by Ivan Morris
At lunch time a few days later, the boy said to his father: “Granny’s keeping that cloth with the blood on it.”
“Really?” said Minobé. “Why?”
At that, Umé again extracted the dish cloth from her dress and held it up for all to see. In the center was a dark stain that could be recognized as blood.
“I’m keeping this as a memento,” she said. “I’ll show it to people so that they’ll realize how I’ve been treated here.”
“You know perfectly well that it was a mistake, Granny,” said Minobé.
“I’m not so sure about that,” Umé said. She had abandoned her usual deferential tone and spoke defiantly, almost harshly.
“All right,” said Minobé, “if that’s going to be your attitude, I can be just as disagreeable as anyone else.”
At once Umé lowered her head and gave out an old woman’s cackle.
“Of course it was a mistake,” she said. “I was only joking.”
Staring at Umé, Minobé suddenly remembered the Confucian teachings on filial piety and respect for one’s elders. Was it possible that the Master had had sly, wicked old women like this in mind when he expounded his noble precepts? To respect an insensitive old woman like Umé, conscious as she was of only the physical aspects of life, was like worshiping a stone idol. Umé had become just a body, in which it was impossible to detect the slightest trace of soul, spirit, conscience, or anything that makes human beings worthy of respect. Her greatest worry in life was that her grandchildren or great-grandchildren might be getting better food than she herself.
To be sure, thought Minobé, there were people like Kōda Rohan, the great scholar, whose intellectual powers remained unimpaired until his death at the age of eighty. Such people, indeed, seemed as they grew older to become constantly more sensitive and intelligent. They were one in a thousand. The remaining nine hundred and ninety-nine were destined to become distasteful, useless lumps of flesh, the scourge of relatives and a burden to society. There was hardly a family in Japan that did not suffer from the system in which old people had to be either cared for by their children or committed to primitive and sinister institutions. People had been complaining for years, but the traditional family system still lingered on, with all its inefficiency, hypocrisy, sentimentality, and injustice. It was high time for something to be done—not by sociologists, but by people all over Japan who were themselves suffering from these anachronistic traditions. “Study the demeanor of your parents,” Confucius had told Tzu-hsia, “and never fail to treat them with true deference and affection.” That, thought Minobé, might be all right in the case of people like Kōda Rohan, but for old Umé and her kind the maxim seemed totally inappropriate.
That very evening Minobé was dismayed to hear a farmer’s wife say to Sachiko: “My, my, your old lady’s looking fit as a fiddle, isn’t she? She seems to be putting on a bit of weight too.”
“Are you sure she isn’t swelling up with water?” said Sachiko hopefully.
“Oh no,” said the woman, “it’s the clean country air and plain food that’s done it. She’s good for another five or six years, mark my words.”
“The question is,” said Sachiko with a sigh, “are we?”
VI
Not long afterward, Minobé was able to take over a house in Tokyo from a friend. He hired a van for the day and piled it high with furniture, luggage, and the six members of his family. The people whom they passed on the road stared in amazement at the huge load, and occasionally Minobé detected a look of sympathy on their faces. Umé sat on a packing case, her body shaking rhythmically in response to the vibration. After a few hours, she began muttering querulously, and Sachiko had to lift her up like a baby and hold her over the side of the truck while she relieved herself. At that moment Sachiko could not help feeling bitter hatred for this old woman with her withered body and long, chicken-like legs.
In the new house Umé was assigned a small room of her own next to the toilet. Here she would sit quietly and give herself over to a new and particularly annoying habit that she had acquired since her return to Tokyo: taking any piece of material she could lay hands on—clothes, towels, or sheets—she would systematically tear it to shreds. In the case of clothes, she would first rip the material from the hem upward into strips about one centimeter in width, and then start on the sleeves; by die time she had finished, the pieces were so small that they could riot even be used for dusters. Her usual expression while she did this was one of guileless vacancy, though as she tore up a particularly long piece or sat contemplating a huge pile of tatters, one could observe an enigmatic smile playing on her lips.
No one could make out the origin of this new quirk. Was it that Umé, whose entire youth had been devoted to the art of needlework (one of the few accomplishments then considered suitable for women of breeding), felt in some paradoxical way that by tearing material she was at least persevering in her specialty, even though she was now too old to do so constructively? Or was it that in an access of spite she had resolved that none of her clothes or other possessions should ever accrue to this family which had treated her so heartlessly in her declining years? Or was it just the sheer joy of vandalism? The result, in any case, was that, despite Sachiko’s best efforts, Umé’s wardrobe had soon dwindled to nothing. Because of the strict rationing, it was impossible to replace the shredded garments, so Sachiko had to give her grandmother some of her own castoff clothes. With their modern pattern and bright colors, they produced a somewhat ludicrous effect on the old lady. In the end they too were, of course, torn to bits.
“It’s funny how Granny only likes things with salt,” said Sachiko one day, “Most old people like sweet things, but she’ll only eat things when they’re salted or spicy.”
“Let’s hope she doesn’t get pickled and live forever,” said Minobé.
“Yes,” said Sachiko, “the kindest thing she could do for herself and everyone else would be to die. Why do you suppose she goes on living like this?”
Minobé shrugged his shoulders. “In the Far East, longevity’s supposed to be a wonderful thing,” he answered. “For some reason it’s considered a feat to grow very old, even though one doesn’t have the slightest pleasure in being alive and is just a nuisance to everyone around. Take that old dog next door. Its owners go around boasting to everyone that they’ve got a dog who’s lived to be fifteen. And yet the poor old thing is blind and lame, and should have died years ago. Evidently in Japan we can’t even let animals die at the proper time.
“The fact is that once people are wrecks, like Granny, life becomes a spiteful force which turns on its owner, as if to punish him for hanging on to it so long. The blessings of old age, indeed! All Granny really cares about is eating, but because she’s over sixty, the government will let her have only a reduced ration. That’s what I mean by life turning on people if they live too long. And when they finally do die, what sort of memory do they leave behind? Just the memory of their last ugly, unhappy years. Granny once was a lovely woman, to judge from her photos, but what we’ll remember is a hideous, wicked old hag. Surely people should fade out like music, leaving a beautiful melody in the air.”
Almost all day, apart from mealtimes, Umé lay half-asleep by the charcoal brazier in the living room. At night, however, she was wide awake. As soon as the family had gone to sleep, she would wander out into the passage and start complaining raucously of hunger. Finally someone would have to get up and give her a piece of bread, a potato, or a rice ball.
She now visited the toilet four or five times a night; they left the light on permanently. Sometimes she would go and stand in the lavatory for ten or fifteen minutes, peering out the window. They could hear her muttering loudly to herself: “Ah, that’s the moon over there. It’s getting pale. It’ll soon be time for breakfast….” As she was gradually becoming incontinent, the first person to visit the toilet in the morning would usually find it in an appalling mess. Minobé wondered if this, too, was not an unconscious attem
pt to punish the family for imagined ill-treatment.
She occasionally suffered from hallucinations. One night Minobé awoke to the sound of fearful cries from Umé’s room: “Help, help, I’m dying! Oh, they’re killing me! Help, help!”
Jumping out of bed, he rushed to the rescue, but found Umé sitting up in bed as if nothing had happened. “What’s wrong, Granny?” he asked, but she only shook her head, staring at him blankly. Minobé gave her a glass of water and went back to his room. He wondered if the old woman had been confronted with some horrible vision of death.
A few days later, she grabbed one of her great-grandsons by the arm as he was walking by, and held out a ten-yen note.
“Run down and buy me one yen’s worth of rice and a yen’s worth of tobacco,” she said.
“I can’t, Granny,” answered the boy. “Everything’s rationed. Besides, one yen wouldn’t buy even a button.”
“Nonsense, child!” said Umé. “Well, if you won’t go, you can open the window and call for the errand boy down there by the corner. He did my shopping for me yesterday.”
Evidently her mind had gone back to a time fifty years before when she had lived in Tokyo with her husband, and errand boys used to wait on the street corners. Now, understanding that she could expect no help from her great-grandson, Umé took down a small basket from the shelf; she wrapped her tattered dressing gown tightly about her and tottered out into the passage, clasping her ten-yen note.
“Where are you off to, Granny?” said Minobé, as he saw her passing the living room.
“I’m going out shopping.”
“You’ll have quite a job!” said Minobé. “But don’t let me stop you.”
This seemed to discourage her, for instead of going out, she visited the toilet, and no more was heard of the shopping expedition.
Later that day, Minobé heard the old woman’s voice droning away monotonously in her room. He stopped and listened.
“Isn’t that the Lotus Sutra Granny’s reciting?” he said to Sachiko.
“No,” she said, “it’s The Greater Learning for Women. They had to learn it by heart at school. I suppose she’s trying to see how much she can remember.”
The Greater Learning for Women! That eighteenth-century classic which claims to set forth in one volume the essentials of a woman’s moral training seemed to have profited Umé little in her long life. Minobé remembered the opening sentences: “Parents, rather than to bestow upon your daughters fine garments and divers vessels, better were it to teach them these precepts, which will guard them as precious jewels throughout their days….”
She had begun reciting again, in a toneless, hurried chant which seemed almost entirely bereft of meaning. Only once in a while would an intelligible phrase emerge: “Not because of its height is yon mountain august….” This, it seemed, was all that remained of Umé’s arduous years of rote learning.
Then suddenly, with scarcely any change of expression, Umé said: “What about lunch? Haven’t I missed my lunch?”
“Of course not, Granny,” said Minobé. “You finished lunch an hour ago.”
“Really?” said Umé. “I feel as if I hadn’t eaten for ages.”
The suspicion that she might have missed a meal, and was now being tricked into believing that she had eaten it, showed clearly on her face. And yet it was hardly surprising that Granny had forgotten about lunch, reflected Minobé. During her life she must have eaten almost one hundred thousand meals, and over thirty thousand of them had been lunches.
As soon as Umé awoke from one of her naps, she would start wailing: “Oh, I’m hungry! I’m dying of hunger! Bring me something to eat, for pity’s sake—a rice ball, an onion pickle, anything. Only hurry!” Sometimes there were variations: “Help, the fire’s gone out! I’m dying of cold. Come and light the fire, someone.” Or: “Water, water! For mercy’s sake, master, bring me a glass of water!”
An especially irritating habit was her referring to people in terms of exaggerated obsequiousness, as if to imply that only so could she prevail on them to help her. Thus Minobé became “master,” Sachiko was “madam” or “mistress,” and her great-grandchildren “young sirs.” As he stood painting in his studio-room, Minobé would hear her shrill voice: “Oh, my dear mistress, may I crave a few grains of rice to calm my hunger?” or “Young sir, have mercy on an old woman and bring a glass of water.” Despite his resolutions, Minobé would sometimes fling his paintbrush to the floor.
Her pilfering continued, and indeed had grown worse. If, on waking, she saw no one about, she would hurry over to one of the cupboards and take whatever she could find. Formerly, stolen objects had always been retrieved in her room, but Umé’s pilfering had become far more serious since she had taken to tearing things to pieces.
“It’s really going too far, Granny,” said Sachiko one day. “You’ve gone and helped yourself to one of the best towels from the bathroom. Didn’t I give you your own towel to play with?”
“A bath towel?” said Umé with an air of injured innocence. “I don’t know anything about it.”
“It’s no use pretending, Granny. It’s right there behind your foot warmer. At least you haven’t started tearing it yet.”
“My goodness!” said Umé. “So it is. I must have caught it on my shoulder by mistake when I went to the bathroom.”
“That’s quite an achievement,” said Sachiko, “considering that it was firmly fixed to a towel rail.”
Her appetite seemed to become more voracious as the weeks went by.
“Oh, good madam, take pity on me! I’m so hungry it hurts!” she started wailing one morning.
“Really, Granny!” said Sachiko, hurrying into her room. “I gave you five big rice cakes just a couple of hours ago. What have you done with them?”
“Rice cakes?” said Umé “I don’t remember any rice cakes.”
Sachiko looked behind the foot warmer, under the bed, and in all the usual hiding places, but there was no trace of the rice cakes.
“Have you forgotten where you hid them?” said Sachiko. “Surely you can’t have eaten them all already.”
“Well, since you can’t find them,” said Umé dubiously, “I suppose I must have.”
Sachiko left the room, shaking her head. And behind her Umé was sticking out her tongue contemptuously.
One day the children discovered a large piece of fresh bread in the dustbin and brought it to their mother.
“If that isn’t the limit!” said Sachiko. “This is the piece I gave Granny a few hours ago. I know she doesn’t like this cheap rationed bread, but it’s all any of us can get these days. And I salted it specially for her.”
She went into Umé’s room and scolded her severely, but the old lady denied all knowledge of the bread. The following day a whole bowl of rice was found in the dustbin.
“How can anyone throw away rice these days when millions are starving!” cried Sachiko, glaring at Umé. “Such waste deserves to be punished.”
“Good gracious!” said Umé. “Who could have done such a thing?”
“You know perfectly well it was you, Granny. You’re the only one who throws things like this in the dustbin.”
“Mercy me, no!” said Umé indignantly. “I’d rather die than throw rice away. It’s a sacrilege. Let me tell you, I’d like to get my hands on whoever did it….
At this point Sachiko gave up.
In the evening she mentioned the matter to Minobé. “She’s lost all judgment, hasn’t she? If she wanted to get rid of the rice, all she had to do was to throw it down the toilet and none of us would have been the wiser. This way we were bound to find out.”
“She was probably furious because the rice was cold,” said Minobé.
“We all had cold rice today,” said Sachiko. “She had the same as the rest of us.”
“Yes, but nothing will ever convince her that we aren’t getting better food than she is. I expect she purposely put the rice where we’d find it, as a sort of protest.”
>
“I wonder if her mental powers are up to that,” said Sachiko.
“When it comes to food, they certainly are,” said Minobé. “Look at that awful habit she’s got of bowing and scraping to us all, in the hope that we’ll give her extra things to eat.”
“Yes, I suppose she’ll sink to anything to fill her belly. It’s all that she lives for these days. It’s as if she were under a curse. It really makes me sad, you know, when I think that she’s my own grandmother.”
When visitors came to the house, they would invariably be startled by the sudden apparition of old Umé, with her weird, white, wrinkled face and fuzzy hair.
“Are they from Echigo?” she would ask, and having been assured to the contrary, she would raise a piteous cry: “Oh, I’m so hungry! For mercy’s sake, good people, let me have something to eat! I haven’t had a morsel since last night. Help! I’m starving!”
Sachiko and Minobé would then be obliged to explain matters to the bewildered guests.
One day, when Umé had made a particularly ugly scene of this kind, Sachiko lost her temper and shouted harshly at the old woman. Umé listened in blank silence, vaguely shaking her head. That afternoon when Sachiko was doing the laundry at the garden well, she noticed a strange, spectral figure standing by the front gate; it was Umé, who had managed for the first time in years to make her way out of doors unaided. When the old woman realized that she was being observed, she raised one hand in a gesture of supplication and held the other to her throat as if about to slash it. She was barefoot and had thrown an old overcoat over her dressing gown. Obviously the aim of her maneuver was to have one of the neighbors discover her in this pathetic garb.
“Good heavens, Minobé,” shouted Sachiko, “Granny’s gone out!”
Minobé threw down his paint brush and ran to help her, but his wife had already managed to get the old woman back into the house. Umé stood by the door with a tragic look of frustration on her face, obviously exhausted by her feat. With one hand she was affecting jerky movements of obeisance; in the other, she held a gimlet menacingly. The end of the gimlet was broken off and Minobé recognized it as the one that he used to open his tins of paint and that had been missing for some days. No doubt it was part of Granny’s recent loot.