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

by Неизвестный

  “Where’s the salt? Quickly,” her mother had repeated. Noriko brought a jar of coarse salt from the kitchen. Her mother scattered handful after handful over her shoulders and around the hem of her kimono. When she finally entered the house and sat down, she explained that a young woman had committed suicide by throwing herself in front of the train.

  “She was about your age,” her mother had told Noriko, then just twenty. “Not married, apparently. It was so awful, I couldn’t look. But I heard them saying, ‘That’s a leg,’ and ‘That’s an arm,’ and ‘There’s a lump of flesh.’ And such a smell . . .”

  It was probably the memory of that incident which caused Noriko to carry on the salt ritual herself. Her mother’s white face at the door, the young woman her same age whose body had been turned into lumps of flesh in the space of a second. . . . Her mother’s ghastly expression made Noriko imagine she might be possessed by a ghost. The look was gone by the time she came inside and Noriko could see her in the light. But who could tell whether, had she come straight in, that thing might not have come in too, and still be hovering in the air?

  Whenever Asari returned from a funeral, Noriko would have him wait at the door as she hurried to fetch the salt. “Don’t bother. It’s silly,” he would say, coming straight in to remove his shoes. But Noriko would insist on taking him back outside and shaking salt over him. Her parents had always used coarse salt, which wasn’t available these days, so Noriko made do with the ordinary table variety, though it left something to be desired.

  One day as she sprinkled him with salt, Asari had asked her: “What’ll happen if you die before I do? Will you shake salt down on me from somewhere in the sky when I come back from your funeral?”

  Whenever Noriko knew that she’d have to purify herself, she would leave the salt shaker in the mailbox as she set out—as she had done today.

  “I must have forgotten,” she told Asari, putting it back on the dinner table, and forcing a smile. “Which do you want first: dinner or a bath?”

  “What would you prefer?” Asari said, adjusting the front panels of his kimono before tying his sash.

  “I don’t mind either way.”

  “I’ll go later, then—I’m starved.” He added: “Tonight, I’ll do without.”

  But Noriko didn’t want him not drinking tonight: the last thing she wanted was for him to go off to the Showa. On the other hand, if he stayed home, he’d only get irritable, and it would be even worse if he started after dinner: he might get very drunk.

  “Well,” she replied, “feel free to change your mind.” This was her habitual response these days when he announced that he’d do without. But tonight she chose to say this for a special reason: she wanted him to drink, not too much, just enough so he’d stay and talk with her.

  In the end, Asari did break his resolution—not through weakness, but at her suggestion.

  “Would you mind if I had a beer, though?” Noriko asked, using the same embarrassed tone Asari adopted if he changed his mind. “I’m really thirsty.”

  “All right,” he said. He grinned. “Since it’s a request from someone who rarely indulges, I’ll make an exception and have some too.”

  “But we’ll have to go at my pace.”

  “What do you mean, your pace?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Whatever you say.”

  Noriko brought over the bottle, and Asari reached out to open it.

  “Let me do the honors,” he said. “Now, you can purify yourself with beer, since you forgot the salt.”

  Noriko silently gazed at the filling glass. Asari stopped when it was half full.

  “Is that all I get?”

  “I’ll give you some more in a minute. You’re not a drinker, after all.”

  Noriko took the bottle from him, poured his beer, and by the time she’d set it down, he was already swigging. “Aren’t we going to toast, since I so rarely indulge?” she asked.

  “Oh, that’s right.” But all he did was put down his glass and seize his chopsticks.

  Noriko took a sip.

  “How old was your friend who died?” Asari asked.

  “My age.”

  “An old lady like that?” Asari covered his mouth, pretending that had slipped out. “Who let her get behind the wheel?”

  “She gave me a ride once.”

  “That was stupid. You’ve got to be more careful. What if you’d been in the car when she had the accident? You’d have died, and I’d have had nobody to sprinkle salt over me after funerals.”

  Noriko picked up her glass, and drank a little beer.

  “It was safer then. She had a sticker in the window that said ‘I just got my license. Thank you for your cooperation.’ ”

  “People don’t pay any attention to those stickers.”

  “No, but that’s how careful she was.”

  “Anyway, I don’t want you to ever get in a car with a woman driver.”

  “You don’t mind if the driver’s a man? Even on a very long long trip?”

  “I’m serious.”

  “I know.”

  “I hope so. But you know, going so unexpectedly like that—I think that’d be the worst.”

  “So you’d rather I came and said goodbye?”

  “I meant if I died. Well, it would be pretty bad if you did, too. . . .”

  “You think so? Tell me, what would you want to take care of before you died? Do you have a mistress?”

  “Possibly. Actually, at one time I thought a lot about what would happen if I did die unexpectedly. Right after I got out of school my father died, and my mother divided up the family property for the children. Some land was bought for me in Setagaya—Mother planned on my building a house there, and moving in with me when I got married, but it was years before I did marry, and in the meantime I sold the land and squandered all the money.”

  “You’ve told me this story.”

  “But she never knew. Every time I went home, my mother would tell me to go ahead, get married and build my own house, she’d help me financially. And then prices went up. I’d sold the land when it was cheap, and there wasn’t any left. Back then, you know, I really drank—I don’t drink at all now in comparison—I ended up not being able to pay the rent. I brought all my things to the pawn shop, my suitcases and trunks were empty. Once, I counted up the tickets from the pawn shop, you now, and I had eighteen. But I kept hitting the bottle. Sometimes I’d wake up on a bench in some train station: what would happen if I died now, I’d wonder. Those pawn tickets would loom up before my eyes. I couldn’t stand the thought of Mother finding out I drank the land away, debts piled up, and had nothing but a stack of pawn tickets. I’d have to get rid of those tickets, I’d have to have time for that, at least, I’d tell myself.”

  “What would you do if you were going to die now?”

  “Well, first of all, this, I suppose.” Asari raised his glass, and gulped down some beer.

  Noriko picked up hers. It was nearly empty. As she drank, the foam on the top sank down to the crystal bottom, the bubbles dispersing. Asari’s face, the size of a bean, came into view.

  “Want some more?” he asked.

  Noriko held out her glass, and as he started pouring, she warned, “Oh, not too much.”

  “You were complaining a minute ago how little I gave you,” replied Asari, deliberately taking his time complying.

  Noriko took two sips in a row. Her glass was more than half full.

  “You sure you’re all right?”

  She paused. “Yes,” she answered, glass in hand, and the next moment, she finished it off. Pretending to be engaged in draining it to the last drop, she immersed herself again in that distant, miniature, cheerful world sparkling in the bottom of her glass. Seated at a cute little table scattered with dishes, Asari looked small enough to hold in the palm of her hand. What would he do, she wondered, if she told him she only had a few hours to live? Would he kill her before 3:19 tomorrow, with his own hands?
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  “I see what you’re doing,” said Asari, who was copying her. “You look so tiny.”

  “So do you. It’s pretty, isn’t it?” And then, after a pause, she asked: “Tell me, did you ever think of leaving any notes behind for people to read after you died?”

  “No.” Asari put down his glass and Noriko did the same. “My only hope was that my mother would die, so she wouldn’t see me end so miserably. That was my one try at filial piety. Now,” he changed the subject: “How about some saké?”

  Usually he found it difficult to stop once he got onto saké.

  “If we’re going at my pace,” replied Noriko, “that’s it, I think. But we could eat. How do you feel?”

  “That’s fine with me,” Asari acquiesced, mildly.

  As they ate dinner, Noriko asked: “I wonder how we’ll turn out, growing old together, you and I.”

  “What do you mean, how we’ll turn out?”

  “You know, how we’ll lead our lives.”

  “Same as we do now, I’d guess.”

  “You mean like young newlyweds, or like friends who get together over a cup of tea—for the next twenty, thirty years?”

  That’s not a true married life, she wanted to say. But Asari seemed oblivious.

  “What a great way of putting it!” was his reply.

  He glanced at the clock above the cupboard. “Guess what—it’s not too late for the movie at the Shōwa. I don’t mind taking you, if you’d like to go.”

  Taking the ticket book from the letter rack, he flipped open the red cover. “Only one left. Want to buy me another booklet and use one yourself?”

  Noriko said yes.

  They set out, walking along close to the hedges that lined the neighborhood roads. In the gardens they could see light from the houses, soft lights that spoke of spring evenings. These houses all looked so peaceful and assured to Noriko’s eyes. In the past, she had once been terribly lonely after being abandoned by her first lover, and she remembered that the light from other people’s windows had always looked so warm and inviting. When she returned to her lodgings and switched on the light in her small bare room, she would think that nobody, not even a person dying of cold and hunger, would look with envy and longing at her window. Now, as she strolled along with Asari, she wondered about the light from their living room window. Did it glow, calm and confident, like these? Or was it the weaker, uncertain kind that shines from an inn or dormitory?

  They reached the shopping district and crossed the railway tracks. The Shōwa Cinema was a small theater beyond the station, specializing in foreign films.

  “Hmm, I wonder what’s playing,” Asari said aloud to himself, looking at the movie stills in the window: a western and an Italian film, apparently.

  “One book of tickets, please,” Noriko said, handing over the 500-yen note she’d tucked into her sash.

  “I thought you were going to buy me a few,” Asari grumbled next to her.

  They went inside and as Asari opened the door, Noriko made out lines of backs ranged in all the seats. But when her eyes gradually adjusted to the darkness, she saw several empty places near the front.

  “Let’s go over there,” Asari said. Crouching, he headed down the aisle. Once seated, they looked up at the screen: the Italian film was playing. A shot of a peaceful country village in beautiful muted colors; then a train station; and in the next scene appeared a woman, obviously recovering from a serious illness, accompanied by her husband: they were leaving a health spa. Not long after they got home, a visitor came, a friend of the husband. From what the men said when the woman was out of the room it became clear that the marriage was no longer passionate—in fact the couple hardly felt anything for each other any more.

  Not like herself and Asari, Noriko thought: they still felt strongly about each other. Not one day passed without her being aware of his heart beating, and it was surely the same for him. Yet she did wonder about the kind of light shining out of their home. A legal bond, cohabitation, sex, and love were supposed to be the four pillars of marriage. But they don’t alone suffice—any more than four pillars constitute a house. Neither of them had bothered to do any work on their four pillars, it seemed to her. They hadn’t put a roof over them; they hadn’t even painted the walls—the things that would keep a house up when a pillar got wobbly. But their marriage had nothing supporting it. Their life together only amounted to a simple succession of days.

  In other words, she reflected, they hadn’t known the hardship or the happiness of true conjugal life. But if only they’d been aware that they were lovers, and not husband and wife, and lived out their relationship as it really was, their experience might have been totally different. True, they might have been ostracized, and they would have lost their easy tranquillity—but they might also have felt a keener, more intense kind of joy.

  If she did write a letter to Asari before her death, Noriko told herself, she’d have to be honest with him. “What I regret,” she would say, “is dying without ever finding out what our relationship might have been, had we tried to be husband and wife—or known that we were, in fact, simply lovers living together.”

  The movie was still depicting the husband and wife becoming more and more estranged. One or the other would occasionally attempt a reconciliation, but each time both felt betrayed and ended up feeling more hopeless than ever.

  “Your wife will never get better unless you encourage her more,” the husband’s friend told him. The husband immediately followed this advice.

  “You look wonderful this morning,” he said to her. “Your cheeks are so rosy. The worst must be over by now.”

  The wife took this as a sign of his impatience with her weak condition and forced herself to pretend that she did feel better: At this, her husband said that since she was doing so well, he would be able to take her to a party he’d been invited to the following week.

  A few days later, their little boy ran a fever. They both nursed him through the night.

  “Mummy and Daddy are here, sonny,” the husband told the boy, his arm around her shoulders.

  “Darling,” the wife said, addressing their son. “How many days do you want to stay out of school? Daddy can do everything; if he can cure people, maybe he can arrange for you to be ill as long as you like.”

  The man’s arm fell from her shoulders.

  “I want to get better quickly,” the son said.

  “All right. I’ll make you get well very soon.”

  On the day of the party, the wife came into her husband’s room, dressed up and ready to go out. He had forgotten all about the party, and hurriedly started shaving.

  Despite how badly they got along, there were no fights: only short ironic exchanges between this husband and wife showed how distant their hearts and minds had become. And so the days passed, without any incident that might have led to divorce.

  Noriko turned her now heavy head to look at Asari sitting beside her. His eyes fixed on the screen, his face was bathed in its light. Would he understand if she told him she didn’t think they had ever truly been married? They were nothing like the couple in the movie. But their bond of simple love and affection had allowed them to interpret each other’s words in purely positive ways—the way that he had taken it as a compliment when she said at dinner they were half like newlyweds and half like friends visiting over a cup of tea. The couple in the movie drifted farther apart because they always interpreted each other’s words negatively; but she was Asari’s accomplice in a similar sort of crime, continually inferring only good things in what was said, without really listening.

  She could imagine the way he would reply if she did say to him, “Please listen to me. I’m wondering now if it’s a good thing that we’ve never had a fight.”

  “It is a good thing!” he would say. “Trust me. I know.” And the urge to tell him what she wanted to say would fade, just as it did for the screen couple who never bothered to explain any true state of mind. . . .

  They got hom
e just past ten o’clock, after staying to watch the western.

  “I think I’ll go take a bath,” said Asari.

  Noriko stopped herself from saying she’d go too.

  “That’s good—see you when you get back.”

  When he left the house, she went upstairs, sat at the desk, and took out some paper.

  “I must tell you that if I had to die now, I would have regrets and disappointments,” she wrote.

  She went on to describe her fears that, even though they had been legally married and lived under the same roof, united in mind and body, they hadn’t been a married couple. After listing her reasons, she continued:

  Today, waiting for the bus on my way to the funeral, I looked at my watch: it was just past one o’clock. At that time the day before yesterday, my friend was still alive. She’d eaten lunch, and left the house, just as I had. The thought of death was probably the furthest thing from her mind. When I imagined her driving, without the faintest idea of what was going to happen, I got so frightened that the ticking of my watch scared me. As you said, it must be the worst thing to die unexpectedly. My friend would have had so many things to do, had she known her fate—if she could only have had one more day. . . . That idea made me think about what I would do if I had to die tomorrow afternoon. I didn’t stop thinking about it, even after I’d come home. I started to wonder about your next marriage, which I imagined as something quite different from our own; and then that made me reflect on our life together.

  My dear, our choice was either to become husband and wife in the true sense or consciously live out the relationship that we have—simply a man and a woman who love each other. And I want us to do one or the other now—even if it brings conflict and pain. What I don’t want is to continue to believe that we’re living a married life when we’re not. . . .