American Stories

by Nagai Kafu

  “So at her request, I reluctantly agreed to a temporary separation, but shortly thereafter she wanted a formal divorce; four years later, I received word that she had remarried. Ah, my Josephine! I have, as a result, been living a life of solitude these twenty years or so. . . .” Having finished his story, Dr. B— stood up from the chair, walked around the room two, three times shaking his hands, then ran, staggeringly, toward the huge grand piano at the corner of the room and immediately began playing, with trembling fingers, the pilgrims’ music from Tannhäuser.

  As the base notes resounded, one, two petals fell down from the white roses in the vase on the piano.

  I listened intently with my head bent.

  (January 1907)

  Rude Awakening

  Mr. Saburô Sawazaki pursued fame and fortune by daily promoting himself in his company and was rewarded by being appointed business manager of the New York branch of Company X. So, intoxicated by the vain-sounding words, “going to the West,” and swayed by the greedy thought of a certain sum of dollars for living expenses, he left alone for the United States in high spirits, leaving behind his wife and children at his home in Tokyo.

  However, there is a difference between what one sees and what one hears. For the first month or two after arriving in New York, Sawazaki virtually lived in a complete daze, but once he became somewhat accustomed to the way the branch office functioned and reached the point where he could walk around the city without a map, he gradually began to experience intolerable boredom.

  It is all right so long as he works at his office from nine in the morning until five in the afternoon, but once he goes outside, there is no place to go to but his dreary boarding house, despite the fact that New York is such a big place. It would be all right for the young clerks right out of school to divert themselves by chatting idly through the night, but for someone with some social standing and consciousness of his outward appearance, it is no longer appropriate to exchange pleasantries with just anybody. Of course, he knows that in order to understand a foreign country, it would be useful to socialize in various clubs and hotels where Westerners amuse themselves till late at night, but this option is simply unavailable for financial reasons. Maybe he could try some reading, but alas, for someone who has been exposed to the ways of the world for so many years after leaving school, curiosity about new thought or new knowledge has steadily diminished, and he does not even have the energy to try to understand a foreign country, although there was once a time when he was intrigued by it.

  So as the days go by, followed by three more months, then half a year, he is more and more given to feeling the inconvenience of daily life as well as the loneliness of his lot. There are times when he desperately wants to take a morning bath in a Japanese tub or eat grilled eel with a shot of warm sake; anyway, his thoughts run to his homeland. Back home he has a wife who willingly does everything he asks, and there was also a time when he secretly kept a mistress; once he starts recalling these things, he feels utterly foolish for having ever left Japan at the mature age of forty, when life had been so comfortable. Every now and then, while he is busy at work or lying exhausted at night, some meaningless thoughts occur to him like a shadow, like smoke, and as soon as he comes to himself, he feels desolate, as if all his strength had suddenly left him.

  He is ashamed of his own weakness and also vexed by it; at times he downs a quick whisky or tries to turn his attention calmly to office work, but the sense of forlornness simply will not go away. He feels as if a big hollow had opened up in his heart and a cold wind were blowing into it.

  However, Sawazaki neither knew the cause of this sensation nor wanted to know it. To begin with, his wife was merely someone he had married as if hiring a maid, according to common custom; and his home was just a gateway for show, his children, ones to bring up primarily because they had been born. . . . That was all there was to it, and it felt quite unmanly and cowardly to worry about wife or home.

  Especially since he had received his education during a transitory period, when it was believed that it was shameful for a man to turn his mind to inward thoughts such as anguish or contemplation; so in the end, he decided to have a hearty laugh, mocking himself and concluding that the vulgar cause of his strange frame of mind was, in short, that he was missing women. So he felt slightly satisfied with himself and with his willpower.

  Indeed, it is true that he has been short of women. Ever since he came to New York he has occasionally slipped to the red-light district on his way home from a dinner party with fellow Japanese, but he would always be looked down upon as a “Jap” and so would be unable to linger on beyond the perfunctory, cash-on-delivery service; so his plight is to have nobody but himself to warm up his bed every night. What draws his attention nowadays, wherever he goes in New York, is no longer the twenty-story-high buildings that used to astonish him when he first arrived, but the figures of narrow-waisted and large-hipped women with their breasts pushed up by corsets; from the way they walk to the way they talk, they appear to him irresistibly inviting.

  Every day he has been commuting by subway between the business district commonly known as downtown and the quiet, exclusively residential uptown in order to go to his company’s office, but the crush in the cars is extraordinary; around nine in the morning and five in the afternoon it almost seems as if all the young men and women from all over New York come and go at these hours.

  Men and women, in heaps on the platforms of the station, rush inside the cars like a flood when the train has barely stopped, scrambling for seats, and those few who have managed to sit down immediately start reading the newspaper they have brought with them without a minute’s hesitation. Those who have failed to get seats either cling to straps or lean against others’ shoulders, pushing or being pushed; no longer having the leisure to mind gentlemanly or ladylike manners, they vie with one another for a chance to grab a seat, by force if necessary.

  Following the example of these busy Americans, Sawazaki always holds a newspaper, but when young salesgirls or office girls sit without ceremony very close to him on both sides, not only pressing their soft bodies against his whenever the train jolts as it stops and starts again but also gradually transmitting their body heat, the fine print of the paper simply disappears, and he suddenly feels a slight spasm in his toes, an itchiness at the roots of his hair, and a sort of agony all through his body. Being underground, the air is all the more oppressive, with the smell of sweat characteristic of a meat-eating race added to the crowded condition of the car intoxicating him like a bad wine, compounded by the constant and subtle quivering of the train. Sawazaki falls into a trance as if he were running a fever; what usually happens is that at precisely the moment when he begins to lose self-control, feeling he cannot stay another fifteen minutes in the car without unwittingly grasping the hand of the woman sitting next to him, the train fortunately arrives at the stop where he has to get off, so he rushes out of the car and draws a long breath in the cold air outside.

  He repeatedly tells himself that something must be done, but there is no immediate solution. At his boarding house there is a young daughter of marriageable age and also a passably pleasant-looking maid, but the long and short of it is that he does not want to complicate matters. To join the young clerks in the office and to frequent the red-light district is too foolish. Matters have stood thus for almost one and a half years, and it is already the second spring since he came to America, and the month of May when robins gather in the woods.

  He has never felt the force of spring so strongly. Gentle breezes penetrate his lungs as if they were tickling him, while the soft sunlight pierces his skin and inflames his blood. All women walking in the streets under the clear blue sky seem without exception to have shed their heavy winter coats, barely concealing their splendid flesh under thin summer clothes as if to torment him, and to expose deliberately their thin silk stockings from the raised light back hems of their skirts in order to mock him.

  That morning, bei
ng particularly apprehensive of the crowded subway, he went to his office by the elevated train, which was usually less crowded, taking the trouble to make a big detour; as he entered the manager’s office where his desk was located, he noticed with a pleasant thrill that an unfamiliar young Western lady was sitting in a corner seat as if waiting for him.

  He had completely forgotten about it. It so happened that the old lady, close to fifty years old, who had for a long time worked in the office doing chores like answering the phone, had resigned for personal reasons, and they had hired this young woman through a newspaper advertisement; she was to begin work that day, and that was why she was waiting for his instructions and explanations as to what she was expected to do.

  He told her that all she had to do was answer the telephone and, if she had time, help with filing letters written in English, but as he explained these things to her, he felt strangely happy that from this time on he would be able to keep this young woman by his side and have her assist him in his office work. In contrast to the time when that wrinkled, gray-haired, and bespectacled old lady had worked here, it felt as though the whole office had brightened up.

  He could not take his eyes off her profile even for five minutes while working in his office. She must be at least twenty-six or twenty-seven years of age. Plump and not tall, and of passable looks, her general appearance, with her black hair parted in the middle and rolled up around the crown as if she were wearing a sports cap and neatly clad from head to toe in off-the-rack clothes bought at some emporium, emanated strong magical power because of its very lack of grace and dignity; she was, in short, an example of the type of women who are remembered for a long time by men who have just happened to pass by them on the street. Sawazaki tried to break the ice and become better acquainted with her by starting a conversation on one pretext or another, but unlike the stereotypical office girls who stuffed their mouths with candy throughout the day and spent their time laughing with anybody, she was exceedingly reticent, probably feeling ill at ease about everything. After all, this was her first experience working in a Japanese company, and all she was willing to let out was that her name was Mrs. Denning and that she had been living in a boarding house by herself since she was widowed about a year ago. Sometimes she even sat pensively with her elbows on the desk.

  Three weeks went by, without her showing the least sign of having become familiar with her new surroundings. Then she started arriving late for work in the morning, and toward the end of last week, she began to stay away from work—due to some illness, he was told. Sawazaki felt somehow disappointed. She had told him she was ill, not that she was going to quit, but all the same, he suspected that perhaps she did not want to work among unfamiliar Japanese. . . . She would soon send word one way or another, he thought, and he waited all day the following Monday, and again on Tuesday, but he did not hear from her.

  On the evening of that day, he had just started walking along Amsterdam Avenue after dinner to run some errands; it is a broad street but actually more like a seedy boulevard lined exclusively with tenement houses and unattractive retail stores. It was twilight in stuffy, windless late May; even though streetlights had begun to be lit, the surrounding areas were still bright, enveloped in a purple haze. From wide-open windows and doorways here and there slovenly housewives with uncombed hair and the faces of prettily made-up young girls, in contrast to their shabby clothes, could be seen, and along the streets where greengrocers, fruit merchants, and such kept stalls, little boys and girls were playing noisily.

  Recalling the street scenes in Yanagichô or Akagishita [in Tokyo] for no particular reason, Sawazaki just happened to stop in front of a stall, when a woman came out from a nearby doorway. It was—most unexpectedly—that Mrs. Denning.

  Taken completely by surprise, Sawazaki accosted her, calling her name without ceremony.

  The woman, not a little surprised herself, stood still on the spot, obviously reluctantly, as she could not run away and hide herself. But she averted her face and was quite afraid of speaking out.

  “How is your illness. . . . Have you already recovered?”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  “Do you live around here?”

  “Yes, I rent a room on the third floor here.”

  “How about coming to work tomorrow?”

  “I am so sorry; you must have been so busy.”

  “It cannot be helped if one is sick. . . . By the way, you were just going out for a walk? If you don’t mind, let me accompany you part of the way.”

  Approached this way, she could not quite refuse his offer, and so she walked aimlessly next to Sawazaki toward wide, tree-lined Broadway. This far north on Broadway, only quiet apartment buildings stand on both sides, and the traffic is not very heavy. The water and the trees of the Hudson riverbank can be seen through the buildings.

  “Let’s walk up to the riverbank. The deep green color of the leaves of those trees really suggests the summer has come, doesn’t it?”

  They walked about one block and sat down on a bench under some trees. For a while they sat quietly, watching the river as it changed its appearance from twilight into the beginning of the evening, but then Sawazaki said abruptly, as if he had just remembered, “You will be coming to work tomorrow, won’t you?” The woman remained silent, as if she had not heard him, but then she seemed to have made up her mind and said, “Actually, I was thinking about leaving.”

  “Why? Are you not happy with the work?”

  “No, no. It is not that,” she protested emphatically. “It is simply that I don’t feel up to it, perhaps because of my illness.”

  “What kind of illness?”

  The woman seemed at a loss for an answer and looked down without a word. Sawazaki pressed on, “Is this the first time that you have worked at an office?”

  “No, not really. For a long time before I got married I used to work for various stores and companies.”

  “Then you must be accustomed to office work.”

  “I am afraid not. For three years or so after I got married, I simply didn’t go out and stayed put at home, so I guess I became rather lazy. After my husband died, it became necessary for me to go back to work but . . . well, what can I say, I seem to have lost my staying power,” she said, smiling sadly.

  “But the work you do at my office isn’t really strenuous. Besides, you are the only Western woman, so you don’t have to socialize. . . . Couldn’t you somehow put up with it?”

  “You are quite right. There isn’t a nicer place than your office anywhere in New York. That is why I really wanted to be employed by you, but somehow every morning . . .” The woman unwittingly closed her mouth and blushed.

  It was already night all around, the kind of summer night that is dark even though it looks as if it holds light, and light even though it seems dark. Realizing that the young new leaves of a tall linden tree standing behind the bench intercepted the starlight and streetlights, casting a dark shadow upon the couple, she seemed to have become somewhat reassured and glanced furtively at him.

  Even though poetry and song were alien to him, the mere fact that he was sitting there, on a bench with no other people, close by her even if he was not holding her hand, in an indescribably poetic night of beautiful young leaves, made Sawazaki feel so happy that choosing a subject of conversation was the least of his worries.

  “What did your husband do?”

  “He worked for an insurance company.”

  “You must miss him, for many reasons.”

  “Yes, of course. . . . For a time I was totally at a loss as to what to do.”

  Whenever the river breeze gently caressed their hair, the young new leaves whispered all around. The sound of the piano being played in a house nearby could also be heard. The woman became steadily more relaxed; for no particular reason, she felt as if she wanted to talk to someone, just anybody, about personal things that she would not discuss during the day even with her closest friends. Maybe this was a case of confi
ding one’s life under the gentle stars of a summer night. . . . She leaned one elbow against the back of the bench and said, as if in a monologue, “It was so much fun while my husband was living!”

  Sawazaki had been in this country for more than a year and was used to Westerners’ talking uninhibitedly about intimate matters. So he responded, assuming an all-serious air, “I can see that,” and asked, “How did you get married?”

  “Well, he and I commuted to work on the same train every morning, and so we got to know each other and began meeting on Saturdays or Sundays. . . . Soon we decided to live together. He at first insisted that both of us continue to work until we had accumulated some savings, but I really hated the idea of getting up early in the morning and sitting properly in a chair till evening. . . . Actually, that was why I had wanted desperately to find some kind person to take care of me, and so I managed to have my way. For me, there is really nothing more painful than getting up in the morning when I am still so sleepy. I do think it is criminal to force people to get out of a warm bed to wash up and get dressed, especially in cold weather.