by Неизвестный
NOMA HIROSHI
Like Dazai Osamu and many others of his generation, Noma Hiroshi (1915–1991) was deeply interested in Marxism while he was in college. During the war, he was conscripted into the Japanese army and fought in a number of battles. His military experiences are described in his novel Zone of Emptiness (Shinkū chitai, 1952), which was translated into both English and French within a few years, quickly earning him an international reputation. Noma’s short story “A Red Moon in Her Face” (Kao no naka no akai tsuki), published shortly after the war in 1947, suggests as well his interest in experimenting with contemporary European forms of fiction writing.
A RED MOON IN HER FACE (KAO NO NAKA NO AKAI TSUKI)
Translated by James Raeside
There was a kind of expression of suffering in the face of the widow Horikawa Kurako. Not that her face bore that type of so-called unapproachable, elegant beauty sometimes seen in Japanese women, a face that conveys a sense of soft flesh enclosed in a rather cold outline; nor was it the type whose attractiveness derives from the way one feature—eyes or nose or mouth—upsets the harmony of the whole. As a face, it had, if anything, the regularity associated with a runof-the-mill kind of beauty. Yet, undoubtedly, there was something warped about it, as if, in the midst of burgeoning life, something had been forcibly torn from it, and this had given her face a beauty that was filled with an unusual degree of energy. Suffering appeared in the middle of it, as if working its way out from her wide, white forehead and the under-fleshed area around her mouth, which shifted frequently in response to changes in the world outside.
As the number of occasions on which he looked at her face grew, Kitayama Toshio recognized that its expression was gradually penetrating into the depths of his heart. A little under a year ago he had come back from the tropics and taken a job in a firm belonging to an acquaintance, situated on the fifth floor of a building near Tokyo station, and he often bumped into her in the corridor, in the elevator, or near the entrance to the bathroom. On those occasions, he had discerned this strange kind of pained expression in her face. He became aware that the woman’s face worked upon the suffering within his own heart with a spiritual sweetness that was coupled with pain.
He was unable to estimate her age. Or rather, he never wondered about it— that is, from the outset, her age had been hidden from him by her beauty. Naturally, this was because he had gone for a long time without seeing any women from his own country, and also perhaps because, having had a painful experience in the past, he had lived resolving to avoid women in general. Also, he was not aware that she had once been married. He guessed her to be much younger than she actually was, and for that reason he thought it strange that such a youthful face should so clearly preserve and express what lay within—something very rare among Japanese women.
Because she worked at the Yachiyo New Development Company in the office facing his own, she was separated from him by a corridor. The corridor was long and dark with offices of exactly the same pattern along both sides, so the occasions when he met her or brushed past her were very brief, and he did not have the time to inspect her face closely; however, from her face as it floated up in the dark atmosphere of the corridor or when it was before him, sandwiched between a mass of backs in the elevator, he felt an energy of beauty released and directed at him, like that of a landscape close to sunset at the instant of its intensest radiance, when it is just on the point of fading, when the sharply defined line of a mountain range and the line of the horizon glow with that last, strangely powerful beam of light shining from a sky huge with silence. At first he had only been concerned with this aspect of her face, but recently he had come to realize that the quality of suffering in her facial expression had penetrated everywhere throughout her rather small body, clad in a somber, blackish suit, and itself at odds with that face of hers. He also felt that her appearance, seemingly steeped in suffering, was reviving in him memories of a painful experience from his past. Without doubt, that face had a beauty that well matched the suffering he had inside him, but it was impossible for him to understand why her face approached so exactly what was in his heart. However that may be, that face of hers did touch the suffering there. Sometimes, as he was going down the stairs, he would suddenly feel something squeezing him around the chest. He didn’t understand what it was at first, but in fact it was the impression of her suffering face sinking deep into his mind. He sensed that the woman’s face was at the core of whatever it was that was squeezing his heart. So he fixed his gaze on that face within his breast. His heart ached and he was seized with a vague anxiety; he was plunged into the sensation that the feet under him would no longer respond to his will. Then suddenly, a dark, incomprehensible thunderbolt of emotion passed through his breast. It came whirling up from the deepest recess of his memory, wielding a power that his present strength was completely unable to withstand. And it laid him low.
“Ah, no!” He stopped dead for a moment. “No, no!” He shook his head. Nonetheless, he was rocked by chaotic memories that he had no idea how to dispel. He became aware that the words he himself would not affirm, words denying human life, denying humanity, were forcing their way up from inside him. It was an unendurable moment, it seemed to him that his whole body was lit, from inside to the tips of his fingers, by a dark lightning that passed through him and then was gone.
He told himself, No, it’s not true; I don’t think that at all, I don’t reject humanity. . . . I’m better intentioned than that. I’m a straightforward soul. I have much, much more faith in humanity than that. Yet he recalled the very different impression of day-to-day humanity that he had gained when fighting in the field, and he suffered the attacks of that fanged beast that resides in all human beings. He knew that the tooth marks left by the cruel fangs of his fellow soldiers on the battlefield were still clearly evident in his skin, and, at the same time, that he had left the same kind of tooth marks in the skin of his comrades; he shuddered at the thought of the selfish guise that human beings assume when their lives are in danger on the battlefield.
The reason why the appearance of Horikawa Kurako caused the antihuman voice to arise and the memories of the battlefield to be revived in Kitayama Toshio was that her appearance corresponded to that of another suffering woman. When he saw Horikawa Kurako, he could clearly picture in his mind his own pitiful figure walking through the battle zone, nursing in his heart the image of that other woman.
In the past Kitayama Toshio had taken for a lover a woman whom he could not, for the life of him, love from the bottom of his heart. She was, so to speak, a substitute for his lost love: a woman whom he had loved beforehand, but who had soon left him. This lost love of his had not been particularly wonderful or endowed with extraordinary qualities; it was just his tough luck that he’d met such a woman in the intense and feverish era of youth. Following a pattern of behavior commonly seen in adolescent lovers, he had idealized this woman. Enumerating all her real or imaginary graces, he had placed her on a pedestal. But then, since her family opposed him and he was unable even to overcome that opposition, leaving her uncertain of his ability to make his way in life, the woman had announced she wanted to break things off. Yet even while hating her, he had continued to preserve her image in his heart. Then his next girlfriend had made her appearance. This woman, who worked as a clerk at the munitions company where he was employed, had been in love with him. Unlike his first love, this woman had immediately given him everything. She was sickly with a thin face and skinny neck and hips, but she was intelligent and her upbringing and cast of mind matched his own. Although he’d had the strength to endure the loss of his previous love alone, he was not the kind of person who could bear to be always solitary; nor was he strong-willed enough to forgo the prop to his vanity that he derived from the proximity of a woman who loved him; thus, he also lacked the willpower to back off from her proffered love. Yet, because it had been obtained so easily, he was not able to comprehend that the love of this woman who believed in him completely, who gave him
everything, was precious in a way that he would never find again in his lifetime. He had taken her on as a substitute for his former love and that was how he loved her. He looked at her, indeed, with a callous eye. As he touched the skin of her breast, which was weak, even slack, he felt the chill in his own heart. His eyes compared her breasts to those of his former love and the soft flesh they had enclosed. That feeling of something missing, of dissatisfaction, made him think his heart had shriveled inside. It irritated him to realize that there was no sort of an inviting sexuality that drew him to her face, in a way a rather modern face, with its pale, narrow forehead and slightly protuberant cheekbones. When he brought her face nearer, he felt a wave of contempt for the clumsy way she had applied her rouge. Of course it was not as though he habitually thought about her in this cold way . . . but when such thoughts became very frequent, the devoted love she showed for him weighed heavily on him. It oppressed him to feel his body enfolded by the full, passionate feeling that seemed to flow from her heart.
News of her death had come to him while he was in the army, still stationed at home, and only then, as a result of her death, did he realize how criminal had been his pretense of love toward her. For, in the course of the life full of hardship that he was leading as a new recruit, he was finally forced to comprehend how great the value of love was. There was a saying among the enlisted men that you only find out how wonderful your ma’s love is after you get in the army, and in his army bunk he too would think of his mother, and of love. He thought of the greatness of one human being loving another. In a certain sense, it’s a saccharine, comical idea: a man over thirty, wet with tears, nibbling a bun between the blankets, working out from his everyday life as a soldier—a life strictly bound by training and private brutalities—the belief that the only thing necessary in human life was love, that love alone had value. With his own chilled hands, he stroked his cheeks, swollen and purple where they had been struck by the soles of army boots, and he thought of his mother’s soft hands, of the gentle palms of his dead lover. When he was in the field, these thoughts became even more intense—that is, while they were stationed in Japan, there were still some reciprocal feelings of sympathy and pity among the new recruits who all were experiencing the same miseries. In the darkness beside the latrines, they exchanged brief words filled with pity for each other. During life at the front, however, while constantly oppressed by the incoming enemy bullets and by the shortage of food, their mutual sympathy naturally disappeared—of course as far as their attitudes toward officers and senior privates were concerned, but even toward their fellow new recruits. He understood that, in the face of fierce combat, each human being would simply protect his own life with his own strength, console himself for his own suffering, and grasp his own death with his own hands. Just as they all selfishly guarded the water in their water bottles, they desperately clutched the life in the leather bottles of their selves. No man ever gave any of his water to another; no one ever risked his life for the benefit of another. If one individual’s physical strength was inferior—even by just a little—to that of his comrades, he rapidly dropped out of the conflict, and death swooped upon him. Giving up your food to another when the entire platoon was starving would mean your own death. And comrades in arms faced each other down over possession of a single item of food.
When in the intervals between the extreme tensions of hand-to-hand combat he thought back briefly over the half of his life he had lived so far, it seemed to him that, of all the many people he had met, all the colleagues and friends, the only ones who had really loved him had been his mother and his dead lover. . . . During a lull in the fighting, in that agonizing silence that descended on the front when an outpost of enemy skirmishers had strangely ceased firing, he looked ahead through the sights of the 41-caliber field gun, searching for the clump of trees behind the wide grassfield, which was his next target; in those moments, it seemed to him that, from out of his past life, the figures of the two people who had truly loved him rose up tremulously and hastened toward him. In the scene as it was displayed in his sights, his dead lover walked toward him with her large left foot swung outward as she walked, a gait she had never been able to correct. He felt her appearance penetrate his suffering heart. Recalling her awkward gait he felt a trembling in his heart—now brought to the point of exhaustion by heat and fatigue—for he had wounded his former lover while she was alive, when he used to look down as he walked with her and inwardly sneer at the way she twisted her left foot. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, he said in his heart as he faced the enemy. And so, keeping in his breast the image of this lover who had given him all she had without regret, he had endured the hardship of battle.
He had come to the Southern Front from China. As a junior private, his battle was not fought with the enemy—it was a battle he fought with fellow Japanese soldiers. Because of the intense heat, the horses all developed saddle sores, the hide on their backs peeling off in strips. Even when wearing saddle blankets, the horses could not be put to service, so the low-ranking privates took the place of horses in pulling the gun carriage. They could not march during the day because of the power of the sun, so most marches were done at night. They would get up at one in the morning, start off at one-thirty, and set camp at eleven that same morning. When they set camp, however, the junior privates had to take care of the horses, check the ammunition, service the guns, and prepare food—they got only about two hours sleep a night. Tired as they were, they could hardly pull the gun carriages forward at all, so the senior soldiers, the fourth- and fifth-year privates, would beat the juniors who stood in for the horses, until, finally, the juniors started to defend themselves against these attacks. To these junior privates, the enemy was not the foreign enemy before them, but the fourthand fifth-year privates, the NCOs and officers at their sides.
Thus beaten by enemies from his own camp, with the image of his lover in his heart and the traces of the gun carriage over his shoulder, Kitayama Toshio pulled the gun onward through undergrowth from which geckos called.
“What are you thinking about? You’re thinking about that again, aren’t you?” his dead lover had sadly questioned him as, their lovemaking finished, he remained silent and unmoving. She was well aware that he was dissatisfied with her. She was sure that, once again, he was thinking of his former lover.
“I’m not thinking of anything,” he instantly denied. But his tone of voice was certainly not one of denial; instead, it contained an acknowledgment of her accusation.
In her letters she often wrote to him: “I don’t know any other way of living but to love you, whatever you may think of me.” Then she wrote, “Some day you too will understand how I feel. Even though I might be dead by then. . . .” So when he thought of her, and her feelings emerged from these banal phrases to pierce his breast, he considered he deserved all the suffering he was undergoing.
Go on, suffer more, he told himself, as he pulled the gun forward under the whips of the fifth-year privates. Fields of sugar cane, set ablaze by Filipino soldiers and now burnt black, stretched out darkly far below. Through a haze of dust stirred by the soldiers, the large red sun of the tropics rose above the line of the cliffs. The soldiers’ faces were jaundiced and wracked with fever; their sweat-stained summer uniforms appeared dyed red by the sun’s light. The company was stretched out a long way, advancing along the gradually narrowing mountain path in a broken line. From behind came the hoarse voice of the company commander, “Number Two, Number Three, change places.” Replacements came up from the midst of the ranks with wordless groans, their gas masks hanging down in front of them while the dust, soaked by the sweat that ran down them, clung like black moss to their jackets.
Handing over the traces of the second gun-carriage shaft, Kitayama Toshio, along with Number Three, Private, Second Class, Nakagawa, a former fishmonger, fell out of line. Yet he had no notion of when he had handed over the traces to his replacement or why it was that he had fallen out of line. The back of his neck was fever
ish, his eyes clouded, the outline of his heart, jumping in his chest, knocked against his chest wall. Together with Private, Second Class, Nakagawa, he remained standing there as if petrified, but at last they joined the very end of the line. . . . They began to walk, each taking the reins of a skinny, saddleless horse, the bones of whose flanks stuck out, which their replacements had clung to until then. But they no longer had the strength to walk along with the horses. Their feet, inside military gaiters that they had not taken off for ten days, had lost all feeling. And it was as if they were shedding a great quantity of blood with each step they took up the slope.
“What are you doing there!” The lance corporal acting as platoon leader came back to the tail of the line and let his whip fall on their hands as they clutched the horse’s reins. “Don’t you know the horse will snuff it if you hang on to it like that! We can replace you two, but we can’t replace the horse. Now, don’t come whining to me about every little thing in this fucking heat.”
Wordlessly they looked up at the lance corporal, then, resignedly, they let the reins go slack and walked at a greater distance from the horse. But their feet did not move. It was as though, no matter how deeply they breathed out, dirty air remained in their lungs to choke them. The straps of their gas masks pressing down on their right shoulders seemed to finally stop all breathing. . . . The surface of the mountain, which soaked up the febrile rays of the sun during the day, at night time gave off a burning heat that enveloped the bodies of the troops and blocked their pores with dust and sweat. One might say that it was only the form of the company marching before them and dragging their bodies after it that caused them to carry on walking.
“I can’t walk no more,” came the voice of the fishmonger, Private, Second Class, Nakagawa from the far side of the horse’s body, which was pulling him. This was the same declaration that he had made umpteen times before, and his voice bored into the exhausted mind of Kitayama Toshio. His strength worn completely down, Nakagawa had now lost all the energy necessary to move his heavy-boned frame. “This time, I’ve really had it. I just can’t walk no more.” Still, he continued to walk for another thirty minutes, dragged along by the horse.