by Ogai Mori
“Who are your favorite actors, Otama-san?” Suezo said, turning to her suddenly.
“I don't have any favorites,” she said. She had been quietly listening to the conversation.
“Oh!” interrupted her father, “she's never been inside a theater!” And he added: “We live right next to one, and all the girls on our block go to see the plays. But not my Otama. Never. I hear the other girls rush out of their houses the minute they catch the first note!”
The old man, in spite of his intentions, was apt to revert to the praise of his daughter.
Chapter Eight
THEY REACHED an agreement. Otama would live in the house Suezo had bought on Muenzaka.
But the transfer, which Suezo had thought a simple matter, raised some difficulties.
“I want my father as close as possible,” Otama had said. “I want to visit him often. I must look after him.”
Her original intention had been to send her father, already over sixty, the greater part of her allowance and to provide him with a young maid who would make him comfortable. If her plan worked, he would no longer have to remain in their dismal home, its wall shared with that of a rickshaw garage. “Why can't you put my father in a house near my own?” she had asked.
So it turned out that Suezo, who had thought that all he need do was to receive his mistress in the house he had purchased for her, now had, in addition, just as he had been forced to invite the father with the daughter at their first interview, to undertake the problem of the old man's living quarters.
She had told Suezo: “It's my own concern. I don't want to trouble you.”
But since she had mentioned the problem, he could not avoid it. He wanted to show her how generous he was.
Finally Suezo had said: “Look. When you come to live at Muenzaka, I'll rent a house for your father at Ike-nohata.”
It had been forced on him. When Suezo saw how Otama would have to save and pinch on her allowance after she had said that she would manage the arrangement herself, he couldn't allow her to do so.
Thus Suezo had to pay more than he had calculated. But he paid without bitterness, much to the bewilderment of the old go-between.
By the middle of July, Otama and her father had settled in their new homes. Suezo was so bewitched by the modesty of the girl's manner and her maidenly way of speaking that he visited her almost every night. He had been capable of complete ruthlessness in this dealings, and still was, but now he tried every trick of tenderness to gain Otama's affection. This, I believe, is what historians have often called the touch of weakness in a man of iron will.
On these visits Suezo made it a point to appear almost every evening, though he never stayed the entire night. With the help of the go-between, Otama had hired a maid. Ume was only thirteen, and she did the kitchen work, which, Otama could not help feeling, was little more than having a child play a pleasant game. The result was that Otama did not have enough to do during the day and was left without anyone to talk to.
She would find herself wishing for her master to come earlier in the evening and would smile at the change taking place in herself. Before, the situation had been different. She had also been alone while her father was out selling his candies, but during his absence she had taken in piece-work. She had not even had the friendship of the girls in the neighborhood, yet she had never regretted the loss, had never even been bored. She would think only of the sum she would receive upon completing the task. There would be her father's surprise, his smile of pleasure because of her diligence. Yes, she had worked hard in those days. But now it was different, and she was beginning to feel the pains of ennui.
Yet her weariness was not unbearable, relieved as it was by Suezo's evening calls. Her father's position in the new house was a more difficult one than her own. Overnight he had been given luxuries he had never had before. At odd times during the day he would say to himself: “Am I bewitched? Yes! Bewitched by a fox!”
But the change was not enough to satisfy him, and he began to miss those earlier days when he and Otama would spend their evenings together, the oil lamp lit, their small talk about the ways of the world begun, the silence without disturbance from others infiltrating their room.
“A pretty dream that was,” said the old man to himself. “It'll never come back.”
At other times he said to himself: “When will she come? I expect her. But when?”
A number of days had passed since their separation, and he had not received even a short visit from her.
For the first few days the old man was delighted with the house, the maid from the country, the conveniences. The girl cooked his meals and did the heavy task of carrying in the water from the well. He tried to keep busy too and helped the girl put the rooms in order. Sometimes he swept. Occasionally he sent her out to shop for him. And in the evening when he heard her working in the kitchen, he sprinkled the ground around the parasol pine. Later, his figure framed in the low window, his arms on the sill, a pipe in his mouth, he watched the movements of the noisy crows over Ueno Hill and looked at the shrine on the wooded island in the pond, the lotus flowers in the water blurred by degrees in the thickening haze of evening.
He said to himself that he was grateful for his good fortune, that he was satisfied with his circumstances, yet at the same time he could not help thinking: “I raised her without anyone's help. I kept her from the moment she was born. We didn't even need words. We could understand each other without talk. A daughter who was always kind, always waiting for me when I came home.”
He would sit at the window for hours, his eyes on the pond or the people walking along the street.
At times he wanted to shout: “Otama! Look at that! Did you see that carp jump?”
When a stranger was passing, he wanted to call his daughter to the window, wanted to tell her: “A foreigner! What a hat she's got on! A whole bird on top of it!”
How he wished he could say that to Otama, to cry: “Did you ever see such a sight?”
And it pained him that he could not.
With each passing day he became increasingly irritable. He began to find fault with the maid when she brought him his meals. He had not had a servant for many years, and since he was a tender-hearted man, he refrained from scolding her. But he was uneasy in her presence, for no matter what she did, it went against him. To do justice to the girl—just up to Tokyo from the country—it was unfortunate for her to be compared with Otama, who bore herself so well and did everything gently and quietly.
Finally, on the fourth day after moving to his new house, he was shocked to find that the maid had her thumb in his soup as she brought it to him at breakfast.
“No more serving me! Go away!” He found the courage to say that much.
After the meal he took his usual position at the window. He didn't think it would rain, and with the weather so cool, he thought he would go out for a walk. As he went around the pond he kept speculating: “She may come while I'm out.”
And he turned several times to look at his house.
Eventually he came to a small bridge leading towards Muenzaka. Should he go to his daughter's house? But he couldn't bring himself to take that direction. It seemed as though he felt hindered by a barrier suddenly rising between him and his daughter, an awareness of their altered positions, something. A mother might never have such a feeling towards an only child. Wondering why a father should, he continued around the pond instead of crossing the bridge. Suddenly he discovered he was standing in front of Suezo's place. The go-between had previously pointed to it from his own house. From close up, it seemed better looking, surrounded by its high mud wall with bamboo strips nailed diagonally at the top of the barrier. The neighboring house, which he had been told belonged to the scholar Fukuchi, had more extensive grounds, but the residence itself was old-fashioned and not as gaudy and pretentious as Suezo's.
For a while the old man stood in front of Suezo's house, his eyes on the service gate of white woodwork, yet his mind defin
ite that he did not want to enter it.
The old man was not thinking of anything in particular, but for some time he seemed dazed, attacked by a rush of feeling, a kind of loneliness coming over him and mixed with the sudden awareness of life's brevity, its change. If you force me to define these emotions more specifically, they were those of a parent who has debased himself by selling his daughter as a mistress.
A week passed, and still Otama had not come. He was annoyed at himself for wanting to see her so badly, and he wondered: “Has she forgotten me? She's comfortable now. Why not?”
These suspicions were so faint that he alone could have brought them about and played with them in his own mind. Suspicions they were, and yet not such as to make him hate her. But superficially at least, with the irony that one often uses in conversation, he murmured: “I'd be happier if I could.”
Then his reasoning took another direction: “I leave the house so that I don't have to think too much. Let her come when I'm not there! She'll be sorry she missed me. But what if she doesn't care if I'm out? Well, at least her visit was a waste of time. That should annoy her. It would serve her right too!” And on his walks he repeated these conclusions a number of times.
He would go to the park, rest on a bench in the shade, and then get up and walk again. If he happened to see a covered rickshaw, he would say to himself: “Ah! she's visited me! Oh, she'll be upset all right not to find me in. That'll teach her!” And if, as he half wished, it did punish her, he knew that he was also putting himself to a test.
In the evening he began to go to the theater to listen to the storyteller and the recitations of dramatic ballads. Inside, he imagined his daughter on one of her futile visits to his house, but the thought would suddenly occur to him that she was also in the hall, and he would look around at the young women with the same hair style as Otama's. Once he was certain he had seen her. The woman had entered during the intermission, her companion in yukata and with a panama hat, quite a new fashion in those days. The old man watched her take a seat in the gallery, put her hands on the railing, and look down into the pit below. But as he looked more closely, he said to himself: “No, her face is too round. Besides, she's smaller than Otama.” In addition, her escort was accompanied not only by that woman but by others who sat behind him.
They were all geisha girls and apprentices.
And he heard a student near him whisper: “That's Fukuchi!”
As Otama's father left the hall after the performance, he saw the man followed by his troop of geishas and novices and led by a woman holding a long-handled lantern with the name of the theater written in red characters.
He walked on in the same direction as this party, sometimes going ahead, sometimes falling behind.
At last he reached his own house and went in.
Chapter Nine
OTAMA, who had never been away from her father, was eager to know how he was. Yet, in spite of this desire, several days had passed without her being able to visit him. She was afraid that Suezo might come when she was out, and she feared that he would be annoyed if he did not find her. Usually he came at night and stayed until eleven, but he began to appear briefly at odd hours.
The first time he came during the day he said, sitting down opposite her in front of the charcoal brazier: “I've dropped in on my way to an appointment. I'll just smoke a cigarette and go.”
As a matter of fact, Otama seldom knew when he would come, so she didn't have the courage to leave. She might have slipped out in the morning, but she considered Ume an unreliable child. Moreover, Otama didn't want to be seen then or in the afternoon, for she didn't like the thought of the neighbors staring at her. She was so shy that at first she went to the bathhouse below the slope only after she had sent Ume out to see that it was not crowded.
To make matters worse, on the third day after she had moved in, she had been frightened. She was already timid enough to give the situation more attention than it deserved. On first moving into Muenzaka, she had been called on by the vegetable dealer and the fishmonger. When she agreed to be their customer, they gave her an account book. On the day in question, when the fish had not been delivered, she sent Ume down the slope to get a few slices for lunch. Otama was not used to eating fish every day, having taken her meals without such delicacies. Nor had her father been particular about food as long as she had prepared it well and it was healthy for him. But once she had heard one of her neighbors at their old house saying that she and her father had bought no fish for several days. Remembering how embarrassed she had been then, Otama decided to send the girl for some. “If Ume thinks I'm trying to save money,” she reasoned, “then I'm being unfair to Suezo. He's not like that.”
But a short while later the maid returned crying.
“What is it? Tell me,” Otama said a number of times before the girl would speak.
“I went into a fish market, but not the one we buy from. I looked around but couldn't see the dealer. And I thought: ‘Why, he's probably calling on customers after buying fresh fish at the waterfront.' And then I saw some mackerel looking like they'd just been pulled out of the water. ‘How much?' I ask the wife. ‘I've never seen you around here,' she says to me, not even telling me how much. ‘Whose house you from?' she asks. And when I told her, she began to make a face like she was angry. ‘Why!' she says. ‘Then I'm sorry for you. Go on back where you're from and tell your mistress we don't sell fish to the—whore of a usurer!' And then she turned her back on me, smoking her pipe, pretending I wasn't even there!”
Ume had been too shocked and hurt to go to another shop and had run all the way back. And the simple girl, all the while making sympathetic gestures, told her mistress the entire story line by line.
As Ume spoke, Otama's face turned pale, and for a while she could not answer. A mixture of feelings tumbled inside the inexperienced girl. It was impossible for her to disentangle her confused thoughts, but the total confusion put so heavy a strain upon the heart of a pure girl sold that all her blood seemed to be drawn into it, draining the color from her face and leaving her back chilled with cold perspiration.
On these occasions an insignificant thought seems to take hold of us. Would Ume continue to serve her after this disgrace?
As the girl watched Otama, she could see that her words had upset her mistress. But she could not guess what had caused Otama such dismay. The girl had returned to the house in a fit, but now it seemed that the food for lunch was indispensable, and she still carried the coins in the folds of her sash.
“I never met such a nasty person!” Ume said, a look of compassion on her face. “Why! Who'd shop at such a place? Not me. There's another shop up ahead of that one. Near a fox-shrine. That's where I'll go. And right away too.” And she got up from the mats to run out.
Otama gave her an automatic smile and a nod, moved at finding a friend in Ume, who hurried out of the room.
Otama remained seated. As the strain became less intense, she began to cry quietly and reached into her kimono sleeve for a handkerchief. She heard a voice cry out: “It's not fair! How cruel!” It was her own confusion. By these words she did not mean that she hated the woman who refused to sell her the fish, nor did she feel sad or mortified in recognizing that her status had barred her from a simple fish market. She did not even feel resentment toward Suezo, who had purchased her and who had now turned out to be a usurer. It was humiliating to belong to such a man, but she did not even feel that. She had heard that usurers were disgusting persons, looked down on, feared, detested. But her father's only experience in that direction had been with pawnbrokers. And when their clerks had not been kind enough to give him the sum he needed, he had never complained in spite of the inconvenience. So, even though she had been told that such men existed, her fear was similar to that of a child toward an ogre or a policeman—not a particularly keen one. What then was this despair she suddenly felt?
In her feeling, the sense of injustice done by the world in general and men in particular was
almost absent. If she had such a sense, it was that of the unfairness of her own destiny. She had done nothing wrong, yet she was to be persecuted by the world. This pained her. This was her despair. When she had learned that the policeman had deceived her and deserted her, she had used the same words for the first time in her life: “It's not fair! How cruel!” And she had used them again when she had been forced into becoming a mistress. And now that she realized she was not only a “whore” but one kept by a usurer whom the world detested, the feeling of humiliation that time and resignation had softened and toned down emerged once more with its sharp outline and strong colors. This was the substance of Otama's emotion, if you force me to describe it in any reasonable way.
Eventually she stood up, opened a closet, and from a bag of imitation leather took out a calico apron which she had made. Tying the apron around her waist, she entered the kitchen with a sigh. Her silk apron was more like a dress, and she never used it while working there. She was so fond of personal cleanliness that even when she wore an easy-to-wash summer kimono she would tie a towel around her hair in order to keep the neckband from getting soiled.
Gradually her thoughts settled. Resignation was the mental attitude she had most experienced. And in this direction her mind adjusted itself like a well-oiled machine.
Chapter Ten
ONE EVENING when Suezo came, he took his usual seat opposite Otama. From their first meeting in her new home she had put a cushion beside the charcoal brazier as soon as she knew he was there. He would go to it and sit down, and relaxing with his pipe, engage in small talk. From her own position on the mats she would answer him in monosyllables. She would say a few words, pass her hands along the frame of the brazier, toy with the charcoal tongs, do anything to keep herself busy. If she hadn't had a definite place before the brazier, she wouldn't have known what to do. It may be said that she was facing a formidable enemy with only the battlement of the brazier to protect her.
