel Solitude in the Square (Hiroba no kodoku), which deals with the reactions of intellectuals from various countries to the Korean War. Much of Hotta’s fiction centers on the loneliness and solitude of postwar life. His Shadow Pieces (Kage no bubun, 1952) juxtaposes three interlocking visions of life in the difficult aftermath of the war, the first of which, “The Old Man” (Rōjin), is included here.