Modern Japanese Short Stories

by Ivan Morris

  “So you were the one who brought that girl up, eh? Is she still doing circus work?” asked Constable Miyoshi, recalling as he spoke, a girl in a flimsy green dress, her face thickly powdered, regarding him with dull, listless eyes. But the old woman Kin apparently had no idea what her daughter was doing now. After some years she had heard that Yoshie had run away from the circus troupe and was working at a textile factory in Shizuoka Prefecture; then, after a further lapse of years, news had somehow drifted her way that Yoshie was living with a man who worked at a cotton mill, and that she had a child. Just recently Kin had heard from a dry-goods salesman who visited her village about a woman with a child who was working in this town as a maid at the Seifu Inn. When she had questioned the man more closely she had learned that the woman seemed to have moved recently from somewhere in the midlands, and, when asked about her relatives, the woman had said she knew only a foster mother and was not sure whether she was dead or alive. From all this Kin had concluded that the woman must be Yoshie. She did not know what Yoshie intended, but even if she could not get her to return to her old foster mother, at all events she had to see her, just once. So Kin had come here today, no easy journey at her age, and had discovered that the woman was indeed Yoshie. But she had not seen her. Yoshie had stayed only two months at the inn, leaving again with her child at about the time the snows had started to melt, and no one knew where she had gone.

  The off-duty policemen had all left by this time, and the room had grown quiet. A single electric light shone down dimly on the antiquated chairs and desks.

  “Well, if we make inquiries, we should find her,” said Miyoshi, “but it will take a day or two, you know. Where is it you live?”

  He looked up in surprise when Kin said she was from Akazawa. “What? Do you mean to say you’ve walked from Akazawa?”

  The place was some thirty miles distant, in the mountains. Added to this, Kin told him that she had no relatives or acquaintances of any kind in this neighborhood; but when he suggested that she stay overnight at a cheap lodginghouse, the old woman shrank back toward the bench as if he had threatened her.

  “Whatever next!” she cried, with unexpected vehemence. “It would be wicked, paying good money to sleep at a lodginghouse. Please, just let me stay where I am until morning.” She made no move to go.

  Miyoshi disappeared into the night-duty room. Returning a little later, he found the old woman still standing by the bench. She was taking various articles from her cloth bundle, apparently preparing to sleep where she was, but the constable led her, much against her will, to the night-duty room. When she saw the room she drew back at once.

  “Oh no, really,” she said. “I’ve never slept on a nice matted floor like that in all my life. The wooden boards back there will do me just as well.”

  Eventually, however, when the policemen started opening up the supper boxes their wives had brought them, she advanced hesitantly into the room and began to untie her own bundle. Two eggplants tumbled out, rolling smoothly over the yellowing straw mats, and the old woman pursued them fussily as if she were chasing escaped chickens.

  “Would any of you gentlemen care for one?” she asked, as she retrieved them.

  “Well, thanks all the same, old lady, but we’ve got plenty. Keep them for yourself,” said Miyoshi. Glancing up he saw that, with wrinkled, dirt-lined hands, she was picking at a hash of millet, cold boiled rice, and bean paste, folded in a wrapper of bamboo bark.

  “Here, you try a bit of this instead,” he said, holding out the round lid of his own chinaware supper box, on which were set several morsels of soy-flavored turbot.

  “On dear, no,” protested the old woman, keeping her hands where they were. “After getting you to put me up for the night I can’t take your food too.” At that moment a strange, choking noise sounded in her throat, and she stared straight ahead, her bleary eyes suddenly tense.

  “What’s the matter, old girl?” The policemen were alarmed. Kin hiccupped.

  “It’s nothing,” she said. “My stomach’s a bit queer, that’s all.” She sat holding a ball of rice in her hand, making no further move to raise it to her mouth.

  The night drew on. The old woman had dropped off to sleep, snoring loudly, and the policemen, squatting on the floor at her side, were playing checkers. The station’s detective officer, who had been on duty in the other room, called to them, passing by on his way to the toilet.

  “We’ve got him!” he said. “The poultry thief!” At this the policemen hurriedly slipped on their jackets and, fastening the buttons as they went, trooped out to look. In the custody of the constable from a village three miles down the road stood a surprisingly tall, vacant-looking farm laborer. The case was no direct concern of Constable Miyoshi’s, but he had often heard Yajima, the officer for penal offenses, grumbling about it: poultry had been disappearing at an alarming rate, from villages all over the district, for three or four months now; and in all this time the thief had managed somehow to escape arrest.

  “Is this the man, then? The poultry thief?” he asked, gazing up at the lanky rustic overtopping him by a head. At the same moment he noticed another man, a short, dumpy fellow who looked like some sort of day laborer, standing to the rear of the village constable.

  “Yes, this is the man who’s been taking them all. But while he was out stealing chickens …” Constable Sasaki turned and glanced behind him. “Hey, you! It’s no good trying to hide yourself!” He pulled a muffler away from the short man’s face. “While he was out stealing chickens, this fellow was passing the time with his missus. What do we do about it?” He put the question to Miyoshi, who was his senior.

  Until lately the lanky Kisuké had enjoyed a spotless reputation. He had never even been suspected of filching a sheaf of rice. But his earnings as a hired man on wretchedly small farm holdings had begun to seem hardly worth the trouble, and when faced recently with expenses for his mother’s funeral and for the support of a newborn child, he had began stealing chickens to help out—just two or three fowl on isolated occasions at first, but in time it had become a habit, so that he was out stealing or selling chickens practically every night. Naturally the neighbors had grown suspicious, and, being sensitive to their remarks, Kisuké had at length stayed away completely from his own house. Deciding finally that, with things as bad as they were, he might as well take his wife and child with him and leave the district altogether, he had slipped back home tonight, after an absence of forty days, to carry out his plan. The hour was late and people everywhere were asleep, but from within his own house he had heard the sound of a man’s voice. Turning aside into the garden and peering through a knothole in the drawn shutters, he had caught a glimpse of a face in profile and recognized it as that of Izumiya, formerly a railway laborer in the village over beyond the bridge, but now a gang leader in agricultural assistance work. Kisuké, even without this, was already over-excited, having hurried back in feverish anticipation of the joys of homecoming, and his immediate impulse had been to rush in and beat the life out of the man—but if he was to catch him, he had at once reflected, he might as well catch him in the act: so he had sat himself down in the dark to watch and wait.

  “Do you admit this—about you and Kisuké’s wife?” asked Miyoshi, turning to Izumiya.

  “Whether he admits it or not,” said Kisuké, assuming an expression of solemn righteousness, as if he had come to the police station expressly to complain of this very matter, “I saw it, with my own eyes. Saw it plain and jumped in on him. Saw it plain”—he asserted once more—“with my own eyes.”

  At this point Constable Wakamatsu returned from the toilet.

  “Did you, then?” he shouted at Kisuké. “And I suppose you didn’t see yourself stealing chickens?”

  In contrast with the lanky Kisuké, whose pallor was probably the result of malnutrition and who seemed already resigned to his fate, the round-cheeked, plump little Izumiya was clearly anxious about what was to come, and the beadlike eyes in his swarthy f
ace gleamed with apprehension. After suffering a merciless hiding from Kisuké, who had burst in from the rear of the house without a moment’s warning, Izumiya had run off, dazed and mortified, toward the local policeman’s house, shouting “The poultry thief! The poultry thief!” and yelping like a whipped dog; then, on returning boldly behind the policeman to glory in Kisuké’s downfall, he had suffered the further discomfiture of hearing the arrested man calmly register a formal complaint against him.

  “You must write an apology,” said Constable Miyoshi.

  “Oh, is that all you need, then?” said Izumiya, his expression brightening at once.

  Kisuké, however, looked utterly amazed. “Here!” he protested. “Isn’t this wretch going to be charged?”

  “The one who ought to be charged,” said the constable, “is you. If you hadn’t left your wife alone to starve, this would never have happened!”

  Kisuké looked suddenly dispirited and said no more. With everyone in the village talking about her husband’s misdeeds, Kisuké’s wife had soon found it impossible even to borrow a bowlful of rice from a neighbor, and it was in these straits that she had yielded to the smooth-tongued Izumiya, who had apparently promised her a job in agricultural assistance work.

  “What sort of thing shall I write?” asked Izumiya, turning his diminutive round eyes on Constable Miyoshi, and taking up a pen.

  “First of all,” said the constable, “you write ‘Guarantee.’”

  “Is that the address?” asked Izumiya earnestly.

  “Blockhead!” thundered the local policeman. “A guarantee’s a promise! You have to promise you won’t misbehave again. That’s the regulation.”

  Izumiya was thoroughly abashed, and his next remark was spoken in a low whisper.

  “But, you see,” he said, “fellows like me, with no education, can’t very well write complicated things like this ….”

  Constable Miyoshi wrote out the guarantee for him, and Izumiya, having pressed his thumbprint on the document and bowed obsequiously to all the officers, withdrew toward the door.

  “And if you do it again, you wretch,”—suddenly roused to a fury, Kisuké thrust his unwieldy form across the room after the disappearing Izumiya—“I’ll damn well murder you!”

  Izumiya, who was by this time just beyond the street entrance, whirled around defiantly and, like a beaten small boy calling names and making faces from a safe distance, shouted back: “Yah, dirty thief! I don’t give a damn for a fellow like you! I never want to see your ugly face again! D’ya hear me?”

  Kisuké, not to be outdone, was about to improve on this when Constable Wakamatsu intervened. “Get home, you fool,” he bellowed at Izumiya. “You’ll say too much!” And Izumiya promptly vanished.

  When Miyoshi returned to the night-duty room, having first lodged Kisuké in the detention cell, the old woman Kin, who lay huddled in a corner beneath a padded quilt, was making noises that sounded like stifled moans.

  “What is it, old girl?” he called across, as he poured hot water into an earthenware pot to make tea.

  “It’s nothing. Just pains in my stomach—I’ve always suffered from them,” she replied; and at once she fell quiet. Presently, in the still darkness, coming from somewhere in the direction of the cell at the far end of the cement passageway which separated the night-duty room from the caretaker’s lobby, there sounded the clucking of a hen. The old woman, apparently too exhausted by her stomach pains even to sleep, stirred beneath the quilt.

  “My!” she said, without raising her head or turning it from the wall. “So you keep hens, too—even in the police station!”

  Two or three days ago a young man of eighteen, a farm hand employed by one of the leading families in a neighboring village, had spent a night in the detention cell. The young man had lately, for want of money, been obliged to discontinue his visits to a certain girl in one of the town’s bawdyhouses, and on that night, unable to contain himself longer, he had grabbed three of his employer’s chickens, stuffed them quickly into a basket, not even stopping to secure their legs, and carried them straight off to town. But, while hurrying toward a butcher’s shop with the basket slung across one shoulder, he had suddenly noticed a policeman on patrol duty coming directly toward him down the street. Checking a rash impulse to turn and flee down a side alley—behavior which he realized would have been altogether too suspicious—he had walked boldly on past the policeman, luckily not a man of experience in these matters, and was just heaving a sigh of relief when the birds in the basket had started to cluck. He had been stopped at once and taken to the police station. There, while he was being questioned, the hens had broken loose and wandered idly about beneath desks and chairs, and when the policeman at last noticed this, after finishing his brief ten-line report, and tried to get them back into the basket, the hens had shown a desperate determination to avoid recapture, as if convinced that this time, with no shadow of doubt, they were to be sold to the butcher. After fluttering wildly from desk to desk in the office they had scampered through an open door into the superintendent’s room, jumping up on the table used for entertaining visitors. The whole night staff had turned out to join in the hunt, leaving the thief to look after himself, but, even so, one of the birds, a white Leghorn, had slipped past them into the corridor and, reaching the open space between the caretaker’s lobby and the wash house, had disappeared into the night. No one had seen it since. Constable Miyoshi, feeling certain in his own mind that the noise he had just heard was that same bird still loitering about somewhere outside, went out toward the cell to investigate, and as he did so a further series of clucks greeted him from the darkness at the end of the passage. The owner of the voice, however, was no hen. It was the newly arrested poultry thief, Kisuké.

  “What’s all this?” Miyoshi shouted indignantly. “You in there, this is no place for making stupid noises!”

  “But the constable asked me.” Kisuké’s aggrieved voice floated out from the blackness of the boxlike cell. “The constable himself said to make a noise like a hen.”

  The policeman assigned to duty at the door of the cell turned to Miyoshi. “That’s right, sir,” he said. “I told him to do it. According to what he says, it’s imitating the cluck that’s the secret in stealing hens. I was just investigating, trying to find out what sort of noise it was.”

  Kisuké had been telling him that the only sure method in stealing hens was to creep up close to a bird, clucking expertly all the while, and then, in one movement, seize it and wring its neck. That way, it seemed, the bird never got away and never even scratched you.

  At this moment there was a sound of voices at the front entrance, and Constable Miyoshi hurried back to the office to find a group of policemen gathered around a solitary dejected-looking woman. Her hair, bound backward and upward in the Shimada style, was badly mussed and disheveled, but there was nevertheless a certain professional elegance about her appearance. She wore a muslin kimono of a bold checked pattern, topped by a black neckpiece, and was carrying a samisen. Miyoshi summed her up at a glance as some sort of strolling entertainer.

  “What is it? What’s that woman here for?” he called out from across the room; and then, moving nearer, he noticed a face he recognized, the face of a man called Sakutarō, peeping out from behind the back of Constable Kobayashi, the officer who had brought the woman in.

  “You here again?” he bawled at the man. “Have you seduced this one, too?”

  Sakutarō had given the police, at various times, a great deal of trouble on matters pertaining to women, and Miyoshi remembered his face only too well. Sakutarō beat a big drum while his wife sang, and together they went the rounds of the local villages begging for money. Until the autumn of the previous year they had based themselves in this town, where they had rented a house. At about that time, however, on a visit to a town some thirty miles distant, the customary terminus of their man-and-wife singing tours, they had met up with another group in the same line of trade, and while travelin
g in company with these fellow artistes (both groups having decided that business would be better for all concerned if they joined forces and made one big, noisy party), Sakutarō had formed an intimate relationship with a girl named Sayo in the other troupe. His wife had caught them together one night, and had raised no end of a commotion, but Sakutarō was not the man to resign himself easily to defeat, and finally he and the girl had run away together to a distant part of the prefecture. Sakutarō’s wife and the girl’s uncle had then come to the police to request a search, and before long, thanks largely to the pains of Constable Miyoshi, the runaway couple had been returned. The girl was severely lectured and then handed over at once to her uncle, but Sakutarō, before being dismissed, was locked in the cell for a night. Within an hour from the time of his release the next morning, however, Sakutarō had come running back to the station in a state of great agitation.

  “What is it now?” Miyoshi had chaffed him. “Do you want another spell in the lockup?”

  Sakutarō had feigned alarm at this. “That’s only a joke, officer, isn’t it?” he had said, cringing. “You see, something awful has happened.”

  On returning to his house, it seemed, Sakutarō had found the place stripped bare. His wife, and everything from the furniture to the implements of their trade, was gone; and now he had come to ask for police assistance in tracing the woman.