by Неизвестный
“In any case,” she announced peremptorily to the man, “446 N-machi is my house, so I’m going to go home. Then everything will be perfectly clear. Because it is absolutely certain that I do not have a husband. Either I’ve gone crazy, or else you’re the one who’s crazy!”
She climbed into the young man’s car, not uttering a word as they drove to her house. There was much she had to consider, but she didn’t know where to begin. What exactly had happened while she had been gone? A young man she’d never seen before suddenly shows up, and then he starts talking about her husband, and even worse, he claims that her husband is in bed with an incurable disease and wants to see her.
It was an odd feeling. When they opened the door to her house (actually, after the man rang the bell, a young woman who appeared to be a nurse opened it from inside), a repulsive odor made her sick to her stomach. She went with the young man into the living room and sat down on the couch. There was no question that this was in fact her house; everything was as she had left it when she set off on her trip. Only one thing was different: there was an unfamiliar silver picture frame on her table with a photograph inside it. It was a snapshot of a man and a woman sitting in chairs on a terrace, with the sea lit by the evening sun and a cloudy sky as the backdrop. The couple glowed almost imperceptibly in the backlighting of the setting sun. The man was looking straight ahead, and the woman’s face was concealed under a large white hat. Their bodies were pressed together, the man’s arm around her shoulders, and one of her hands rested on his leg. She picked up the photograph and stared at it. She was about to ask the young man who these people were, but she realized that the answer was a foregone conclusion. He would surely say, “This is a photograph taken on your honeymoon.” And in fact, that is precisely what he said to her as she looked at the picture: “It’s a photograph from your honeymoon.”
She twisted her lip and said, “So you’re claiming this woman is me? That’s ridiculous. I’ve never seen this woman before, and I have never laid eyes on this man!”
The young man peered at her hard, a look of astonishment on his face. “Come now! You’re completely exhausted. And I’m sure you’re not feeling well. You’ll come to your senses if you just get some rest.” Evidently he had decided to ignore her assertions.
“Stop it! I’m not going to be fooled by these preposterous tricks. It’s true that the woman in this picture does somehow resemble me. But you use such nasty tricks. Hmmph! Her face is hidden by this large hat, isn’t it? If you think I’m going to be fooled by that, you’re sadly mistaken. Let me see the man you claim is my husband. I’ll be more than happy to tell him that I’ve never seen him before and to get the hell out of here!”
Restraining her anger, she spoke with a quavering voice. Although she had no idea what this absurd situation might mean, fueled by rage she was determined to drive these people from her house. She stood up from the couch, glaring straight at the young man, and said, “Fine, take me to him! Surely he’s not using my bedroom?”
Her overbearing tone caught him off guard, and he guided her to the room where the man he had called her husband was sleeping. It was, in fact, her bedroom, and her eyes swam in anger at their audacity. When she entered the room, that peculiar odor took her breath away. The man lying in her bed lifted his head, smiled weakly, and said “You came back. I knew you’d come back. You can’t betray our love. I forgive you for everything. I love you.”
She shuddered with revulsion, and choking from the foul stench that seemed somehow to emanate from the man’s afflicted body, she said, “Who are you? Just who are you?”
“Your eternal lover.” He answered in a feeble, almost imperceptible voice, but she heard him clearly. He slowly closed his eyes, the smile still floating on his lips. Those were his final words. With a smile on his face, he died.
KOJIMA NOBUO
After Kojima Nobuo (1915–2006) was drafted into the army and served in China, the subject of many of his postwar writings became satires of his experiences in the military and of the confusion and disillusionment felt by soldiers returning from the war. He also examined the collapse of the family in postwar Japan in such novels as Hōyō Kazoku (Embracing Family, 1965, trans. 2005). Kojima’s story “The Smile” (Bishō, 1954) is a characteristic portrayal of the psychological burdens of a war veteran as he tries to reconnect to his family.
THE SMILE (BISHŌ)
Translated by Lawrence Rogers
The other day a local paper ran a picture taken at a swimming class for children who’ve had polio. The caption under it referred to “a smiling father in the pool.” I was that smiling, apparently happy father. I’d been getting the word out to my friends and acquaintances about the class for some time, so everyone congratulated me when the photo appeared in the paper.
1
I saw my son for the first time when I returned home from the war. I’d been gone for four years. I was oppressed by the sense that rather than simply being my son, he was more my sickly son. When I returned to where my family had been evacuated during the war, he was not in the shack that served as a home but was playing outside. Instead of calling for him, I went out to look for this son I’d never laid eyes on as though I were looking for hidden treasure. I’d seen only pictures of him when he was a baby, so in searching for my four-year-old son, it was obviously better that I look for someone who resembled me rather than rely on my recollection of him in a photograph, and as it turned out, I was able to find this boy who looked like me. He already walked with a limp then, his right heel up off the ground. My wife told me that was because his injured big toe hadn’t yet healed and said she’d been taking him to a masseuse.
That seemed implausible to me. If his big toe hurt, you could hardly expect him to walk on it intentionally, heel in the air. That was perfectly obvious to me, and in my mind I told myself over and over what a disaster it was and even said as much, yet I went day after day telling myself that the next day when he got up, a miracle will have occurred and he wouldn’t limp anymore. There was no room for pity for the boy quite yet, for I was gripped by doubt: was I really meeting my obligations as a father? Yet I once carried him on my back almost eight miles along a mountain road down to the nearest train station and, from there, gone one hour by train, getting then on another train and taking him to the Red Cross hospital in Nagoya. There was a suspension bridge on the mountain road that crossed a deep gorge, and when I looked down at the water roaring far below me, I almost passed out. When we got to the other side my wife spoke.
“I used to go to Gifu for provisions with this boy on my back. I’d close my eyes and pray and think of you before I started across. Then I’d sing the song that goes ‘the pure white foothills of Fuji’ as I crossed. I’ve no idea why I sang that song, but oddly enough, it gave me courage.”
That time with me, however, she hadn’t sung, despite what she’d just told me. My wife and I took turns carrying the boy along the long road, and each time we set him down, we’d sit down and rest a bit and feed him. My mind was at ease, for I felt I was doing my duty, and I enjoyed it, and my wife seemed happy somehow, and by doing this I was earning my own self-respect.
At the Red Cross hospital we took him to General Medicine. All they did was put a compress on him. After we came home, the boy soon lost the ability to hold chopsticks in his right hand. He couldn’t hold them no matter how much I scolded him. Before long he started to stutter. Sensitive to stuttering, my dismay was complete, for there could be no more indisputable proof that he was my son. Until that moment I’d felt that he was my wife’s boy, and since I’d been brooding over his affliction day after day, he seemed like “our sickly son,” but when he began to stutter I was stopped cold in my tracks.
My father stuttered; when I was a child I was cured of my stuttering, though even now I can’t say the cure was completely successful. If I’m angry with my wife, for example, my stuttering is something fierce, so much so that she’s the one who is struck speechless. My son probably i
nherited this predisposition to the wretched affliction from me, or most certainly picked up my speech mannerisms and was soon stuttering after I returned and had quarreled with my wife several times.
In that sense as well, my son has been a sickly son. Stutterer or not, of course, it would be a truly sad situation for any father, yet on the whole, feelings of pity for him have been beyond me. I’ve thought a good deal about this. Neither my mother nor my father ever treated me coldly, and I’ve acted the same way toward them. When you get right down to it, I don’t think I’ve been such a cold fish as a human being. They did make overblown gestures at suicide, often when they were sick and frustrated at the lack they perceived in the way they were being nursed and at having to be dependent on such care. Father’s was directed at Mother and Mother’s at my older sister. Father walked to the persimmon tree in the back carrying a kimono sash cord. He was probably waiting for me to stop him. Mother tried to jump out a second-story window. She also anticipated my stopping her. I went and wrapped my arms around them, arriving neither too soon nor too late. Had I acted then out of duty? No, I had raged at their sicknesses and wept at how they must have felt. My parents, in fact, also were angered by their afflictions, but I sensed that their desire to confront them, to play the fool within the human drama, was the stronger emotion.
2
A year after we moved to Gifu, we knew that it was infantile paralysis, but to be cured the patient must receive a spinal injection within two months of contracting the disease, after which the only treatment is massage—which you also have to leave to a specialist. But since my son had both a bad leg and a bad arm, it was cerebral, for which from day one there is no cure. This is also what they told me at the Red Cross hospital. They had not been able to come up with a diagnosis at the local prefectural hospital. When I heard from the doctors that it was too late, I felt immensely relieved, as though a weight had been lifted from my shoulders. I no longer felt responsible, I told my wife, and if responsibility didn’t lie with the disease, it was the responsibility of the war, which had led to his malnourishment, and if the war were to blame, I asked her, shouldn’t we be thankful simply that he survived? I’d said it less to console my wife than to affirm my own sense of deliverance. After I’d told her this, I often took the child out to play. I observed myself when I didn’t do it. I found that to me it was less a matter of pitying and lamenting the child’s disability as he walked than taking my son out and demonstrating that I was equal to being stared at. It was my intention thereby to compensate for the feebleness of the love I felt for him.
As I had anticipated, when the two of us, father and son, went for a walk, passersby would inevitably turn and look at us. I discovered that people walking toward us didn’t look until they were passing, that when they came precisely abreast of us they looked hard at the child and then turned back to stare.
“Don’t let their staring get to you,” I often told my son as we walked, “Daddy’s with you.” I wonder, though, if in the final analysis, it was really my intention to raise the child’s spirits. I’d return home exhausted from these emotional ordeals.
I’d take him to ride the horizontal swinging log at the playground.
“Ready? Get on.”
If I’d taken him with the actual intention of having him ride the log, I’d have done it when no one was watching, and I certainly would have set him on it with the greatest care and held him there. Yet not only did I not help my fearful son, who would look anxiously up at me, I would simply stand there and stare at him as he limped toward the log, his right hand twisted behind him.
“Don’t worry. Get on.”
I must instill courage in this crippled boy if he is to brave the raging sea of life.
This was what I chose to think as I swung the log vigorously. I knew just how repulsive an expression the boy would have on his face as he cried. He’d look not simply like one of our family who was crying. He’d have that lopsided, contorted expression characteristic of the infirm.
One day an old woman I’d never laid eyes on before caught me in the act.
“You there!” she called out in the local dialect. A look at her angry face made me, curiously, fiercely angry myself.
Is he your kid? Do you think I’d do this if he were someone else’s kid? I handed him a toy I’d spent my last yen on. I felt such rage toward this old woman who had seen deep into my heart that I could have knocked her down. When my agitation subsided, however, I felt so wretched I wanted to take my son in my arms and plunge from the bridge over the Nagara River. And I realized that in this respect I was indisputably my mother’s son.
I was aware that the reason I felt no love for my son was a consequence of my not personally taking part in raising the boy myself, and it was for this reason, I concluded, that I’d have to take a hand in disciplining him. Yet the fact is, it’s not simply a matter of not loving my son. I despise him for his disability. When I think about this hapless child, I’m absolutely overwhelmed.
My wife scolds the child, forgetting he’s crippled. Then at night she’ll cry in bed, back turned to me. I, on the other hand, scold the boy because he is crippled. In that sense, I find my wife’s mentality the more frightening.
My wife was in bed for a good while with morning sickness. The boy has to urinate a lot. (Another thing that comes from his affliction.) After I woke him one night, the boy was starting to pass water as he stood on the futon. I knocked him down, took hold of his rigid body by his legs, and carried him to the roof eaves at the window. I savored a pleasant numbing sensation as I did so. I don’t deny, of course, that I was a kind of devil at the time, yet I felt I myself was quelling an imp. (I despise the devil of deformity.) I took the board-rigid body and tossed it on the futon as one would a stick. I then began spanking the boy as one would beat a drum.
The war had ended recently and I was utterly exhausted, and my wife had lain in bed for more than a month, able to hold nothing down. She was not going to make it if the fetus wasn’t aborted immediately. I was waiting for my wife to stop me, at which point she came flying at me. I grabbed her by the throat. She kicked me in the stomach, and I fell backward. For the first time since I’d known her, she reviled me as she lay face down on the floor with the violent, rough sort of language only men use.
“What the hell are you doing?!”
I’m sure that’s what she said. How could my wife, whose upbringing was better than mine, use language like that? Shocked at this unexpected outburst, I was able to regain my composure.
What the hell are you doing?!
Turning these words over and over again in my mind, I took care of the futon. I then put the boy to bed. (In a little while, he had forgotten what I’d done to him and was asleep. I don’t know whether this is symptomatic of his disease.) I put a cold compress on my wife’s forehead and sat where I was for a long while. We were staying on the second floor of an inn, so everyone had seen what I’d done.
I knew I had to consider how it was that such a cruel act had come into my head. All during my long and frenzied life in the military I’d lived an eventempered existence and had never even touched another person. Why had I, having thus responded to military life, done something like this? If I’m capable of this sort of thing, I must be cautious about myself.
Shall I join a church?
Shall I undertake spiritual training?
Shall I hold myself in check with other actions?
By other actions I mean such things as suddenly starting to dust with a duster when I get excited, or sweep with a broom, or run outside. But perhaps before I’m able to do any of those things, I’ll beat him with the duster, knock him over with jabs from the broom, or beat him and flee. As for faith and spiritual training, it would doubtless be a simple matter to cast either aside, since whether to contemplate faith or to throw it over would be entirely up to me. Yet it also seemed to me that at the least, my intentions are perhaps the better for it while I’m in this frame of mind. And thanks to thi
s incident, my wife’s morning sickness disappeared completely.
I often found myself musing silently as I stood behind my wife, who would be doing the laundry.
I wonder what I should do.
I wanted to have the confidence to retrieve my own mild temperament. My wife was trying to teach the boy to count. He was old enough to go to kindergarten but simply couldn’t get beyond four, so I calmed her down and took over the task.
“After four comes five. Five.”
I repeated the number for him with uncommon gentleness.
“You have to go easy with him. OK, are we ready, son? It’s one, two, three, four, five. Five.”
“One, two, three, four . . .”
He fell silent after he reached four.
“It’s five! It’s no big deal!” I said, recalling as I spoke that the boy was a stutterer.
“Now, son, is it that you can’t say it, that you know what it is but you can’t say it? Which is it? Which? You don’t know? You can’t say it? Tell me. Which?”
The boy started to snicker.
My hand betrayed my heart and in a flash was on its way to his cheek.
“You think it’s funny? Laugh at this!”
Stop my hand.
What the hell are you doing?!
His snickering didn’t stop after I hit him, but the tears finally began to flow. His hand over his little thing, his whole body began to shake. It had come to this because my son had abruptly started to snicker at a time when he shouldn’t have, when I was groping about for answers: Is his slow-wittedness inborn? Is it due to the polio? Or is he incapable of counting because he stutters? And in fact the boy laughed because he was unhappy. Perhaps there’s something wrong with his brain.