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

by Неизвестный

  The first time, the course she had taken was clear in every detail the next morning. She had fled to the rock garden at the Tsuruyas’ nearby, where she had relieved herself on a rock covered with green moss. From there, she had gone on to the house of a widow who had a bull, and had stamped up and down in front of the cowshed. The widow’s eldest son, drawn outside by the noise, had attempted to capture the offending animal, only to see it make off, swifter than any horse, in the direction of the Ashishina district of the village.

  The next morning, Shuzō discovered the door of his cowshed smashed and the cow gone. Uproar ensued. Before long, news came from the Tsuruyas. A cow unknown had disgraced itself on a rock in their garden and made a clean sweep of the strips of giant radish hung out to dry over the veranda. Unless she was caught as soon as possible and given a dose of bicarbonate of soda, the dried radish would swell up in her stomach and choke her to death when she ruminated.

  Pale at the thought of the terrible loss that threatened, Shuzō set off in search of the cow on his bicycle. Fortunately, he soon found her, tethered to a persimmon tree in one of the terraced fields on a hillside at Ashishina. She was only a cow, it was true, but to have created such a public disturbance, especially over a display of carnal lust, was disgraceful.

  The second time she had run away had been on the twenty-first day following her servicing at the O.K. Breeders. On that occasion, she had run a full twelve miles in the middle of the night and gone back to the O.K. Breeders. As soon as Shuzō found in the morning that his cow had gone, he guessed where she was and went to the O.K. Breeders on his bicycle to fetch her back. Even a cow, he had reasoned, must cherish a rather special feeling for the partner made familiar from experience. Fortunately enough, his shot in the dark had hit the mark. Any delay, and the cow would almost certainly have been made off with by someone else.

  She was a troublesome cow, indeed. Even so, Shuzō was fond of her and was determined, he said, to see her blessed with children. To have a calf would, he was convinced, put an end to her carnal preoccupations. Even while he was drinking tea in the kitchen, Shuzō got up two or three times to go and peer into the cowshed.

  “Will it take or won’t it?” said Shuzō anxiously. “I wonder. . . . If it doesn’t take this time, do you think it means she’s barren?”

  Such a question was not for Grandpa to answer; it was the province of the vet, after a proper examination.

  They went to bed, their quilts laid out side by side on the floor, but Shuzō got up yet again to go and look in the cowshed. The cow was lying on her belly with her legs folded beneath her, peacefully dribbling as she ruminated. Even after he was back in bed, Shuzō started talking to Grandpa again. If a mating was not successful, it was natural for anybody’s cow to go into heat again and there was no need for Shuzō to worry so much. If it wasn’t successful this time, he said, he was afraid the cow would get excited and start rampaging and bellowing almost immediately. It humiliated him in the eyes of the neighbors. They would get the idea that her owner was the same way. He would willingly provide a bull for her just to keep her quiet; in fact, if that was the only purpose, any seedy animal from the nearest place at hand would do. And yet, for a man of his age and living alone to provide such a service was hardly respectable.

  Grandpa himself had once been asked by a circus to provide just that kind of service. Twenty years previously, a cattle market had been established in Kasumigamori, and one of the committee members had invited a circus to the village for the opening ceremonies. The circus was made up of a dozen or so men and women who brought with them two horses, one cow, and a dog, and its performances consisted of putting the animals through various acts to make the audience laugh. Grandpa had been summoned to bring a bull to the circus.

  The booths for the performances, simple affairs of frames covered with straw matting, had been set up on the dry riverbed in Kasumigamori. Arriving there with his bull, Grandpa was met by a large man in dark glasses, who looked like the manager of the circus and who asked him to do something about his cow, which was in heat. It didn’t matter whether she got pregnant or not, he said, so long as she cooled off. To fill such an order was hardly going to increase the reputation of a cattle breeder. Then, to top it all, the man who seemed to be the manager asked him outright to see, if possible, that the bull didn’t make her pregnant. “Damn fool,” thought Grandpa, and went straight home again with his bull.

  Unfortunately, the wrong story had got about. The tale that spread around was that old Ushitora, the cattle breeder, had put his bull to the circus cow to get her off heat rather than with calf: a bovine brothel, said people snidely. In a day or two, everyone had heard the story, not only in Kasumigamori but in Yaburodani and all the other villages round about. The net result was that Grandpa became a laughing stock, while the circus cow enjoyed an enormous vogue. The general impression seemed to be that she was in some way a seductive, flirty type of cow. Thanks to this, the circus had a considerable attendance, but on Grandpa’s side his son Tōkichi, who was still at primary school, was ostracized by the other children for quite a while afterward. On more than a few occasions, Tōkichi came home from school crying. Tōkichi had never forgotten how he had suffered at that time; that was why, even now, he was still oversensitive where breeding was concerned.

  “Really, it’s a nasty business,” concluded Grandpa Ushitora. “You could go on fretting about it forever. Let’s go to sleep,” said Shuzō.

  The next morning, Grandpa woke up early. It was a fine day. Before breakfast, he went to the water mill to buy rice bran. On the way back, he dropped in at a shop where they processed bean curd and bought some of the sediment left after making the curd. Everything was intended as fodder for the bulls, but he set a little of the sediment aside and had Shuzō mix it with the rice for their breakfast.

  Grandpa had just finished breakfast when he had a visitor. It was Uchida from Kasumigamori, who had found out somehow where he was. Then, almost immediately afterward, he had another visitor. This time it was the former priest of the Myōkendō shrine in the western section of the village. Both of them, by strange coincidence, brought presents of sweet potatoes for the bulls, and asked him to bring his bulls for mating with their cows.

  When Grandpa led the two bulls out of the stable, both Uchida and Myōkendō, as he was still known, asked to have the servicing done by Wild Cherry. Wild Cherry, however, was not for use for some time to come. Even with a bull in the prime of life, it is normal to mate him with no more than seventy to seventy-five cows in a year. Grandpa had always made it a rule to put Wild Cherry to work five times a month, and to get the other two bulls to help out with the rest.

  The Myōkendō priest was much taken with Wild Cherry. “When all’s said and done, you can’t beat a Chiya bull,” he said. “This one’s the best of the bunch. A good, substantial animal!”

  His companion Uchida also praised Wild Cherry to the point where Grandpa began to get embarrassed. His praises sounded so much like flattery designed for the ears of Wild Cherry himself that Shuzō interrupted him.

  “Praise him as much as you like, the animal couldn’t care less,” he said. “If you praise him too much it sounds barefaced, like some marriage go-between talking.”

  “Well! So my cow’s not the only one that gives trouble,” said Myōkendō, making a sly reference to the unconventional behavior of Shuzō’s own cow.

  Grandpa received his payment from Shuzō, and got back onto the main road with his two bulls. Uchida and Myōkendō followed in their wake, vying with each other all the while in praising the way that Wild Cherry walked, the gloss of his coat, and so on. His appearance was, indeed, so fine that even the nonexpert would have noticed it. He was massive and handsomely built, whether seen from the front or the side. His dewlap hung in ample folds from his chin and down his chest, as though the surplus weight of his body were overflowing into it. Viewed from the rear, his gait had a ponderous assurance. His thighs were pleasingly plump, his hips sq
uare-set, and his coat gleamed a dazzling black as he walked. His horns rose straight and even, glossy black at the tips and matt black at the base, as though they had been dipped in water.

  Uchida and Myōkendō were each trying to let the other take precedence in having his cows serviced. There were another five days before Wild Cherry would be fit to use.

  “No, after you,” said Uchida. “My cow’s only two years old. Whoever heard of a youngster taking precedence over someone older from the same village? My cow must certainly take second place because of her age, quite apart from anything else.”

  “No, no. You first. My cow’s so shy, you wouldn’t believe it. Last year, now, we had the bull brought twice, but she behaved as though nothing was up at all. This time too, I expect it’ll take time.”

  After much give-and-take, it was finally agreed that Uchida’s cow should be serviced first. Myōkendō’s cow might or might not be bashful, but the fact was that Grandpa had taken his bull there twice the previous year, only to find that he had met his match. Myōkendō’s cow had not given Wild Cherry—then still known as “the Chiya bull”—so much as a second glance. Slowly, as though she had all the time in the world, she had put herself out of his reach, though she bellowed all the while as though she was off her head, with bloodshot eyes and every other physical sign of being in heat. Having given birth to twin calves two years previously, she ought not to have objected to the mating, but for some reason or other she rejected his advances on both occasions.

  Myōkendō, watching the proceedings, had grown desperate. “Come on,” he had scolded her, “get some life into you! None of your airs and graces!” The second time, too, he had scolded her in the same way, afraid that the fee he paid was going to be wasted. Possibly the timing had been wrong on both occasions; most cows go into heat between twenty-one and twenty-eight days after parturition and are in heat every third or fourth week thereafter, but the period is a bare one and a half days, and even then, the first half day is the best.

  Once the servicing of Uchida’s cow was over, Grandpa went to cut grass on the embankment of the pond below the temple, then took Wild Cherry alone down to the river in the valley. He made him walk about in the shallows and washed him all over with a brush, then wiped the drops off him with a towel. He even cleaned the dirt off his hooves. Then he took the bull’s hooves one at a time on his knee, and was scraping the underside with a sickle to improve their appearance when a voice hailed him:

  “Well, Grandpa Ushitora! Haven’t seen you for a long time! Cleaning his hooves, I see. A cow’s hooves are surprisingly soft, aren’t they?”

  It was the younger brother of the previous head of the Tsuruya family. He carried a fishing rod, with a fisherman’s creel in his hand, and his trousers were soaked through up to the knees. He was already in his early fifties, and the sideburns below his white hat were flecked with gray. Some thirty years ago, he had gone to Tokyo to study but had dropped out of school and, disqualified thereby from obtaining a job with a decent firm or government office, was said to have been making a living writing novels. For nearly two years during the war, he had brought his large family to stay with the Tsuruyas in order to escape the air raids. Even then, he had gone fishing in the river every day throughout the summer. When one of the neighbors greeted him with a “Hello! Going fishing?” he would reply “Off to work!” thus doing his own reputation a good deal of harm. This time—again, it seemed, with the purpose of tiding over a financially thin time—he had brought his son, who was on vacation. One could hardly expect much, at any rate, of a man who abandoned his birthplace and went off to knock around in foreign parts. To say that a bull’s hard hooves were surprisingly soft was hardly a compliment. . . .

  “It all depends on how you use the sickle,” said Grandpa, giving him little encouragement, and went on paring.

  “They say cows like being scratched here, don’t they?” went on the Tsuruyas’ visitor, pinching at Wild Cherry’s dewlap. “In the Kantō area they call this part the ‘hangskin,’ you know. What would the cattle dealers in these parts call it?”

  “We call it the ‘hanging.’ The ‘throat hanging.’ ”

  “Is that so? The ‘hanging,’ eh? And how do you tell a cow’s age? I hear there are all kinds of complicated ways of telling it, by the proportion of deciduous teeth to permanent teeth, or the extent to which the permanent teeth have been eroded. . . .”

  “We here, we just look to see how many teeth it’s cut, if a young animal. With an older animal, we look to see how much it’s worn down its second teeth.”

  As soon as Grandpa had finished paring the bull’s hooves, the Tsuruyas’ visitor went down under the bridge and started fishing. Soon Grandpa appeared up on the bridge leading his bull, whereupon he hailed him again from below.

  “Grandpa—perhaps I shouldn’t bring this up now, but they do say you’ve left home. Somebody tipped me off about it a while back. But you know, Grandpa, traveling about never got anybody anywhere!”

  He might almost have been talking about himself.

  That night, Grandpa got Uchida to put him up. The next day, he took his bulls down to the broad, dry riverbed about two and a half miles downstream and turned them loose there. At nights he stayed at the general store near the bus stop; the owner was a distant relative. The store had a two-story outbuilding at the back, with a window looking out over the riverbed, which was convenient for keeping an eye on the bulls. The next day, and the following one, he slept on the second floor of the outbuilding; and all the while, as he watched over the animals, he tried hard to keep thoughts of his son’s willfulness out of his head, so that the bulls too could take their ease and relax.

  On the fifth day, he set out early in the morning with his two bulls and went to the Myōkendō shrine in Kasumigamori. The cow there still showed no change, but the next morning she was definitely in heat. Contrary to Myōkendō’s prediction made the other day, the cow proved neither bashful nor retiring. If anything, she was rather forward. When Wild Cherry came lumbering into the cowshed, she simply stood there motionless, as though stuffed.

  That night, Grandpa put up with Myōkendō. With the latter’s approval, he drove the two bulls into the outbuilding, which was all but empty, and gave them their nosebags with sweet potatoes in them. He opened the two windows high up in the walls as wide as possible.

  Myōkendō’s place stood on a piece of high ground, an offshoot of the hills. It had originally been a shrine dedicated to the Bodhisattva Myōken, but, since the war, serving the gods and Buddhas was no longer a profitable sideline, so the place had ceased to be a temple, and Myōkendō had returned to secular life as a farmer pure and simple. The hall that had housed the statue, the priest’s living quarters, the cowsheds, and the outbuildings all stood side by side in a line, with a rocky cliff behind them. The remaining three sides formed a steep slope of red clay sparsely dotted with pine trees, with a narrow path winding up the slope. The site was quite well protected, in fact, but some intuition warned Grandpa that he should fasten the door of the outbuilding with nails.

  Myōkendō laid out quilts for Grandpa in the very center of what had been the shrine and hung a mosquito net over it for him. He also opened up all the shutters, so that there was a pleasant breeze.

  Grandpa was already in bed when Myōkendō came to worship before the statue of Myōken that still stood in the sanctuary at the back of the hall. Grandpa was just dozing off but woke up again.

  “Well, well, Myōkendō,” he said. “Time for prayers, eh? You mustn’t mind if I go to sleep.”

  “Go ahead, go ahead. You know—it doesn’t really pay to do this nowadays, but even so I say the sutras every ten days.”

  He lit a small candle in the candlestick standing on the altar. Then, rubbing his prayer beads between his palms, he said:

  “Sorry to bother you, then. Afraid the sutras will disturb your sleep rather, but I’ll start the service if you don’t mind.” And he started chanting the sacred scripture.
It was quite impossible for Grandpa to go to sleep, but to get out of bed seemed rather too pointed, so he lay still and did nothing.

  The sutra-reading over, Myōkendō apologized to Grandpa again.

  “Sorry to bother you again, but I’ll give the drum a bang while I’m about it, if you don’t mind. I expect you can hear this drum way over in Yaburodani, can’t you?”

  “Yes, we can hear it at night over in my place.”

  “You know, it just doesn’t feel right unless I give this a bang. Just to let people know we have the faith, you see. . . .”

  He started beating the drum. He beat it with a fine abandon and at the same time began chanting in a loud voice. It occurred to Grandpa, though he disapproved of his own thoughts, that if Myōkendō went at it like that, there must surely be the occasional person who came with offerings in a sudden fit of generosity. He could not help having this idea, so unpleasantly jarring was the sound. The noise must have stopped without his realizing it, however, for he soon fell asleep.

  The next morning, disaster struck. Immediately on rising, Grandpa went straight to the outbuilding, where he found the door open and both bulls gone.

  “Oh, my God!” cried Grandpa, stamping his foot, and set off at a run for the former priest’s living quarters. Shouting he knew not what at the top of his voice, he pounded on the door. The commotion roused Myōkendō, who was still in bed. As soon as he heard the grave news, he started bawling at his wife, too, to get up. She came out wearing nothing but a nether garment, only to be yelled at angrily by Myōkendō. “Idiot! Loose woman! Go and get some clothes on!”

  Marks on the outbuilding door suggested that the nails holding it fast had been pulled out with pliers or some similar instrument. In the unfloored downstairs section, only a single pile of cow dung was to be seen, and quite a few of the sweet potatoes were still left in the nosebags. Someone had apparently led them away the previous night against their will, before they had got far into their potatoes.