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

by Неизвестный

  The student considered a moment, then told her that in the library in Moscow there was a novel so long that no one could read all of it in a lifetime. This novel was not only long, but also as cryptic and cunning as the forests of Siberia, so that people got lost in it and never found their way out again once they’d entered. Since then, Moscow has been the city of her dreams, its center not Red Square, but the library.

  This is the sort of thing my mother told me about her childhood. I was still a little girl and believed in neither the infinitely long novel in Moscow nor the student who might have been my father. For my mother was a good liar and told lies often and with pleasure. But when I saw her sitting and reading in the middle of the forest of books, I was afraid she might disappear into a novel. She never rushed through books. The more exciting the story became, the more slowly she read.

  She never actually wanted to arrive at any destination at all, not even “Moscow.” She would greatly have preferred for “Siberia” to be infinitely large. With my father things were somewhat different. Although he never got to Moscow, either, he did inherit money and founded his own publishing house, which bore the name of this dream city.

  15

  Diary excerpt:

  There were always a few men standing in the corridor smoking strong-smelling Stolica cigarettes (stolica = capital city).

  “How much longer is it to Moscow?” I asked an old man who was looking out the window with his grandchild.

  “Three more days,” he responded and smiled with eyes that lay buried in deep folds.

  So in three days I would really have crossed Siberia and would arrive at the point where Europe begins? Suddenly I noticed how afraid I was of arriving in Moscow.

  “Are you from Vietnam?” he asked.

  “No, I’m from Tokyo.”

  His grandchild gazed at me and asked him in a low voice: “Where is Tokyo?” The old man stroked the child’s head and said softly but clearly: “In the East.” The child was silent and for a moment stared into the air as though a city were visible there. A city it would probably never visit.

  Hadn’t I also asked questions like that when I was a child? —Where is Peking? —In the West. —And what is in the East, on the other side of the sea? —America.

  The world sphere I had envisioned was definitely not round, but rather like a night sky, with all the foreign places sparkling like fireworks.

  16

  During the night I woke up. Rain knocked softly on the windowpane. The train went slower and slower. I looked out the window and tried to recognize something in the darkness. . . . The train stopped, but I couldn’t see a station. The outlines of the birches became clearer and clearer, their skins brighter, and suddenly there was a shadow moving between them. A bear? I remembered that many Siberian tribes bury the bones of bears so they can be resurrected. Was this a bear that had just returned to life?

  The shadow approached the train. It was not a bear but a person. The thin figure, face half concealed beneath wet hair, came closer and closer with outstretched arms. I saw the beams of three flashlights off to the left. For a brief moment, the face of the figure was illumined: it was an old woman. Her eyes were shut, her mouth open, as though she wanted to cry out. When she felt the light on her, she gave a shudder, then vanished in the dark woods.

  This was part of the novel I wrote before the journey and read aloud to my mother. In this novel, I hadn’t built a secret pathway leading home for her; in contrast to the novel in Moscow, it wasn’t very long.

  “No wonder this novel is so short,” my mother said. “Whenever a woman like that shows up in a novel, it always ends soon, with her death.”

  “Why should she die? She is Siberia.”

  “Why is Siberia a she? You’re just like your father, the two of you only have one thing in your heads: going to Moscow.”

  “Why don’t you go to Moscow?”

  “Because then you wouldn’t get there. But if I stay here, you can reach your destination.”

  “Then I won’t go, I’ll stay here.”

  “It’s too late. You’re already on your way.”

  17

  Excerpt from the letter to my parents:

  Europe begins not in Moscow but somewhere before. I looked out the window and saw a sign as tall as a man with two arrows painted on it, beneath which the words “Europe” and “Asia” were written. The sign stood in the middle of a field like a solitary customs agent.

  “We’re in Europe already!” I shouted to Masha, who was drinking tea in our compartment.

  “Yes, everything’s Europe behind the Ural Mountains,” she replied, unmoved, as though this had no importance, and went on drinking her tea.

  I went over to a Frenchman, the only foreigner in the car besides me, and told him that Europe didn’t just begin in Moscow. He gave a short laugh and said that Moscow was not Europe.

  18

  Excerpt from my first travel narrative:

  The waiter placed my borscht on the table and smiled at Sasha, who was playing with the wooden doll Matroshka next to me. He removed the figure of the round farmwife from its belly. The smaller doll, too, was immediately taken apart, and from its belly came—an expected surprise—an even smaller one. Sasha’s father, who had been watching his son all this time with a smile, now looked at me and said:

  “When you are in Moscow, buy a Matroshka as a souvenir. This is a typically Russian toy.”

  Many Russians do not know that this “typically Russian” toy was first manufactured in Russia at the end of the nineteenth century, modeled after ancient Japanese dolls. But I don’t know what sort of Japanese doll could have been the model for Matroshka. Perhaps a kokeshi, which my grandmother once told me the story of. A long time ago, when the people of her village were still suffering from extreme poverty, it sometimes happened that women who gave birth to children, rather than starving together with them, would kill them at birth. For each child that was put to death, a kokeshi, meaning make-the-child-go-away, was crafted, so that the people would never forget they had survived at the expense of these children. To what story might people connect Matroshka some day? Perhaps with the story of the souvenir, when people no longer know what souvenirs are.

  “I’ll buy a Matroshka in Moscow,” I said to Sasha’s father. Sasha extracted the fifth doll and attempted to take it, too, apart. “No, Sasha, that’s the littlest one,” his father cried. “Now you must pack them up again.”

  The game now continued in reverse. The smallest doll vanished inside the next-smallest one, then this one inside the next, and so on.

  In a book about shamans, I had once read that our souls can appear in dreams in the form of animals or shadows or even dolls. The Matroshka is probably the soul of the travelers in Russia who, sound asleep in Siberia, dream of the capital.

  19

  I read a Samoyedic fairy tale:

  Once upon a time there was a small village in which seven clans lived in seven tents. During the long, hard winter, when the men were off hunting, the women sat with their children in the tents. Among them was a woman who especially loved her child.

  One day she was sitting with her child close beside the fire, warming herself. Suddenly a spark leapt out of the fire and landed on her child’s skin. The child began to cry. The woman scolded the fire: “I give you wood to eat and you make my child cry! How dare you? I’m going to pour water on you!” She poured water on the fire, and so the fire went out.

  It grew cold and dark in the tent, and the child began to cry again. The woman went to the next tent to fetch new fire, but the moment she stepped into the tent, this fire, too, went out. She went on to the next one, but here the same thing happened. All seven fires went out, and the village was dark and cold.

  “Do you realize we’re almost in Moscow?” Masha asked me. I nodded and went on reading.

  When the grandmother of this child heard what had happened, she came to the tent of the woman, squatted down before the fire and gazed deep int
o it. Inside, on the hearth, sat an ancient old woman, the Empress of Fire, with blood on her forehead. “What has happened? What should we do?” the grandmother asked. With a deep, dark voice, the empress said that the water had torn open her forehead and that the woman must sacrifice her child so that people will never forget that fire comes from the heart of the child.

  “Look out the window! There’s Moscow!” cried Masha. “Do you see her? That’s Moscow, Moskva!”

  “What have you done?” the grandmother scolded the woman. “Because of you, the whole village is without fire! You must sacrifice your child, otherwise we’ll all die of cold!” The mother lamented and wept in despair, but there was nothing she could do.

  “Why don’t you look out the window? We’re finally there!” Masha cried. The train was going slower and slower.

  When the child was laid on the hearth, the flames shot up from its heart, and the whole village was lit up so brightly it was as if the Fire Bird had descended to Earth. In the flames the villagers saw the Empress of Fire, who took the child in her arms and vanished with it into the depths of the light.

  20

  The train arrived in Moscow, and a woman from Intourist walked up to me and said that I had to go home again at once, because my visa was no longer valid. The Frenchman whispered in my ear: “Start shouting that you want to stay here.” I screamed so loud that the wall of the station cracked in two. Behind the ruins, I saw a city that looked familiar: it was Tokyo. “Scream louder or you’ll never see Moscow!” the Frenchman said, but I couldn’t scream any more because my throat was burning and my voice was gone. I saw a pond in the middle of the station and discovered that I was unbearably thirsty. When I drank the water from the pond, my gut began to ache and I immediately lay down on the ground. The water I had drunk grew and grew in my belly and soon it had become a huge sphere of water with the names of thousands of cities written on it. Among them I found her. But already the sphere was beginning to turn and the names all flowed together, becoming completely illegible. I lost her. “Where is she?” I asked, “Where is she?” “But she’s right here. Don’t you see her?” replied a voice from within my belly. “Come into the water with us!” another voice in my belly cried.

  I leapt into the water.

  Here stood a high tower, brightly shining with a strange light. Atop this tower sat the Fire Bird, which spat out flaming letters: M, O, S, K, V, A, then these letters were transformed: M became a mother and gave birth to me within my belly. O turned into omul’ and swam off with S: seahorse. K became a knife and severed my umbilical cord. V had long since become a volcano, at whose peak sat a familiar-looking monster.

  But what about A? A became a strange fruit I had never before tasted: an apple. Hadn’t my grandmother told me of the serpent’s warning never to drink foreign water? But fruit isn’t the same as water. Why shouldn’t I be allowed to eat foreign fruit? So I bit into the apple and swallowed its juicy flesh. Instantly the mother, the omul’, the seahorse, the knife and the volcano with its monster vanished before my eyes. Everything was still and cold. It had never been so cold before in Siberia.

  I realized I was standing in the middle of Europe.

  TSUSHIMA YŪKO

  Tsushima Yūko (b. 1947) is the daughter of the novelist Dazai Osamu, one of whose works appears in this anthology. Not unlike her father, Tsushima explores her own shifting psychologies in her stories and novels, which have found a wide readership in Japan and earned her many important literary prizes. Two of her novels, Child of Fortune (Chōji, 1978) and Woman Running in the Mountains (Yama o hashiru onna, 1980), as well as a collection of stories, have been translated into English. Her story “That One Glimmering Point of Light” (Hikarikagayaku itten o, 1988) recounts a remarkable incident in a relationship between mother and son; the tragedy in the story is taken from Tsushima’s own experience.

  THAT ONE GLIMMERING POINT OF LIGHT

  (HIKARIKAGAYAKU ITTEN O)

  Translated by Van C. Gessel

  By the time we realized a quarrel had started, it was already too late to do anything. We heard in the same moment a shrill cry like the wail of an infant and a low, husky shout, and then it looked as though one of the women’s bodies was suddenly crumpling before our eyes. The body collapsed face-down to the ground, and though we noticed a pool of red spreading quickly around her, it didn’t occur to us right away that anything serious had happened; we merely looked on blankly at the woman’s disheveled body.

  —She’s dead.

  —Stabbed in the chest.

  —With just a single stroke. What terrible luck!

  —And what a mess the other woman’s gotten herself into—I mean, stabbing someone with a knife.

  —What’s going to happen, now that someone has died?

  Whispers from the onlookers filled the air.

  We were at a park with a lake, not far from my house. A group of women who had graduated from a girls’ high school were getting together for the first time in some while. Both the stabbed woman and the attacker were members of that class.

  Still unable to believe that the stabbed woman could really be dead or that a person could die so easily over something so trivial, we became conscious of the attacker and shifted our gaze toward her. She stood silently beside the dead woman, her back hunched over as though nothing—not her eyes or ears or any other organ—was functioning any longer. The only change was in her complexion, which had turned a pale green. The word “murder” came to mind. All avenues of escape were now closed to her. So many people had witnessed what she did, after all. The blood drained from my face as well, and my legs began to shake. How could a simple argument escalate into something so awful?

  When we were in high school, the assailant was often said to resemble an ac-tress of the day, and she herself was very proud of her well-featured face. She seemed rather stuck-up, an impression exaggerated by the wealth of her family, and she often seemed like a show-off. Even after she married and had children, that impression did not seem to change much. But just now this woman had been transformed into something utterly different, a person deprived of contact with any other human being in the world, a solitary existence stripped even of her name. The transformation was overpowering to me and to the other women, rendering us incapable of movement. All we could do was continue watching the woman from the sidelines. Even if we had wanted to help her by acting as though nothing had happened, now that a person was dead, that wasn’t an option for us. And yet faced with this sudden death, we had no idea what our initial response should be.

  It felt as though a very long time passed. I wondered whether there was something we should have done immediately in order to save the life of the woman that we had decided was already dead. But by now it was too late. The woman’s body had already started to change color and been transformed into a corpse.

  The murderer suddenly straightened up and her features hardened. She first looked in our direction, and we stiffened, fearing she might make some sort of appeal to us. But her eyes never focused on us onlookers. Instead, she tried to lift up the corpse at her feet all by herself. Even though she was able to get both arms around the torso, she was unable to lift the body. Her face flushed red, but still she could not get things to go her way. After examining the situation several times, she picked up both legs of the corpse and began dragging it with all her might. The corpse seemed very heavy—the woman hunched over and clenched her teeth, and even though she was putting every ounce of force into the endeavor, the corpse moved only a little at a time. We continued to watch the woman; it never even occurred to us to try to stop her, much less to help her. The woman, too, had utterly forgotten that there were people around her.

  When she struggled her way to a spot a little way away from us, she placed the corpse to one side and began digging a hole in the ground with both hands. She dug single-mindedly, but since she had no tools, she made little progress. Just what was she planning to do with the corpse? We couldn’t imagine what she was
thinking.

  Having dug the hole—or perhaps it would be better to say that all she had done was stir up the top layer of the soil—the woman seemed to have decided she was finished and stopped digging. She dragged the body to that spot and studiously began to sprinkle soil over it. Once the corpse had disappeared from sight she firmed up the mound with the palms of her hands and rose to her feet. A look of relief washed over her face as though she had now finished handling a bothersome situation, and after vigorously shaking the dirt from her palms she scurried away, still oblivious to those of us who continued to observe her and even appearing to have already forgotten all about the corpse.

  Feeling deflated, we watched her retreat into the distance until we could no longer see her.

  —Does she think that she somehow hid it by burying it in a place like that?

  —She’s made up her mind that nobody saw her.

  —If you make up your mind that nobody saw you, that’s what happens.

  —Now what?

  —Hmm.

  Once again the voices whispered back and forth.

  —I don’t imagine she’ll want to come back here again.

  —She probably assumes she’s basically taken care of everything.

  —Yes, but if she’d just chosen some other place . . .

  —She wasn’t in any state of mind to worry about the location.