The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature: From Restoration to Occupation, 1868-1945: vol. 1 (Modern Asian Literature Series)

by J. Thomas Rimer

  Miya suddenly jumped up. She tried to stand but her leg hurt her and she fell back helplessly onto the sand. She finally crawled over to Kan’ichi and grabbed his leg. “Kan’ichi-san. Wait! Where are you going?” She spoke through her tears.

  Kan’ichi was greatly surprised. Miya’s kimono had come open, and her knees were exposed. They were bleeding badly and trembling.

  “You’re hurt.”

  He leaned over, but Miya resisted. “It’s not important. Where are you going? I have something to tell you, Kan’ichi. I want you to come home with me tonight. Please. I’m begging you.”

  “If you have something to say, tell it to me now.”

  “Not here.”

  “So what do you have to say to me? You’re not going to let go of my leg?”

  “I won’t.”

  “Don’t be stubborn. I’ll kick you again.”

  “Go ahead.”

  Kan’ichi shook her loose with all his might. Miya fell miserably to the sand.

  “Kan’ichi-san.”

  Kan’ichi strode away. Seeing that she was being left behind, Miya struggled to her feet. She tried to follow but again and again fell in pain onto the sand.

  “Kan’ichi-san, I won’t hold on to you. Just one more time. Once more. I have something I need to tell you.”

  Again, Miya fell onto the sand, this time without the strength to get back up. All she could do was to call after him. A minute later, she could vaguely make out Kan’ichi’s silhouette as he climbed a hill. Miya writhed on the beach and kept calling for him. Finally, his black shadow appeared, standing on the hill’s crest. He appeared to be looking back in her direction. With her last ounce of strength, Miya called out. From the distance, a man’s voice came to her.

  “Miya-san!”

  “Ah. Kan’ichi!”

  She held up her head and looked around. Her eyes searched for him. But upon hearing the sound of his voice, she lost sight of his dark shadow. She wondered momentarily whether she might see him in the stillness of the wintering trees. The approaching waves broke sadly on the beach, and the moon of the seventh day of the new year grieved.

  With yearning in her voice, Miya called out Kan’ichi’s name once again.

  SHIMAZAKI TŌSON

  Shimazaki Tōson (1872–1943) made his early reputation in the Meiji period as a poet. He then went on to write a number of novels and stories that, although often highly personal, also address the social and spiritual issues of his time.

  Tōson’s novels, powerful in their sincerity and even awkwardness, made him a giant in the literature of this period. Although most of his works are long and not easily excerpted, a story written later in his career, “The Life of a Certain Woman” (Aru onna no shōgai), published in 1922, touches on some of the same themes found in his longer novels. Its title deliberately emphasizes the resonances that Tōson found in Guy de Maupassant’s Une vie (One Life).

  THE LIFE OF A CERTAIN WOMAN (ARU ONNA NO SHŌGAI)

  Translated by William E. Naff

  At around 4:30 in the morning Ogen awoke from a deep, refreshing sleep to find herself beside her daughter and her little nephew.1 It was unusual for Ogen to sleep so soundly on an unfamiliar floor, on an unfamiliar pillow, beneath an unfamiliar mosquito netting. It also was unusual for her to be sleeping only with those with whom she felt completely comfortable—her daughter Oshin, their old serving woman, and her eight-year-old nephew—all four of them lining up their pillows and bedding underneath the same mosquito netting.

  Oshin was sleeping as one who begrudged every last bit of the brief August night. Ogen left her daughter’s side as though she was parting from a doll to emerge from the mosquito netting and open two or three of the rain shutters. The summer sky was beginning to grow light.

  “Well, I finally got here,” Ogen said to herself. The room was the kind commonly found in provincial clinics to receive patients who had come from distant villages. The clinic belonged to Dr. Hachiya, a country physician of excellent reputation. When Ogen’s late husband had still been in good health, he had taken in the young Hachiya as a houseboy, and that connection meant that Ogen did not think of herself as the usual patient staying in a sickroom, even though she was here to obtain medical treatment.2

  “Could I have simply decided one day and left home the next, just as though I were a man?”

  “Of course not.”

  “That’s what it means to be a woman. It was six months ago that I decided to do this, and I’m getting here only now.”

  This might seem like a conversation between two people, but Ogen was carrying it on with herself. There were two people inside her, each carrying on its own side of the monologue.

  Ogen was growing old and apprehensive. The grandmother of the Oyama family into which she had been married had died; the heir of the Oyama family, born to her and her husband and Oshin’s only brother, had died; and her husband had died two years ago. All who had been close to her were vanishing one after another: even the two head clerks who had faithfully served the Oyama household for so many years were both no longer in this world. Not only was she reduced to terror by her loneliness, but she also had long been aware of problems with her own health. She could think of nothing but finding a final refuge for her and her daughter Oshin—poor, unfortunate Oshin—unmarriageable and still a virgin at the age of forty.

  Ogen was sixty years old when she decided to leave the Oyama household. She had made a brave show of her departure, taking along Oshin, from whom she was inseparable, the nephew whom she was taking care of, and even her personal servant; but her departure from this house that she had known for so long had been accompanied by the most painful emotions. She had tried to disguise her agitation with laughter. “We’ll see you later!” she said to her adopted heir, his wife, and all the employees. Her real intention was to regain her strength at the Hachiya Clinic and then to go on to Tokyo. It had been a long time since she had seen her brothers, all of whom were younger, and all were in Tokyo.

  The Hachiya Clinic was not far from the Suwara Station of the Chūō Line, about ten miles downstream from the town in which Ogen lived. The agitation with which she left home had stayed with her while she was on the train, and it had still been with her when she arrived at the clinic. But now, after a night under the care of a physician whom she trusted completely, she felt herself to be at peace as she looked out from between the rain shutters into the garden of the clinic with its mulberry fields beyond and listened to the crowing of roosters in the morning mist. She felt that she had placed herself in the peaceful countryside, just a little bit closer to the village where she was born than the town where the Oyama family lived. Although Ogen had decided half a year earlier to get treatment, this also represented an opportunity to get away from everything—to leave the roof under which she had lived for so many years, the inner room where she had slept alone during the more than ten years after her husband had deserted her, and the vast, empty kitchen where she could no longer take pleasure in crowded, lively mealtimes with her adopted heirs and the employees.

  You’re up very early, madam!” the servant said. Oshin was already at Ogen’s side. “That’s the way she always was at home,” Oshin said to the servant. “Up before dark on winter mornings, cleaning her own room, dusting the shōji. Everybody was always saying that the young people couldn’t keep up with her when it came to getting up early. I’d still be in bed in the next room, pretending not to hear.—Ha, ha ha, pretending not to hear!”

  Even when she was making this kind of small talk, Oshin would bring her long face close to that of the servant.

  The little nephew Sankichi came bounding over.3 When they first arrived at the clinic, the day before, the child had run back to Ogen to tell her about each new discovery. The Kiso River flowed past a hundred yards away on the other side of the mulberry fields beyond clinic garden, and he had also come to tell her that the current was much gentler here than where the Oyama family went swimming.

 
Now he was saying, “It’s all burned out on the other side of the mulberries. I saw it; it was all burned out black.”

  Now Oshin was drawn into the conversation. “I was never so surprised in all my life as I was yesterday. That Mother would do something as dangerous as that. To set a charcoal bag on fire and throw it out toward the hedge. I really got all upset—I really did.”

  Oshin’s eyes were filled with tears. Her forceful words had been filled with concern for her aged mother.

  “I saw it, too, yesterday. And then Grandma got scolded by the doctor.” Both Ogen and Oshin laughed at Sankichi’s childish speech.

  “Don’t talk about that any more, Sankichi,” Ogen said. “Your Grandma was bad. It was so stupid—I was all confused, but . . . yesterday I thought something frightful was coming after me. It got on the train with me, and it was lying in wait for me again in a corner of the hedge here at the clinic. So I said, ‘Come on after me if you’re going to.’ I couldn’t stand it any more so I threw that burning charcoal bag at it.4 There’s nothing dangerous out there now, so don’t be afraid. It’s all right. I was able to sleep soundly last night. The spirits of the gods are watching over us, and this morning I feel better than I have for a long time.”

  Putting both hands on her lap, Ogen heaved a deep sigh as though she were laughing at herself. She frequently spoke of “the spirits.” The habit came from her childhood exposure to her father’s passionate belief in National Learning and Shintō.5 Oshin looked at the servant and Sankichi with an expression of delight in her mother’s good spirits and reached out for her beloved tobacco.

  Sankichi’s words remained behind to trouble Ogen after breakfast was over, and he had once again run outdoors like someone on a delightful summer holiday. She had often been aware while still at home that the family was taking precautions for her sake, hiding every cutting implement, from scissors to razors. At those times the aged Ogen felt the chill of the world. Overcome by a mixture of sadness and anger, she would deliberately set out to irritate the adopted heirs. Sometimes she would fold a handkerchief to look like a mouse and put it on top of her head, startling everyone from the head clerks to the apprentices in the workshop. Not even Ogen herself could say whether these stunts to make everyone laugh were of any use in proving that she was still of sound mind and making everyone see her as “the delightful grandmother.” At any rate, now that she had tried to set fire to the mulberry field as soon as she arrived at the Hachiya Clinic, and even a child like Sankichi had mentioned the fact, Ogen, convinced as she was that she was still mentally sound, could not help thinking of all the trouble she had made for her adopted heirs.

  Having finished rearranging her hair, Oshin turned to her mother, satisfied with her appearance. Ogen asked her daughter to bring her the hand mirror she had been using to look at the back of her head.

  “Your mother has never once looked into a mirror since your father’s death. Now that Dr. Hachiya has checked me over thoroughly, I think I’ll have my first look in a long time.”

  With this companionable aside to her daughter, Ogen turned to the mirror. Sudden thoughts of her father, dead for so many years, rose in her breast. Her hand began to tremble slightly. Her father had spent his final days in a dark cell that the family had built for him.

  “Oh!” Ogen seemed to groan as she gazed at herself in the mirror. Instead of the image of her father that she had secretly feared, she saw only her own reflection in the mirror, but it had changed almost beyond belief.

  “I’ve gotten so old!” Ogen said, as though impressed in spite of herself. She smoothed her eyebrows with the same gesture she had used as a young woman when looking in the mirror.

  “Isn’t it awful? It doesn’t seem like my face somehow,” Ogen said again, shoving the mirror toward her daughter with a deep sigh.

  The passing days fell into a quiet routine, although her little nephew, always the first to bring news about other patients coming to stay at the clinic, made Ogen’s room lively. One of the teachers at the school that Sankichi was attending had come to take advantage of summer vacation by having his nose looked after, and Sankichi immediately came running in to tell Ogen. When a couple from the mountains brought their pitiable deaf-mute daughter to the clinic, he again came running in to Ogen. Sometimes Ogen would go out with her little nephew to pass the time among the boulders along the banks of the Kiso River. There was warm summer sun and shade there, and they filled up their empty time at the clinic by gathering small, round stones to to be used as weights when they pickled the eggplants now in season. For Ogen, who had scarcely ever left the Oyama house except to visit the family graves, the riverbank was a place where she could fill her lungs with fresh air and soak her bare feet in the cold, clear water. Her enjoyment in using the stones for making eggplant pickles came not only from her desire to please Oshin and Sankichi. She also wanted to give the beautifully colored pickles to the other patients in the clinic; to the teacher with nose trouble, and to the couple with the deaf-mute daughter. She was good at toasting bread, and she enjoyed doing such things. A prime source of comfort while she was at the clinic was to use the equipment she had brought with her from home to make toast for her little nephew’s afternoon snack. Sometimes the delighted Sankichi would run from room to room distributing the fresh toast that his grandmother had made.

  It was also in this quiet clinic where for the first time Ogen could think over the years gone by. They could clearly hear the frogs singing from their room; they even sang in the middle of the day. Their voices took Ogen back to the times when her husband had been in his prime and the time when he had come home from his travels an old man. Her thoughts of leaving the Oyama family had by no means begun in these days of her old age. She had thought of it more than once or twice even when she and her husband had been in their prime. Few men had been better-natured than her husband, and few men had been weaker when it came to women. He had been still in his twenties, wearing the sea-otter hats that were in fashion in those days, when they had left the country to make a new start in Tokyo. That was also before Oshin was born. Already then, her husband had been involved with many geisha, and one of them had borne him a child. Ogen felt that this was more than she could handle. She was delighted when it pleased her husband to return once again to the country and even more so when even he seemed to feel some remorse. His Tokyo years had ended in failure, and he could not simply go back to the ancient Oyama home now that it had been entrusted in his absence to the head clerk. It had been while he was serving as a teacher in the region that he had taken in the young Hachiya and looked after him. And it was also during that time when he became involved with a woman at a local drinking establishment. That was when Ogen was finally forced to confront her husband’s utter unreliability, and her despair led her to try to leave, but she was unsuccessful. There came the time, too, when he had to apologize to the honest and old-fashioned head clerk. It was in those years after her husband had returned once more to live under the roof of the old family home that he had done his best work and been in the best spirits. The local people trusted him completely. He was widely known, he was free with his money, and he had the finest singing voice of anyone around. He became well acquainted with the local drinking houses and took up with a local geisha. When Ogen heard that he was the father of yet another irregularly conceived child, she could only think, “Here we go again.” That time she made up her mind to leave and actually got as far as the home of relatives in Tokyo, but they persuaded her to return home. However badly she was treated by her philandering husband, once she saw him touching his forehead to the floor before her and begging her forgiveness and once she heard his gentle voice in her ear, she was inclined to forgive and forget all. After her second attempt to leave home, she placed her hopes on her promising young son and in taking pleasure in watching the gentle Oshin grow up, doing her best to forget about her husband’s disgraceful behavior.

  Once her thoughts had progressed that far, Ogen fell into a solitary r
everie. What she had then found at her side was an older child who was coming more and more to resemble his father and a younger child who had been damaged by that father before she had even come into the world.

  Her reveries now brought Ogen to a second-floor sitting room in an urban house. Two of her brothers were with her. Her son was present. His wife was with them, taking out her slender woman’s pipe as she tried to join the conversation. Oshin was at the window railing, engrossed in the sights of the city. It was the house in Tokyo in which Ogen’s son had been living, and the waters of the Sumida River could be seen from the summery room. By the time Ogen brought Oshin on this visit, her husband was already no longer with her. She had heard that a young geisha had gone with him when he deserted his home, his wife, and his children, leaving behind a tangle of financial misdeeds. But he had not communicated with her, and it was not until just now, years later, that she even received news of the distant place where he was living, making it possible to exchange an occasional letter with him. She was then still waiting faithfully for his return. If only the opportunity had presented itself, she would have gone to the hot-spring resort to see her husband, to reunite him with Oshin, and to find some way to get him to come home to live with wife and children once more. It had been with that in mind that she found herself in Tokyo. But in that second-floor sitting room, looking at the expressions on the faces of her brothers and of her son and his wife, she felt that there was nothing for her but to return home empty-handed. The harshness of the younger brother’s words had finally become unbearable to Ogen.