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

by J. Thomas Rimer

  It had been in that second-floor sitting room that she had told him to “stop treating me like a widow!”

  And then he had said, “This old lady still has some fire in her!”

  That had been too much to take. “I certainly do. You may count on that!” she had said and took her leave of everyone. But wait as she might, her husband never returned. Once back home, her only constant companions in her lonely vigil were the desk her husband had left behind, the room he had left behind, and her own cold, lonely pillow, moistened every night by her tears as she thought of her husband and her two children.

  Her reveries next took her to the hearth side of the spacious kitchen. The soot-covered pot hook was hanging down from the high ceiling. The brightly burning fire in the hearth illuminated the shōji and the columns of the room. Oshin had been there, hard at work. The maid had been there. Her adopted heir had been going back and forth between the kitchen and the inner sitting room, a serious expression on his face. Sankichi had been peering in from time to time. That was when Ogen’s youngest brother had led a crestfallen individual in from the frontroom.6 It was Ogen’s husband who, after more than a decade of wandering around Japan and growing older, at last had made the long journey back to the house in which he had been born. Her brother had taken him to make his bows to the adopted heir, and now he was coming to bow to her. By that time her son was no longer in this world. Her husband had even failed to get back in time to see his son still living.7 The son’s wife had left the family. Only the fact that she could now let him meet once more with Oshin made Ogen feel that the spirits were still with her. But even this pleasure had not lasted long for Ogen. Her husband’s innate character would never change, no matter how old he grew. When her husband had returned at last to the house of his birth, he had been able to come through the door only after the sun had set. But humble as he had been upon his return, once he had settled down, her husband soon remembered the taste of the saké in the drinking establishments, and she was soon hearing that he was involved with yet another young geisha. Her husband’s pleasing character and weakness for women remained with him until he died. Ogen often found herself sitting blankly behind the deep windows behind which a woman would sleep and awaken, with only the ancient shōji passed down from distant ancestors to comfort her.

  Try as she might to stop, Ogen went on thinking such thoughts. She wondered once again whether her husband would have led such a dissipated life if she had only been the kind of woman who could have been a companion to her husband in his drinking and joined him in his songs. Those were the kinds of things she thought about now. She had always told the people in the household, her relatives, and everyone else that her daughter Oshin, while still quite young, had fallen downstairs and injured her head terribly and that she had been slow from then on. But her husband, at least, must surely have understood that the child’s fate had already been sealed on the day of her birth. Nor was that all; she herself had been deeply harmed in a way that she could speak of to no one. She remembered the time when during her long and painful wait for her husband, she and her daughter-in-law had lived together for a time. Not only was her son not living with them then, but that daughter-in-law herself had been about to leave her and go to join her husband.

  “I’m just no good to anyone,” she had said to her daughter-in-law as she broke into tears at her bedside.

  “You shouldn’t keep putting it off, Mother. Please go and see a doctor.” Her daughter-in-law had tried to comfort her at the very moment she was leaving her alone. It was from around that time that she had become preoccupied with her bad health. She had thought many times about going to a hot spring or some such place, but she kept putting off going to a doctor for a thorough examination because she could not bear the thought of exposing her husband’s shame. She was terrified by the very thought that the infection that her husband had passed on to her from women unknown and unseen would someday attack her at the very roots of her being.

  “The frogs are chirping!” Sankichi said as he came to Ogen. Completely engrossed in play, the child had gone outside at some time and returned hours later.

  “They certainly are.” Ogen gazed at Sankichi, who seemed to her more like a grandchild than a nephew. “And what did you do while you were outside?”

  “I went swimming in the Kiso River. I’m getting to be a good swimmer,” Sankichi said, making childish swimming motions with his hands. Ogen could not keep from laughing.

  “Where does my brother in Tokyo go swimming?” Sankichi asked, as though the thought had just struck him. This child had been placed in her care by Kumakichi, her third brother, and it was to his father’s place in Tokyo that she was thinking of going for help.8

  “You have been such a good boy that I’ll have to give you something for it,” Ogen said. She took out some candy, gave Sankichi some, and then handed some to Oshin who had just looked in.

  “And a reward for big sister, too,” she said, speaking as a mother might to a mere child.

  “The frogs really are chirping,” Oshin said, listening closely. “It makes me uneasy somehow when they chirp in the daytime.”

  “You’re good at imitating them, Sankichi, but how can your old auntie not give it a try, too? I’m not going to let Sankichi outdo me.”

  As she sat before the children playfully imitating a frog, she began to feel that she really was a frog. Not only did the sound of the breeding frogs in the distant paddy fields seem to press in on everything human, but even the deep green of the clinic garden seemed melancholy and unsettling.

  “I think I’m really about to go crazy,” Ogen said to herself, only half in jest. The voices of the frogs somehow seemed to carry her toward her father—toward the grillwork of that cell in which her father had been confined during his final days. People had always said that Ogen resembled her father more closely than did any of her brothers. The thought was now disturbing. How could it be that she should find herself with a forty-year-old daughter still unable to take care of herself ? The thought made Ogen want to laugh at herself. She picked up the slender brass fire tongs9 from the brazier and, without quite intending to do so, bent them into a half-circle.

  “The doctor’s going to get mad at you again, Auntie!” Sankichi said, looking into Ogen’s face in brief wonderment and then breaking into childish laughter. At such times Oshin would always look at those around her and take her mother’s part.

  “You’re too much, San-chan! You’re always thinking about that.” Laughing, she tried to straighten out the tongs again, careful and gentle as always. After they had been at the Hachiya Clinic for about three weeks, Sankichi began begging to return to the Oyama home. Ogen wanted to keep this little nephew with her as long as possible and to hear him say that “it’s best being with Auntie,” but she could do nothing with the bored child. Saying that he could get home by himself, Sankichi set out to cover on foot the five miles to the nearest railway station. On the day when this country-raised child set out, Ogen and Oshin saw him off to the edge of the village. The sight of her tiny nephew in his student’s cap and his back country coveralls, turning again and again to look back, remained in Ogen’s eyes.

  The room at the clinic was lonely with Sankichi gone. Yet for the first time in a long time, Ogen felt good enough to write a postcard to Kumakichi in Tokyo. Ogen had once written an elegant woman’s hand, but now that she had a tremor in her hands, she rarely picked up a writing brush any more. She kept checking what she had written in the postcard to her brother, delighted to see that her tremor had left no trace. When September came, it brought a succession of days when she felt even better. Not only was she passing an unusually pleasant time with Oshin and their servant woman, she had even walked over to the home of distant relatives in the village. At the end her life, a late-blooming peace had come to Ogen. She had found it in the cool morning and evening rains that came so early to mountain houses, in the dew-covered mulberry fields and in the patterns of sunlight in the clinic garden.
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  “Please lend me one yen,” Ogen said one day. The servant who had come with her had been taking care of accounts, and Ogen would beg spending money from her every day.

  “One yen will be enough,” Ogen said again, holding her hand out. Everyone at the Oyama house was very fond of the old servant, but she would not let Ogen have her way when it came to money.

  “I’ll never be able to face the people back home if I keep letting madam have so much spending money.” She spoke quite firmly, responding to Ogen’s request with the greatest reluctance.

  At such times Ogen couldn’t help feeling that her weak point had been found out. She would assume an angry tone, forgetting all about the servant’s hard work, day in and day out. She had no idea how much money she had spent since coming to this clinic.

  “You’re all acting as though I just throw the money away.” Her manner became harsh. Ogen’s desire to find a final “retreat” for her and Oshin grew stronger day by day. She was not unaware of her ineptitude in handling money, but she could never master it. She could only worry. She could never escape her apprehension about the future for Oshin, still a virgin at age forty. Oshin’s long face and her height came from her father, and her eyes with their long lashes were exactly like his. Whenever Ogen found herself face to face with her daughter, she was reminded of the days when she had been face to face with her late husband. When she was with her daughter, she missed her husband with a special poignancy, although she really could not understand why she missed this wastrel husband: as a father he had harmed his daughter, and as a husband he had harmed his wife.

  “Aah! There’s no one but Oshin left on my side.” She sighed.

  One afternoon in the long clinic hallway, a September sun shining on the garden, thoughts rose in Ogen’s breast of the speed with which a woman’s life could pass by. With an expression of solicitude for Ogen on his face, Dr. Hachiya came through the garden to sit down at the edge of the hallway.

  “I am reminded of Sensei whenever I see the young lady. She certainly does look a lot like him.” Dr. Hachiya always referred to Ogen’s husband as “Sensei.”

  “But Dr. Hachiya, she’s already a woman of forty.”

  “Yes, I suppose that’s right,” Dr. Hachiya reminded himself. “The young lady was still very small when Sensei was looking after me. It’s quite remarkable that you have been able to bring her up this far.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you one thing, Dr. Hachiya. Having her is the only thing that has made it possible for me to keep going. I really do owe it all to her. Right from the first I was never able to take my eyes off of her for a moment. I had to tell her everything: ‘Oshin, do this; Oshin do that.’ If I spoke to her slowly and carefully, she would understand and do just exactly as I taught her. Quiet handiwork is best for her. Once I realized that, I put her to work helping around the house. Yes, she is really fond of handiwork. And in the meantime, remember, she has become a woman. You have no idea how I worried to see her become a woman.”

  “No, it’s really no ordinary thing for you to have brought her up in this way. From the physician’s point of view, too, handiwork is best for people like the young lady. Now the Oyama household can breathe easier.”

  “That’s just the problem. Once I showed her how to peel dried gourds. She said that she wanted to try it, too. So I decided to turn over to her the gourd and the cutting board and the kitchen knife. But then, I’m telling you, she began making odd little sounds and started cutting both thin and thick slices off the gourd. When it came to the question of how many pieces to cut the gourd into, she didn’t have the beginning of an idea. While it would be nice to have her peel gourds, I still couldn’t take my eyes off her for a moment for fear she might cut herself. That’s just the way it is. I still want to go on staying with her and looking after her. Can you imagine me getting this far through all these worries if it hadn’t been for that?—You know very well, Dr. Hachiya, how someone like me could have gotten along on my own for ten years in the middle of all the difficulties of the Oyama family.”

  Without being aware of it, Ogen had sat down beside Dr. Hachiya and begun talking with him as can be done only with an old acquaintance.

  Presently, appearing to tuck his beard—which was unusually long even for a mountain person—into the breast of his robe, Dr. Hachiya got up to leave Ogen. Then, as though he had suddenly thought of it, “My duties as a physician have kept me very busy, Mrs. Oyama, and I haven’t been able to give you as much attention as I would like. Beginning tomorrow, I’m bringing in a young person. He will be my assistant. Just ask him if you need anything.”

  As he spoke, he went over to the far side of the garden where members of the clinic staff were coming and going and brought back a man with him. He looked to be just out of medical school. Dr. Hachiya brought the young shy man over to Ogen.

  “This is the person who will be assisting me, Mrs. Oyama,” Dr. Hachiya said. Ogen made a slight bow, but she found in the young man a presence far beyond what might be expected in the assistant of a country doctor.

  “He’s a fine man.” As the thought struck her, Ogen hurriedly left the hallway and half ran back to her room where she hid herself away, firmly closing and latching the shōji.

  September drew to an end, and Ogen was still feeling good, certain that she was at least nine-tenths of the way to a full recovery. She told Dr. Hachiya as well as Oshin and the servant, and they all were delighted to hear it. She began to think about going to Tokyo. Dr. Hachiya’s wife had never received her with the enthusiasm and deference that her husband always displayed, and her readiness to take offense at the slightest thing lent greater urgency to Ogen’s thoughts of Tokyo. In Tokyo she could look forward to the pleasure of seeing those younger brothers whom she had not seen for such a long time and share with them the pleasure of working out plans for her future with them. She would have to let Oshin out of her care for a time, and she would have to part, too, from the old servant woman who had been looking after her for the past three months. Her adopted heir had been extremely busy, and so it was his elder brother who came as a representative of the Oyama family to accompany her to Tokyo.

  On the night before her departure, Ogen spent the time in the company of the daughter from whom she had been inseparable.

  “Let’s just the two of us have a good talk, Oshin. I’m going to lie down, and you can make yourself comfortable.” Ogen said, relaxing just as though she was still alone with her daughter in a sitting room of the Oyama house with no need to be concerned about prying eyes; now stretching out on the tatami, now partially raising herself, now sitting straight up on the floor. She heaved a deep sigh.

  “I think I’ll have a smoke,” Oshin said, taking her mother literally, and she reached for the smoking set. Her movements as she smoked her pipe were completely consistent with her age.

  “I’m going to go on to Tokyo by myself, Oshin, so I want you to wait for me at home. I’ll send for you as soon as I have talked things over with your uncles. All right? Isn’t it best to be with your mother?”

  Oshin did not reply. She seemed to be giving more attention to her smoking than to what her mother was saying. Her feeling of intimacy with her mother was reflected in the way in which she would light up a tiny bowl full of tobacco and hand the pipe with its slender swirl of smoke to her mother. Ogen took pleasure in the gesture. She accepted the pipe, took it lightly in her teeth, and smoked with enjoyment. These intimate feelings of overwhelming love for her daughter naturally called up memories of her deceased husband. Her memories of him were far more of the bitter, jealousy-filled days than of those in which she had been secure and respected in her position as wife. Ogen found it painful to think of this strange bond between husband and wife. When it came time for their servant to put down the bedding, they could hear the sound of a heavy autumn rain falling outdoors. That evening Ogen lined up her pillow with those of her daughter and her servant, and the three of them talked until late at night.

  The
brother of the adopted Oyama heir arrived the next morning. As the time came to exchange farewells and set off for the station, the feelings with which she had left the ancient Oyama household where she had lived so long rose once again in Ogen’s breast. That had been the time when Ogen had once and for all decided to leave everything behind and to seek out her own “final hiding place.”

  Oshin and the servant accompanied her to the station, saying that they would be going the same way anyway on their way back home. Thus the four found themselves standing together in the station.

  The train passed two stations, and at the second, Oshin and the servant got off. The brother of the adopted heir turned to Ogen.

  “Everyone at the Oyama household has come out the back door to wait for you. You should wave to them from the train window.”

  The stone-weighted, wood-shingled roof of the house where Ogen had lived so long came into view. As they came to the family graves, then to the foot of the embankment below the mulberry field, they could hear the shouts of the people lined up along the top of the stone embankment Ogen could see, almost in a single glance, coming out from the back door the adopted heir dressed in coveralls, Sankichi waving his cap, the clerks, the apprentices, and the women servants.

  “Grandma! Grandma!”

  Sankichi and the cap he was waving passed from view; the roof of the inner sitting room, the white walls of the storehouse on which the anguish of the adopted heir was concentrated all vanished in the blink of an eye. The train moved over onto the rails laid along the vanished route of the old post road and passed beyond the edge of town, trailing puffs of black smoke in its wake.

  A despairing Ogen settled herself into the window seat. She could not keep from reflecting on her situation, taking up the life of a vagabond at the age of sixty. Yet she did not want to look upon her long marriage as having ended in complete bankruptcy as a woman, because she believed that she had always done her very best to the very limits of her strength, from the days when the Oyama family had first expressed their interest in her and she had first come to them as a bride. With Oshin as the sole memento of her husband, she felt that she could still somehow find a more rewarding life. Her thoughts passed as though in a distant dream, and darkness fell as she rode past Lake Suwa.