Radical Shadows

by Bradford Morrow

A New Illness and an Old Cure (Novaya bolezn’ i staroe sredstvo) Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii, volume 4, 1930-31.

  First Aid (Skoraya pomoshch) Peterburgskaya Gazeta, no. 168, June 22, signed “A. Chekhonte.”

  Silence

  and

  The Boat-Women

  A Story and a Dance-Drama

  Yasunari Kawabata

  —Translated from Japanese by Michael Emmerich

  TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

  BOTH “SILENCE” AND “The Boat-Women: A Dance-Drama” come from a single book—a stunning, difficult collection of works in disparate moods and genres, titled beautifully Fuji no Hatsuyuki, First Snow on Fuji. The book was published in April 1958, ten years before Kawabata received the Nobel Prize, one month before his fifty-ninth birthday, and like his other later works it is concerned with forms of presence and absence, with being, with memory and loss of memory, with not-knowing.

  It happens that “Silence” is the story that made me want to translate all of Fuji no Hatsuyuki—that “Silence” is what inspired me, a young translator, to start translating. So it’s particularly pleasing and appropriate that “Silence” should be the first of the works in the collection to appear in English, or in any other language besides Japanese. (Bradford Morrow and I have an idea that the story echoes in its structure Kawabata’s novel The Master of Go. The continuing development of a western context for reading Kawabata and other Japanese writers is thus symbolized in this selection.) It is appropriate, too, that “The Boat-Women” be paired here in Conjunctions with “Silence.” The piece was a first for Kawabata: written in 1954, it was the first of only two works for the stage that Kawabata ever created. Neither “The Boat-Women” nor the second piece, “Sounds of an Old Village,” have received the attention of critics in the West. The poetry of “The Boat-Women” is extraordinary, though, and is perhaps in some sense Kawabataian as nothing else is. If Kawabata’s style is centered in concentration, “The Boat-Women” is concentrated completely.

  The many “verses” in “The Boat-Women” are neither exactly “poems” nor “songs”—they are instead some combination of the two. Each verse is marked in the text with a vaguely mountainlike symbol, which indicates that the line is to be intoned—or chanted? or sung? Certainly the allusive intricacies of the language call to mind the traditions of the Noh—rather than simply spoken. The verses are divided into blocks of five or seven syllables in the Japanese, as Japanese poetry almost always is, and they are written in “classical” or “pre-modern” language; the rest of the dance-drama is composed in more or less “modern” prose. The battle fought between the enemy Genji and Heike clans at Dan-no-Ura in 1185, the history of which is told in The Tale of the Heike, forms the background of the piece. It is perhaps helpful to know that at this battle the Genji triumphed over the more sophisticated Heike, the courtly Heike, and that the story of Dan-no-Ura is one of the most moving and often-told stories in Japanese literature.

  SILENCE

  It is said that Ōmiya Akifusa will never say a word again. It is said that he will never again write a character—though he is a novelist, and only sixty-six years old. What is meant by this is not simply that he will no longer write novels, but that he will no longer write even a single letter or character.

  Akifusa’s right hand is paralyzed, is as useless as his tongue. But I have heard that he can move his left hand a little, and I thus find it reasonable to assume that he could write if he wanted to. Even granting that he would find it impossible to write passages of any length, still it seems likely that he could write words in large katakana when he wanted to ask that something be done for him. And since he is now unable to speak—since he can neither signal nor gesture with freedom—writing even the most crooked katakana would allow him to communicate his thoughts and emotions in a way not otherwise possible. Certainly misunderstandings would be less common.

  However ambiguous words may be, they are certainly much easier to understand than clumsy body language or awkward gestures. Even supposing that old Akifusa managed to show by gestures that he wanted something to drink—by pinching his lips into a shape that suggested sucking, for example, or by miming the act of lifting a cup to his mouth—just making it clear whether it was water or tea or milk or medicine that he wanted, which of just these four—even that would prove difficult. How would he distinguish between water and tea? It would be perfectly clear which he meant if he wrote “water” or “tea.” Even the single letter “w” or “t” would get the message across.

  It is strange, isn’t it, that a man who has made his living for forty years using letters and characters to write words should, now that he has almost entirely lost those letters and characters, and consequently come to understand the powers they possess in the most fundamental sense, and with the greatest certainty—now that he has become able to use them with such knowledge—it is strange, is it not, that he should deny himself their use. The single letter “w” or “t” might be worth more than all the flood, the truly tremendous flood of words and letters he has written in his life. That single letter might be a more eloquent statement, a more important work. It might well have more force.

  I thought I might try saying this to old Akifusa when I visited him.

  Going from Kamakura to Zushi by car one passes through a tunnel, and the road is not very pleasant. There’s a crematorium just before the tunnel, and it’s rumored that lately a ghost has been appearing there. The ghost of a young woman shows up riding in cars that pass beneath the crematorium at night—so the story goes.

  It would still be light when we passed, so there was nothing to worry about, but nonetheless I asked the familiar-looking taxi driver what he knew.

  “I haven’t encountered her yet myself, no—but there is one fellow in our company who’s given her a ride. And it isn’t just our company, either—she’s ridden in other companies’ cabs too. We’ve got it arranged so we take a helper along if we take this road at night,” the driver said. Judging from the way he spoke, he had repeated the story often enough to make him tired of telling it.

  “Where does she appear?”

  “Where indeed. It’s always cars coming back empty from Zushi.”

  “She doesn’t appear when there are people in the car?”

  “Well—what I’ve heard is that it’s empty cars coming back. She fades in near the crematorium, I guess. And from what I hear it’s not like you stop the car and she gets in, either. You don’t know when she gets in. The driver starts feeling a little weird and turns around, and there’s this young woman in the cab. But since she’s a ghost there’s no reflection of her in the rear-view mirror.”

  “That’s bizarre. I guess ghosts don’t reflect in mirrors?”

  “I guess not. They say she has no reflection. Even if human eyes can see her …”

  “Yes, but I suppose human eyes would see her, wouldn’t they. Mirrors aren’t quite so impressionable,” I said. But of course the eyes looking at the mirror were human eyes, weren’t they?

  “But it isn’t just one or two people who’ve seen her,” said the driver.

  “How far does she ride?”

  “Well, you get scared and kind of dazed, and so you start driving really fast, and then when you come into downtown Kamakura you relax, and by then she’s already gone.”

  “She must be from Kamakura, then. She must want to go back to her house in Kamakura. They don’t know who she is?”

  “Ah, now that I don’t know …”

  Even if he did know, or if there was some talk among taxi drivers about who she might be and where she might come from, it was doubtful that the driver would be careless enough to say so to a passenger.

  “She wears a kimono, the ghost—she’s quite a beautiful woman. Not that anyone’s looking back over their shoulder at her or anything. You don’t exactly ogle a ghost’s face.”

  “Does she ever say anything?”

  “I’ve heard she doesn’t speak. It’d be nice if she’d say thank
you at least, right? But of course when ghosts talk they’re always complaining.”

  Just before we entered the tunnel, I looked up over my shoulder at the mountain on which the crematorium stood. It was the Kamakura City Crematorium, so it seemed that most of the dead cremated there would want to return to houses in Kamakura. Maybe it would be nice to have a woman as a symbol of all those dead, riding around at night in empty cabs. But I didn’t believe the story.

  “I wouldn’t have thought that a ghost would need to take a cab. Can’t they go wherever they like, appear anywhere?”

  We arrived at Ōmiya Akifusa’s house soon after we exited the tunnel.

  The cloudy four-o’clock sky was faintly tinged with peach—a sign that spring was coming. I hesitated for a moment at the gate of the Ōmiya house.

  I had only been to visit old Akifusa twice in the eight months since he had himself become a sort of living ghost. The first time was just after his stroke. He was some twenty years my senior, a man I respected, a writer who had been a patron of mine—it was hard for me to see him like that, ugly and miserable as he had become.

  But I knew that if Akifusa ever had a second stroke, it was likely to be the end. We lived in neighboring towns—Zushi and Kamakura are no more than a stone’s throw apart, as we say—and the fact that I had neglected to visit had begun to trouble my conscience. The number of people who had left this world while I considered visiting them, but somehow never did, was by no means small. It had happened so often I had come to believe that this was simply the way life was. I had been thinking of asking Akifusa to write out something for me on a sheet of hansetsu paper, but the idea had come to seem pointless. And the same thing had happened to me several times. Sudden death wasn’t the sort of thing I could treat casually. I was perfectly aware that I myself might die at any moment—perhaps one night in a storm—and I did not take good care of myself.

  I knew other authors who had died suddenly of cerebral hemorrhages or heart failures, of coronary strictures—but I had never heard of anyone being saved but paralyzed, as old Akifusa had been. If one views death as the greatest misfortune of all, one would have to say that Akifusa was extremely fortunate to go on living, even though he lived as a patient with no hope of recovery—as a disabled man. But that sense of good fortune was rather difficult for most of us to feel. It was also difficult for us to tell whether Akifusa himself felt that he had been fortunate.

  Only eight months had passed since Akifusa suffered his stroke, but from what I’d heard the number of people visiting him had already grown quite small. It can be difficult to deal with an old deaf man, but it’s no less difficult to deal with a man who is able to hear, but can’t speak. He understands what you say to him, though you don’t understand what he wants to say to you—it’s even stranger than talking to a deaf person.

  Akifusa’s wife had died early on, but his daughter, Tomiko, had remained with him. There were two daughters, but the younger one had married and moved out—Tomiko, the older daughter, had ended up staying to take care of her father. There was no real necessity for Akifusa to remarry, since Tomiko took care of all the household chores—indeed, he had relished the freedoms of single life—and one might say for this reason that Tomiko had been obliged to make certain sacrifices for her father. The fact that Akifusa remained single, despite having had numerous affairs, suggests too that the power of his will was such that it overcame his emotions—or perhaps something else was going on.

  The younger daughter was tall and had exceptionally fine features—she resembled her father somewhat more than her sister did—but this wasn’t to say that Tomiko was the kind of young woman one would expect to remain unwed. Of course, she was no longer a young woman—she was approaching forty, so she wore almost no make-up at all—but one sensed a purity in her. She seemed always to have been a quiet sort of person, but she had none of the gloominess and irritability of an old maid. Perhaps her devotion to her father provided some comfort.

  People who came to visit always talked to Tomiko instead of Akifusa. She sat beside her father’s pillow.

  I was startled to see how terribly thin she had become. It seemed odd to me that I was surprised, which meant that it was natural for her to be thin—but even so, seeing Tomiko suddenly grown so old and shriveled depressed me. It occurred to me that the people in that house were suffering.

  There was nothing for me to say once I had said the pointless words of a sickbed visitor, so I ended up saying something I shouldn’t have said.

  “There’s a rumor going around that a ghost has been appearing on the other side of the tunnel—have you heard? I asked the driver about it on the way here, as a matter of fact …”

  “Is there really? I’m always in the house—I don’t hear about anything.” It was clear that she wanted to know more, and so—thinking all the while that it would have been better not to mention the matter—I summed up what I knew.

  “Well, it’s the sort of story one can hardly believe—at least not until one actually sees the ghost. Of course, one might not believe the story even if one did see it. There are always illusions, after all.”

  “You ought to look for it tonight, Mr. Mita—find out if it really exists,” Tomiko said. It was an odd thing for her to say.

  “Oh, but you see it doesn’t appear when it’s light out.”

  “The sun will have set if you stay for dinner.”

  “Unfortunately I’m afraid I can’t. Besides, it seems that the woman’s ghost only rides in empty cars.”

  “Well if that’s the case you have nothing to worry about, do you? My father is saying that he’s extremely pleased you’ve come, and that he hopes you’ll make yourself at home. Father—you’ll have Mr. Mita to dinner, won’t you?”

  I looked at old Akifusa. It seemed as though the old man had nodded his head on his pillow. Was he pleased that I had come? The whites of his eyes were clouded and bleary, and there were smudges of yellow even in his pupils—but it seemed that from the depths of those smudges his pupils were glittering. It seemed that he would suffer his second stroke when those glitterings burst into flame—it seemed it might happen at any moment—I felt uneasy.

  “I’m afraid I’ll tire your father if I stay too long, and that might …”

  “No. My father doesn’t get tired,” Tomiko stated clearly. “I realize that it’s unpleasant of me to keep you here with a man as sick as my father, but he remembers that he’s a writer himself when there’s another writer here …”

  “He—what?”

  I was somewhat surprised by the change that had occurred in Tomiko’s tone of voice, but I prepared myself to stay for a while.

  “Surely your father is always aware that he’s a writer.”

  “There’s a novel of my father’s that I’ve been thinking about a lot since my father became like this. He wrote about this young man who wanted to be a writer—the boy had been sending strange letters to him pretty much every day, and then he went completely mad and was sent off to a sanitorium. Pens and inkpots are dangerous, and they said that pencils were dangerous too, so they wouldn’t let him have them. Manuscript paper was the only thing they would let him have in his room. Apparently he was always there in front of that paper, writing … at least he thought he was writing. But the paper stayed white. That much was true, the rest is my father’s novel. Every time the boy’s mother came to visit, he would say—Mom, I wrote it, Mom, will you read it? Mom, will you read it to me? His mother would look at the manuscript he handed her, and there would be nothing written on it at all, and she would feel like crying, but she’d say—Oh, you’ve written it very well, it’s very good, isn’t it!—and she would smile. Every single time she went he would pester her to read the manuscript to him, so she starts reading the blank paper to him. It occurs to her to tell him stories of her own, making it seem that she’s reading the manuscript. That’s the main idea behind my father’s novel. The mother tells the boy about his childhood. No doubt the crazy boy thinks h
e’s having his mother read some sort of record of his memories, something that he wrote himself—that’s what he thinks he’s listening to. His eyes sparkle with pride. His mother has no idea whether or not he understands what she’s saying, but every time she comes to see him she repeats the same story, and she gets better and better at telling it—it begins to seem like she’s actually reading a story of her son’s. She remembers things she had forgotten. And the son’s memories grow more beautiful. The son is drawing the mother’s story out, helping her, changing the story—there’s no way of telling whose novel it is, whether it’s the mother’s or the son’s. When the mother is talking she’s so focused she forgets herself. She’s able to forget that her son is mad. As long as her son is listening to her with that complete concentration, there’s no way of knowing if he’s mad or not—he could very well be mad and sane both. And at those times the souls of the mother and the child fuse together—it’s like the two of them are living in heaven—the mother and the child are both happy. As she goes on reading to him it begins to seem that her son might get better, and so the mother goes on reading the blank paper.”

  “That’s the one called What a Mother Can Read, isn’t it?—one of your father’s masterpieces. An unforgettable work.”

  “The book is written in the first person—the son is the ‘I’—but some of the things he remembers about his childhood actually happened to my sister and me when we were small. He just had it all happen to a boy …”

  “Is that so?”

  It was the first time I had heard this.

  “I really wonder why my father wrote a novel like that. The book scares me now—now that he’s like this. My father isn’t mad, and I can’t be like that mother and read him a novel that hasn’t been written down—but I do wonder if he isn’t writing a novel in his head even now.”

  It struck me that Tomiko was a peculiar person—able to say things like this even though old Akifusa probably heard every word. I didn’t know how to respond.