I feel such an inexpressible loss when I think of it now. If only I had waited and walked with you to Shinagawa, I would not be feeling this way now. Suppose the sight of you in your helmet, laboring under the weight of your gear and your pack had filled me with apprehension, as you had suggested? And what if watching you with the sweat pouring down your face had left me wracked with worry? What of it? How could these feelings possibly compare with the uncertainty I now feel? Can you possibly understand a woman’s feelings? The way her heart aches at the loss? Amid the cries of banzai! the sound of boots, the scent of the earth, the glitter of swords, there you were marching away from me, immersed in thoughts as intangible as drifting sea grass. Why weren’t your soldier’s feelings conveyed to my heart with every step you took?
It must be because, because you were no longer just the man I love, the man who belongs to one woman—to me. No. You were now that man—a man traveling to a distant land for the sake of his country, charged with an important mission. This realization carved itself into my heart so deeply that no words could express it.
I went home. When later I left for Shinagawa, it was nearly one o’clock. Even while I waited outside the station with your father and the rest of the family, I was filled with the same bright feeling that I had enjoyed when I left you in front of the barracks this morning. Was this the way a woman felt when parting from someone she might not see again for months or even years? My carefree joy began to fade into a vague apprehension. All the people milling around in front of the station appeared to be out to enjoy the New Year’s holiday. I didn’t see a soul among them who was there to see off a loved one. Even so, it never even occurred to me that you had already left! I just assumed your train was late. Gradually I began to wonder whether perhaps your company had not stopped somewhere nearby to eat lunch and rest a bit. And so I decided to look around for the kind of estate that would be able to accommodate a group like yours. I took your father by the hand, and we crossed the tracks, hurrying up the broad, slopping avenue.
A wind had come up, and in no time at all, the sky had grown leaden and wintry. We leaned forward as we climbed the hill, using our bodies to block the gusts. While we searched here and there among the many unfamiliar houses for one likely to host such a group, the sun disappeared, and the gentle serenity that I had enjoyed from the morning evaporated. I had believed that I would be able to find the house where you were staying without any problem. I suppose I must seem ridiculously naïve now, but I assumed it would be no easy feat to hide a group of noisy soldiers. I whispered this to myself over and over as we trudged along. How can I describe my emotions? I searched here and there, and when I finally began to realize that I was not going to be able to see you at all, my knees grew weak.
“Here it is,” my younger brother called. He had come with us, and now he was standing in front of a tall wooden fence surrounding a large estate. I imagine we had walked past the place a number of times already—how was it we hadn’t noticed it before? The imposing gate was closed, but through a crevice in the doors we could see that a number of white tents had been spread across the vast lawn. And it was clear that a large crowd of people had been there until only a few minutes before. Cigarette butts, bits of paper, and bamboo-leaf wrappers littered the ground and danced about in the gusting wind.
Ah, we’re too late, I thought to myself and sank weakly to my knees. “Say there! Have the soldiers all left?” my brother called out to someone who was picking up around the tents. He must have been a groundskeeper. I gazed at him vacantly and then turned to stare at the station below us. The wind blew through the treetops. The tremor of the tree limbs, the sound of the trains on the government railways—these are the sounds I heard after you, my husband, had left.
“They left about thirty minutes ago,” my brother reported when he returned. “It’s no use. We’re too late,” I mumbled quietly to myself. And so gradually I came to accept the fact that you had left. At that moment, the bus making its way past us down the hill and the men and women crossing the broad avenue in front of the station looked strange and distant.
A fine snow had begun to fall. Your father, I could see, was feeling much as I was. He asked no questions but stood staring blankly into space, a dumbfounded look on his face. I suggested that we turn back, and as we walked the short distance to the station, I told myself that you, too, not but a moment earlier, had passed this way. Suddenly I felt that I could see into your heart, that I could feel what you felt, and without thinking, I gasped.
I understood perfectly well what you had felt. You did not know exactly when you would be asked to board the train and so had assumed it would be around 2:00. That is what you had told me, and then when you realized that you would be leaving earlier than expected, you thought of us coming to see you off, and although you knew we would not arrive in time, you searched anyway for a glimpse of us as you took this road down to the station and walked out onto the platform. “No, they wouldn’t have come yet,” you told yourself. But rather than feeling disappointed at our absence, you worried over the way we would react when we realized we had missed you and how we would wander around searching for you. In your heart, you saw me as I am now, and it was pity for me that you felt as you set out. This I now know, for I can see your heart as clearly as if it were open before my eyes. I could feel my heart responding to yours. “Please, don’t worry about me. Go forth with a brave heart. I wasn’t able to see you, but I’m fine. I am prepared.” This is what I told you in my heart, and as I did, I began to feel that we really were speaking to each other. Yes, this is exactly what I felt—and since you’ve left, I’ve had many conversations with you like this—speaking to you intimately, even though I cannot see you. Unable to utter even a single word of farewell to you—this, then, is my good-bye. That’s what came to me as I stood there alone.
There was no sign of you, of course, on the station platform. But even so, the station was not as it would be normally. There was an imposing rope stretched across the platform, and it was clear to me that your train had left from here—and probably not long ago.
It was still snowing. Whenever the snow begins to fall as suddenly as this, it always makes me feel as if I’m in a dream. The train yard was silent—with not a soul in sight—and a number of freight cars were scattered along the tracks. When I glanced inside, they seemed to be full of something white and cottony. I suppose they had come from some distant place and were full of snow—the snow they had collected on their long trip. I wondered absentmindedly as I stood there gazing out. “Well, I guess that’s that. We said good-bye this morning, and we may not see him for half a year—a whole year, perhaps. If we’d been able to see him one more time, it just would have made the parting that much harder.” This is what my younger brother said. He was right. I knew he was. But even so, I could not accept what had happened. I could not convince myself that we had actually parted this morning.
And I imagined the snow piling up in those cars.
Your father and his wife left this morning for their home. This is the second time they have seen you off. And so it would seem they are used to such partings. This morning was no different. As soon as they opened their eyes, they began speaking of you. “He must be in Hamamatsu by now,” they began. And it made me happy to see how calm they were. They were in much better spirits than other parents we know who have sent their sons to war.
After I saw your parents off, I stopped by Asakusa on my way home to offer prayers to Kannon-sama. I remembered that you and I had come here together last spring around the time we learned you were finally going to be sent to war. We prayed to Kannon-sama and bought a good-luck charm. That’s right, I reminded myself, you had stood here when you prayed. Suddenly I caught a glimpse of you in my heart—the cut of your shoulder, the drape of the kimono you had worn that day. I went around the little shops alongside the temple hall and bought a miniature statue of Kannon-sama—just as we had done then.
The snow had stopped falling the nig
ht before, but the sky was still overcast. The Asakusa Kannon temple precinct, usually such a lively place, was strangely quiet. An old woman selling trinkets along the road held a lacquer bowl in her hands eating stew with rice dumplings. This must be her New Year’s feast, I thought as I watched her. I decided to feed the pigeons. You always feed the pigeons whenever you come here. I stood there for a while, waiting. Suddenly I heard the clap of gunfire coming from the military parade grounds nearby. The pigeons took flight in a flutter of wings and lit on the temple roof—the whole flock of them. They didn’t look like they were interested in coming down anytime soon. “Then, I’ll leave it here for you,” I murmured, and I dropped the beans on the grounds and turned to go home, alone.
When, I wondered, had I become a normal woman—the kind of woman who on her way home stops by the temple to pray to Kannon-sama and then feeds the pigeons? It’s not that I had turned my back on the world earlier, but I had made my way without needing anything from anyone but myself, hiding my feelings of distrust from those around me. I had convinced myself that I could survive on my own resources. The past is such a dream to me now.
When we first began living together, you often told me about your childhood. You mostly spoke of your mother. In one story, you described how when your mother was dying, the pains in her stomach were so severe that she could hardly see. Her illness was terminal, but you were too little to understand what was happening. When her pain was at its worst, you would pray to Kannonsama—determined that your mother would recover. Afraid to let anyone know, you waited until nightfall when no one would see you and prayed the whole night through. “I’m telling you, by morning she was completely better, and I knew it was all thanks to Kannon.” Every time I heard you tell me this story—your face calm as you spoke—I would think to myself—my, what an old-fashioned man he is! And now here I am taking it upon myself to pray before the statues lined up alongside the temple hall as if they were the most precious icons! After I returned home, I sat before the family altar and quietly lit incense. It was just as I was in the middle of my own prayers that Mr. Aoyama telephoned from the office.
Mr. Aoyama had also gone to Shinagawa but had allowed himself plenty of time—unlike us—and had managed to catch a glimpse of you. This was the gist of his telephone call. “Of course, I had been enjoying the New Year’s celebration since morning,” he recounted with great excitement, “and I must have been feeling my liquor because even after the station master announced that no one was allowed on the platform, I dashed out just as the train pulled in. The soldiers were on board, and from where I was standing, it was impossible to tell who was who. But when I rushed out onto the platform with shouts of ‘Banzai! Banzai!’ your husband must have spotted me because I saw a black-gloved hand shoot up and wave in my direction. He was signaling to me. His face was full and he looked well.” As Mr. Aoyama continued his account, he related how just then another train entered the station from the opposite direction, blocking his view of your train. He lost sight of you, and by the time the other train had cleared the station, he said, all the black blinds had been lowered over the windows in your train and he couldn’t see you any more. “But he really did look well,” Mr. Aoyama added just before he hung up.
For some time after I hung up, I walked back and forth along the narrow hallway by the telephone. Tired of pacing, I stood there for a bit, lost in thought. In my mind I could see you—your black-gloved hand held high, waving. So you got off safely, after all. That’s when it occurred to me. That’s when I realized that even though you had not uttered a single word—that gloved gesture exchanged with another person had been meant as a message to me. When I thought of it this way, I felt so very fortunate. True, I had not spoken to you personally, but here—through the voice of another—I learned you looked well and had set off safely, and this knowledge filled me with joy.
Tonight you must already be at. People in our neighborhood have opened their homes to soldiers on their way to war. Those who do not host the soldiers themselves stay busy collecting sleepwear and bedding for those who do. Tonight will you, too, enjoy the hospitality of strangers? If you do, I am sure you will sleep soundly.
Little by little I seem to have grown used to living alone. It was three months ago, I suppose, when we first learned that you would have to enlist. You left the house alone on a cold, rainy morning. Now it seems like such a long, long time ago. Your father and his wife had come in from the countryside that morning, and most of your relatives had gathered here as well—even the neighbors came by to see you off. When the time came, you climbed into the car, and we crowded into the narrow alleyway outside the house. Umbrellas were opened on top of umbrellas, and on impulse everyone began to cry out at once “Banzai!” “Banzai!” It was like a dream. Somehow I was pushed to the back of the swelling crowd. Stretching up on tiptoe, I could just manage to glimpse your face as the car pulled away. And then the dark shape of the car disappeared behind the jostling umbrellas. The next thing I knew the car had turned the corner and slipped from the alley and out of sight. For a second I staggered against the wooden fence, longing to disappear silently into the press of umbrellas. “Is he gone? Just like that?” Overwhelmed by the realization, I could feel the tears well up behind my eyes. The moment was just so precious. Here you were leaving—you, the man I had shared my life with up until that very day. And there I was pushed to the back of the crowd without so much as a word of farewell from you. You—not even looking my way once—what kind of parting was this? It lashed my heart with a cruel force. This was my beloved! And I—only I saw clearly into the heart of my beloved and understood how he could leave his wife behind—lost as she was in this crush of people. I repeated this to myself over and over. Even if I felt despair, it was as it should be. What if we had been allowed to be together before we parted? What if it had been just the two of us, and we had been able to speak of our sorrow to our hearts’ content? Parting would have been unbearable! No one has taught me this. But I am a woman after all, and I have had to learn to steel my heart for our separation—knowing that I would be required to send to war the only person in the world I have—knowing that I have no power to control the inevitable. As the day drew to a close, I sat in the empty parlor and faced my dinner tray alone. I had just prepared the meal, and as I gazed at the teacup and chopsticks I was so used to seeing, I felt that you were still here with me and had only been called away on business. Suddenly my eyes opened to the reality of it all. You were gone to war. Yet—when I remember it now, it is a dream.
Three months have passed since then. When you were first inducted, the days passed with no word from you. It rained nearly every day. Although I had no way of knowing when you would return, I convinced myself deep in my heart that you would return on one of those cold, rainy days, and every day I darned your socks and mended your underwear, and as I did I sighed over the rain—how much it rains! There was a time—before we were together—when I lived in Aoyama. The soldiers paraded past my house every day in their army units. They marched even when it rained—the rain hitting their cheeks. Now when I think of them, of those innumerable soldiers oblivious to the conditions around them, all their faces blend into one. At the time, there were moments when I would open the window, gaze out at the street, and wonder whether the soldiers were coming past again. At night after I had gone to bed, I would hear the military songs that I had grown accustomed to—way off at a distance—and I would realize that the soldiers were still marching. Even so, it never occurred to me that for every soldier that I saw, there was a loved one left at home, waiting. Now I feel quite as if I had been another person. The old saying rings true: “trial by rain; trial by wind.” It may be hackneyed, but it contains the heart’s truths. I don’t know who to turn to for help right now, and yet I feel that I want to press my hands together in prayer—perhaps it is the sound of the rain that so inspires me.
This great war that has been raging for all these many years did not in fact exist for me until th
e day you walked out the door last autumn. Even I am appalled when I stop to consider my own feelings. Occasionally I would receive a postcard from you. But how could I tell from those short messages what you did day and night? How did you look? How did you fare? You gave me no details, and then it occurred to me that this was your intention. You had written only what you wanted me to know. Realizing this reminded me of your habitual refrain—“Don’t waste time worrying over what you can’t know!” Easy to say, of course, but impossible to control. I am like a summer insect so transfixed by the light that it cannot help flinging its body against the window glass trying impossibly do the impossible. I, too, could not help but spend my days worrying about matters I could not understand. When I stop to think of the way I was then—of the woman I was then—I wish that I had been more mindful of the things you were to tell me.
Last spring when you commuted for those ten days between our house and your unit, you told me on more than one occasion, “You must not think of me as your husband. Rather, you must think of me as a soldier, just a man with no particular name.” You said this to me over and again. And now, now that I have grown used to my life sitting alone in front of my dinner tray, I think I am finally beginning to understand what you meant.
Tonight you still are in Osaka, aren’t you? Yesterday, the woman staying at Toyoko’s house dropped in to check on me. After we had chatted about trifles, she told me that the young man next door to her—I’m sure you’d know him if you saw him—he’s the young company employee named Seto—anyway, he joined the army—back in his hometown—the very same morning of the same day that you were sent off. She said that because of the train schedule, he had to leave the house before daybreak, when it was still pitch black outside.
“The only ones up to see him off were me and his wife,” she began. “He said good-bye to us out in front of the house. ‘Take care of yourselves,’ he said, and off he went. It was so dark outside that I couldn’t see his face clearly. But we stood there and watched as he walked away. At the bend in the alley he stopped to light his cigarette, and as he threw the match down, he glanced back in our direction. When she saw that, the wife flew into the house and burst into tears, clutching me and crying unashamedly.”
The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature: From Restoration to Occupation, 1868-1945: vol. 1 (Modern Asian Literature Series) Page 119
