“Those are useless,” Grandma Kano said, watching us. “Those are Mr. Goodall’s gloves.”
“So they’re a foreigner’s! I thought they were big.”
Hearing that they had belonged to a foreigner, we took turns inspecting them again.
I had never heard a foreigner’s name before, and I found myself painting a picture of him in my mind’s eye as a pleasant, elderly man with a ruddy face. I had seen foreigners twice before. The first time it was a couple who came to stay at a hot spring in the village; the second was when the Emperor came down to hunt, and a few foreigners came along with guns on their shoulders, mixed in among the officials from the Department of the Imperial Household.
I had seen those people from a distance, so I formed my own image of Mr. Goodall by blending what I knew from those experiences with the vaguely dull, lethargic impression I got from the name.
Once I had seen Mr. Goodall’s gloves, I developed a terrible yearning to have them for myself. But as generous as Grandma Kano was in all respects, for some reason she wouldn’t let me have them.
She stuffed dried leaves that acted as bug repellent into each finger, all the way down into the tip; she wrapped the gloves in two, then three layers of newspaper and tied the packet up in two directions with twine; and finally she packed them away at the bottom of a Chinese chest. She treasured those gloves, I could see that.
I looked forward more than anything to the moment when I could hold Mr. Goodall’s gloves in my hands during our biannual cleanings, once in spring and once in autumn.
And I wasn’t the only one: soon, Mr. Goodall’s gloves became famous among the village children, and on the day of the cleaning several of us would cluster around the Chinese chest when it was carried out and set down under the chinquapin in the garden.
I didn’t know who Mr. Goodall was, or how his gloves had come into Grandma Kano’s possession, but I never wondered or felt the slightest desire to probe; the mere fact that the foreigner’s big gloves belonged to our household was enough to satisfy me, and each year when I found them still there in the Chinese chest, I felt relief that they hadn’t disappeared.
The year before her death, Grandma Kano told me a sort of story—I guess you could call it that—about Mr. Goodall’s gloves. She had been suffering from cataracts for a year or so, and she tried not to go out during the day because she said things flickered in bright sunlight; even just sitting near the window, she would tilt her graceful, well-proportioned face back a little and half close her eyes.
If I said something to Grandma Kano when she was like that, she wouldn’t open her eyes; since she couldn’t turn to look at me, she would soften her expression into something approaching a smile. The severity that must have made her so beautiful in her youth was gone then, supplanted by a girlish, innocent look that emerged from somewhere inside her. Her cheeks were pink, with a healthy sheen. I loved Grandma Kano at those times, when her eyesight was bad and that benign expression came over her face the moment I said anything to her.
One day, something prompted me to ask her about Mr. Goodall’s gloves.
“Mr. Goodall was a foreigner, a very large man,” she said. “He must have been fully twice as big as a Japanese man. When your great-grandfather and I went along with Matsumoto Sensei to the Red Cross in Kōjimachi, the main office, he was right there behind us when we signed our names at the reception desk.”
I asked her what he had looked like.
“How would I know that? It was an extraordinary day, you see—foreigners by the hundreds, and Her Majesty the Empress was there, imperial princes and princesses, ministers. Thousands of guests, there were, and to top it all off it was snowing—the crowds were so awful you could hardly move.”
The girlish mildness of her expression never varied; only her mouth moved. Clearly she took pride in the fact that she had known such scenes and sights—things the villagers could never have imagined. She named a few of the princes and princesses, some ministers, but of course I was much too young to have any idea who these people were.
“I ended up having to wait for Matsumoto Sensei and your great-grandfather by the entrance, and Mr. Goodall, a man I had never in my life met before, said it was a pity I would have to wait out in the snow for two, maybe three hours, without having any of the good food inside, so he took his gloves from his pockets and told me to put them on. He lent me those gloves,” Grandma Kano said.
“You didn’t return them?” I asked.
“I wanted to. Afterward Matsumoto Sensei checked the guestbook at the reception desk for me, and he learned the man’s name was Mr. Goodall, but there were such crowds, you know, so many of them foreigners, too, that it would have been impossible…”
From what she said, I assumed that, unable to return “Mr. Goodall’s gloves” to the man she had borrowed them from, she had taken possession of them herself.
I remember the expression on Grandma Kano’s face that day with more clarity than on any other. Perhaps my heart shifted that day, and I went from being a baby to being a boy. Somehow, after hearing that story, for no reason I could have pointed to, I couldn’t help feeling pity for Grandma Kano on that day when Mr. Goodall lent her his gloves.
That was the extent of Grandma Kano’s story about Mr. Goodall. That was it—and yet each time I have recalled it later in my life, it has struck me that she must have felt a terrible sense of loneliness as she told it, so that over time this suspicion has acquired something of the force of certainty. Perhaps I came to think this way because Grandma Kano made an impression on me as she talked then, with her eyes shut in the manner I have described, her face slightly upturned, her expression mild and her eyes clouded by cataracts, that was so completely different from other times.
What sort of event was held that day, I wonder, when Matsumoto Jun took my great-grandfather, and Grandma Kano with him, to the Red Cross? I haven’t the slightest idea, and so far not knowing has caused me no inconvenience; but if the Mr. Goodall whose name was carved in kanji on that grave should happen to have been the same Mr. Goodall who lent his gloves to Grandma Kano, then the event must have taken place before Meiji 22, when Mr. Goodall died. No doubt with a little research I could learn what brought so many distinguished people together under a single roof—what occasion had brought Grandma Kano to the capital with my great-grandfather, expecting that she would sit beside him at his table.
Setting that question aside, I assume this was what happened: Matsumoto Jun made the necessary arrangements for my great-grandfather and Grandma Kano to go up and attend the event, but then for some reason Grandma Kano was unable to enter, and so she ended up waiting outside in the snow, wearing the big gloves Mr. Goodall had lent her out of pity, until the gathering ended and Matsumoto Jun and my great-grandfather came out again.
I found myself imagining this as, having said goodbye to the friend who had led me around all day, I was walking up to my inn, alone now, on a sloping road whose original cobblestones had been left in place only along its edges.
I could imagine various reasons why Grandma Kano would not have been permitted to join the gathering, assuming this happened sometime before Meiji 22. Back then the whole society was bound, up and down and side to side, by a code that might well have demanded she be left standing in the snow simply because she was not my great-grandfather’s official wife.
In any event, Mr. Goodall’s gloves seem to have stood in Grandma Kano’s mind as a memento of a less than happy element of her life. The care she lavished on Mr. Goodall’s gloves was a token of her gratitude to that generous foreigner, but at the same time perhaps it also marked one of the saddest incidents in her life. Just as the extraordinary, self-denying respect she showed Matsumoto Jun was a memorial to those few small pleasures that had come her way, as if they had just happened to notice that she was there, in the course of a life that probably could not be described as happy.
I spent two nights in Nagasaki, then took the bus to Shimabara, crossed from Shimabar
a to Misumi on a small steamboat, and set out from there for Kumamoto.
A driving rain beat down on a rough ocean between Shimabara and Misumi, so I lay in my room the whole time, and never saw the waters people say are so beautiful.
Suffering from mild seasickness, I found myself remembering those words that had been carved on the face of every gravestone in the foreign cemetery in Nagasaki: “In sacred memory.” No doubt Matsumoto Jun and Mr. Goodall had both navigated lives with a scale and breadth beyond anything Grandma Kano ever knew; and yet I wondered if perhaps it was true that they had come to life in the most fiercely sacred manner precisely in Grandma Kano’s memory. And Grandma Kano, in her turn, went on living, in a certain beautiful way, in my own memory. I kept thinking about that, about the nature of our relationships, as I gave myself up to the ship’s great rolling.
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Pushkin Press
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Original texts for ‘Life of a Counterfeiter’, ‘Reeds’ and ‘Mr. Goodall’s Gloves’ © The Heirs of Yasushi Inoue 1951, 1956, 1953
English translation © Michael Emmerich 2014
‘Life of a Counterfeiter’, ‘Reeds’ and ‘Mr. Goodall’s Gloves’ originally published as Aru gisakka no shōgai, 1951, Ashi, 1956 and Gūdoru-shi no tebukuro, 1953, in Japan.
This translation is based on the text in Inoue Yasushi zenshū (Collected Works of Yasushi Inoue), Tokyo, Shinchōsha (1995–1997).
This translation first published by Pushkin Press in 2014
ISBN 978 1 782270 90 4
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission in writing from Pushkin Press
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