Record of a Night too Brief

by Hiromi Kawakami

  My entire apartment was charged with the presence of snake. When I say snake, I mean pure snake, not woman.

  The woman was nowhere to be seen, but a meal had been prepared and laid out on the table. So, I thought, I’d see no sign of the woman tonight.

  I opened a drawer—and scores of little snakes came slithering out from between the notebooks and pens. Gliding up my arms, they reached my neck, and from there they burrowed straight into my ears. I nearly jumped out of my skin. It didn’t hurt, exactly, but the instant they’d penetrated my ears, they changed into a liquid and carried on streaming in, deeper and deeper. They were ice-cold. In an effort to keep out the little snakes that hadn’t yet got into my ears, I shook my head fiercely. But that only made the snakes that had turned into liquid in my ears become more viscous as they pushed on inwards, into my inner ears.

  The viscous fluid filled my semicircular canals. It worked its way through to my auditory ossicles. My ears were now so crammed with snake I could hear nothing, only a distant tiny sound somewhere deep inside as the snakes pushed stickily farther in. The liquid snake brushed against nerves in my ears, and the sensation of being touched there spread outwards, getting into my head. When my head filled with snake, the idea of snake transmitted itself centrifugally to every part of me. My fingertips, my lips, my eyelids, my palms, my feet, my ankles, my calves, my soft belly, my back, the hair on my body—everything that was exposed to the air apprehended snake and broke out in goosebumps. My flesh crept in horror.

  Then it passed, all signs of the presence of snake ceased, and I was released. But after five minutes, the sensation of snake took over again. It was as if every few minutes I was breaking out in cyclical malarial fever.

  This was not something I wanted to spend time doing.

  Rousing the body that was feeling so much discomfort, I made my way towards the dining table. Despite my unusual state, I was hungry, and I crammed the food the woman had prepared down my gullet. Boiled spinach with a tasty ground-sesame seasoning. A sour-sweet vinegar salad of grated carrot and seaweed. Mackerel marinated in sweet miso broth. Simmered yam. A bowl of white rice topped with tiny white fish, minced scallions, and a sprinkling of white sesame seeds. As the food was going down, the soft tissues of my mouth were changing back and forth, now into those of a snake, now into those of a human.

  I’d never had so much going on before.

  I will not become a snake, I will not. Even as I was saying this to myself, I was devouring the food prepared by a snake, swallowing every last morsel. I worked my jaws onto the food, got it down and swallowed, devoured more of it, got that down too, licked the plates, and then paused and listened for the sounds of all the things that cry in the night. Then I lay down and waited for the next snake onslaught, and then for it to pass, directing my mind away from where I was, forward, forward to a distant horizon, as far away from snake as possible. Stretching out as far as it would go, small and long and thin, my mind tried to feel out any nook or cranny, searching for an exit, but everything was sealed, snake filled every crack, and I was simply thrust back, defeated.

  This was uncomfortable in the extreme.

  Hiwako, dear, you’d love being a snake. It’s so cosy and comfortable… The voice rained down on me from all the skies of the world. I was soaking-wet with what it was telling me. The second drawer I opened was packed with a mediumsized snake that was prettily coloured, and when I closed it, hurriedly, the drawer below it sprang open to reveal a gigantic snake, coiled up. Suddenly, there were snakes slithering over my prone body, gliding all over the room, and once they’d tired of that, they got back on top of me, where they proceeded to form shapes of towers and rafts, and lock into puzzles.

  Hiwako, de-e-a-r! Hiwako, de-e-a-r! How long are you going to just lie there? Hearing my mother’s voice, I sat up immediately and tried to get to my feet, but then I thought it could be the snake trying to ensnare me, and I found myself unable to move. Don’t become a snake, Hiwako, dear! What’s the point! You’re your own person! my mother continued. This had the effect of sickening me. Since she was so against it, I felt almost as if I should try it. That’s right, Hiwako, dear—isn’t that what I’ve been saying? I’m the one who’s your mother, and if your mother’s a snake, it stands to reason you’re a snake too… That was the snake speaking. The snake and my mother started to quarrel with each other. On and on they quarrelled, looming, enormous presences, the snake trying to shrink my mother by hurling at her any snakes in the room—little snakes, wriggling snakes, any snakes within reach—and my mother trying to beat the snake back by hurling incantations, imprecations, and prayers.

  I no longer knew where I was, what I was doing, but my body continued intermittently to turn into a snake, regardless, and after a while that physical sensation of snake began gradually to feel quite comfortable. Wondering whether this meant that at some point all of me was going to become snake, I lay there experiencing in equal parts a sense of dread and a sense of calm expectation, the tears falling, as the night continued to deepen.

  “Miss Sanada, you seem a bit tired recently,” Mr Kosuga remarked, as he ground the beans for morning coffee. Since Nishiko had been bedridden, he had assumed responsibility for this task.

  I was indeed extremely sleep-deprived since I now had to deal with the threat of snake onslaughts on a nightly basis. More than once I considered throwing in the towel and just going straight over, but some obstinacy deep inside me refused to let me give in.

  “How is Nishiko?” I asked, sipping my coffee.

  Mr Kosuga’s eyes grew moist.

  “You know, she’s recovering much quicker than I thought.” Despite his relieved tone, he still looked very pale.

  Nishiko had emerged from her bed, he explained, at first dragging herself around with her arms, then holding on to furniture like a baby making its first steps. Now she was able to walk slowly without any support.

  “You haven’t had any other visits?”

  “So far, no.”

  “Does Nishiko really not mind, being without her snake?”

  “She doesn’t seem too bothered.” Mr Kosuga seemed dazed.

  Snakes were now coming round to my apartment to pester me, night after night, hanging around in varying numbers. Had Nishiko really escaped from her snake’s spell? Had she managed to separate herself once and for all from the snake world?

  Mr Kosuga was to make a delivery to Ganshinji Temple in Kōfu. It had been some time since our last visit. He seemed to be stifling yawns all day, and I asked him if he was short of sleep. He admitted he was fatigued, and was worried he might not be able to keep awake during the drive. At his suggestion we closed up shop and went off in the van together.

  When we arrived at Ganshinji Temple, the priest eagerly launched into stories about his possessions. Mr Kosuga, sitting there in an uncharacteristically slouched pose, was giving little nods, clearly off in his own world. We both found ourselves so drowsy that several times in the course of the priest’s stories one of us dozed off and had to be nudged by the other to stay awake.

  “And speaking of snakes…,” the priest now began.

  Suddenly, the topic had shifted, catching both of us unawares.

  “There was once a man who took a snake for a wife. Well, actually, that man was… me.”

  The priest observed both of us steadily.

  After a moment of silence, he resumed:

  “Snake wives make the very best kind of wife. They look after their husbands devotedly, they do housework swiftly and skilfully, and they’re also excellent at keeping accounts. And when it comes to certain night-time activities, well, they’re perfection itself. They don’t have the hot temper you find in so many women, and, best of all, they don’t speak much. When you give them their instructions, they listen, looking at you steadily, with those big, crystal-clear eyes. They have something stubborn about them, but not stubborn like human women: human women get stubborn for emotional reasons; snakes are stubborn because that’s t
heir nature. But then again, this means they’ll keep any promise they make. As for children, you won’t get any human children with a snake: you’ll only get eggs, and from those eggs, juvenile snakes. But as long as my snake’s happy, I have no complaints. I’ve never liked children anyway.”

  The priest paused, and clapped his hands together. In a few moments the priest’s wife appeared, carrying trays of soba, as on our previous visit. She had her hair bound in a low bun, and she wore a long-sleeved apron over her dark kimono.

  “Please start,” she said, after she had set the trays in front of us.

  But instead of retreating to the kitchen, she sat down where she was.

  “I’m now completely used to my snake’s ways,” the priest said. He turned to his wife: “From what I can tell, though, that’s not the case with our guests.”

  The priest’s wife gazed back at him, widening her big eyes. Her eyes were crystal-clear, a bluish-white, and they were wet all over. Eyes that drew you into them.

  The priest’s wife hesitated. “If I may say something…,” she said, in a low, husky voice.

  Mr Kosuga, bewildered, stared at her.

  “Some snakes take a little more getting used to, sir.”

  The priest’s wife’s gaze was fixed on the priest. She did not cast so much as a glance at Mr Kosuga or me.

  Then she continued: “I don’t think we can say a thing about these people’s snakes, sweetie pie, unless we’ve met them face-to-face.”

  The moment she was done speaking, the antique ceramics and knick-knacks that were lined up on the antique display shelves of the room started to rattle. Nobody said a word. When the cabinet with gold latches that was shaking violently came at last to a standstill, the priest’s wife got up and switched on the light. It was not until then that I realized that it was quite dark outside. Although it was early afternoon, black clouds were hanging over the sky.

  Still nobody said a word. Suddenly, without a sound, the drawer of the gold-latched cabinet slid open, and from it dozens of little snakes came slithering out. Each glided across the floor to the priest’s wife, who picked them up one by one, and deposited them into the bosom of her kimono. A moist, warm breeze was blowing all around the temple. When she’d stowed all the snakes away, the priest’s wife slid smoothly over the floor, going first to Mr Kosuga. She wrapped herself around him, and gave his head a lick. Then she came and did the same to me.

  “What do you think? Could you learn to like a snake like me?” the priest’s wife asked, in a husky voice.

  The priest looked on, with an expression of satisfaction.

  “Such a question. I wouldn’t know how to,” Mr Kosuga, turning bright crimson, said in confusion.

  “Don’t you like me?”

  Mr Kosuga, now sweating profusely, managed to reply:

  “It’s not a question of that. I’ve never been comfortable with this kind of thing.”

  “And what about you?” The priest’s wife fixed her big eyes on me. “Am I so different from other snakes you know?”

  Was she different? I’d never been all that interested in snakes. I still wasn’t all that crazy about them. It was just that she kept coming at me, insistently begging me to go over to her world. I had no desire to go over. Despite my resistance, though, she didn’t stop trying, and camfe and pestered me again and again. If she kept this up, maybe the day would come when I’d surprise myself and go over to her.

  The woman in my apartment was a much fiercer, more demanding creature than this priest’s wife, it seemed to me. With the woman in my apartment coiling herself around me, I never felt cool-headed, the way I was feeling with the priest’s wife right now. But there was some quality that she and I had in common. For me, the tense, tingling feeling that overtook me when she and I were entwined contained something I found thrilling.

  “What about you?” the priest’s wife asked me again.

  I shook my head from side to side, slowly. The priest and his wife exchanged a look.

  The priest’s wife’s body started to get longer and longer, and after a moment or two she transformed into a snake. The snake glided smoothly over to the priest’s lap and then up onto his shoulders, where she proceeded to coil herself around his neck three times. Draped in his snake, the priest launched into yet another story about how one of his possessions had fallen into his hands.

  I hadn’t been sure if I’d ever see Nishiko again, but one day there she was, back in the Kanakana-Dō. Incongruously, she seemed full of pep. “Shall I teach you how to thread prayer beads?” she said to me. “You never know—you might be really good at it.” Once again she busied herself around the shop, quietly getting on with her tasks, producing many prayer-bead bracelets. With Nishiko back, the orders for beads, once seemingly in danger of petering out, started to come in again. Mr Kosuga regained a bit of his former colour.

  The fine weather continued, and the snake staying at my apartment was once again a woman. As a woman, she was quite ordinary. She had a few snake-ish traces, but she was still much more human than snake. Winter was approaching, so she knitted things and hung the bedding out to air. Any free time she had she seemed to spend out on walks.

  One morning, as Nishiko was making coffee, I asked her directly:

  “So have you got over your snake now?”

  She thought about it a little, then said:

  “No. I don’t think I’ll ever be completely over it.”

  “Oh.”

  “If another snake ever appears in my life, this time I really am going to commit and go over.”

  “Really?”

  “Well, I suppose it will be a different snake. I’ll have to wait and see.”

  And that was the only time we referred to it. After that Nishiko set about teaching me the fine technique of threading prayer beads.

  Since the last trip to Ganshinji Temple, I’d felt a kind of continual ringing in my head. Not actually ringing—there was no sound; it was like a little nodule, which vibrated, emitting faint signs of its presence. These signs at first didn’t arouse any particular concern, but gradually they started to exert pressure. As the pressure built up, the nodule became enlarged and firm.

  Every so often the woman paid a visit to the shop. Pressing her face up against the beautifully polished glass in the door, she would peer in at us. The first person to notice her would be Mr Kosuga, and he would studiously pretend to ignore her. A moment later, Nishiko would look up, and she would gaze steadily at the woman. The two of them would look thoughtfully at each other for a few moments. Nishiko’s eyes would get narrower, while the woman’s eyes would do the opposite, opening wide. As I watched this exchange, I would feel the nodule inside me vibrate insistently.

  “Miss Sanada, she’s here again,” Nishiko would say. “Why not ask her to come in?”

  I shook my head, without answering. Twisting the thread, clumsily threading the beads, I concentrated on not looking at the woman outside. The more I tried not to look, the more that nodule vibrated. As she pressed her face hard against the glass, the woman’s nose, eyelids, and forehead appeared stretched and flat, making the upper part of her head seem very snakelike. It was uncanny how, whenever she made her visits, we would have no customers in the shop.

  If we pretended we didn’t notice her, eventually she would go away.

  After these visits, we would find fragments that looked like moulted skin on the ground. Nishiko carefully swept it all into a dustpan. While she did that, Mr Kosuga and I got on with tasks in the shop. The last and busiest month of the year was approaching.

  “Hiwako, dear, I can’t wait any more!” the woman said. She grabbed hold of my legs, forcing me over onto my back. Sitting astride me, she put her fingers round my throat.

  “Don’t strangle me. You want me to die?” I yelled.

  “But I can’t wait any more!” she yelled back, a crazed look in her eyes.

  She was squeezing, tighter and tighter; my body was becoming flushed. An energy field filled
the room. Everything seemed to be shuddering. Thrashing around with my legs, I looked for a weak, vulnerable spot on her to attack. The woman was steadily applying more and more pressure with her fingers. I couldn’t get out of her grip.

  Saying my name over and over, she squeezed even tighter. Through squinting eyes, I saw the carpet under me flattened, as if wet, and steam was rising from it. The entire room seemed to be boiling.

  From the wide-open windows various objects came flying in, hitting the woman as she sat astride me. The woman, hair flying, knocked them aside—shards of metal, crumpled fruit, dead birds… When a blur of confetti in five colours—the five celebratory colours of purple, white, red, yellow, green—blew into the room, the woman momentarily weakened her grip. Quickly I thrust my thumbs between her fingers and started to prise them up, using her hand like a lever. No sooner had I unstuck her fingers than she sprang off and leapt up on the desk.

  “Why won’t you wait?” I shouted.

  “Because I know you’ll just continue playing the innocent for ever!” she yelled, her eyebrows drawn in an expression of pain.

  The words seemed to give her the advantage. I drew back, and immediately she lunged straight onto my head and started pummelling it in a circular motion with her feet. The rough drumming sent me into a warm daze. I was expecting her to try getting my neck into some kind of chokehold, but she simply kept pummelling me with her feet.

  It started to seem to me that this fight between us had been going on for hundreds of years. She struck, and I sat there and took it.

  I was sick of the unending cycle—I wanted it to be over. Those vibrations, which had been steadily increasing in strength, felt as if they might explode out of me.

  With a yell of resolve, I started striking the woman with my fists. My fists entered her body smoothly, getting absorbed within her. She seemed infinitely deep, of infinite capacity. The deeper my fists went into her, the more overpowered I was with that sense of a warm daze. I longed just to close my eyes, to fall against her breast, to hear her calling my name. I longed to turn into a snake, to have her coiling around my hips.