Record of a Night too Brief

by Hiromi Kawakami

  I opened my eyes wide, pulled my fists back, and now tried to strike her face with the flat of my hand. But it was the same. No matter how many times I struck, her face remained where it was, white, transparent, undistorted.

  “Hiwako, dear, please come! Why won’t you?” she pleaded.

  I was at a loss. I don’t know, I don’t know, I replied silently. But I did know. It was just that I was so tired. I mustn’t let myself be defeated now. l was being defeated, though, so easily. You must want to be defeated. If it’s what you want, why make yourself refuse? Was I saying that, or the woman? It’s so unclear, so unclear, I thought, and suddenly this combat that had lasted for centuries struck me as incredibly stupid and I decided to put a stop to it once and for all.

  “There is no snake world!” I declared, as firmly as I could manage.

  There, I had said it. In a trice I had brought clarity to the whole messy thing I’d let fester for so long. I understood what I had been pretending not to understand. What a ridiculously simple thing to have spent hundreds of years struggling over. Why hadn’t I been able to say it before?

  “Really?” the woman asked, smiling. “You think it’s that simple?” And she set about strangling me again.

  I became conscious of a loud zapping sound. The energy that had been generated was filling the room with an electric charge, producing flashes of intensely blue and white light; soon, droplets of water started to fall from the ceiling. The droplets became drops that fell faster and faster, and the room started to fill with water. The water rose from our heels to our knees, from our knees to our hips, and the woman and I continued to thrash around in it. Soon the room became totally submerged in water, and we were still fighting. The entire apartment building became engulfed, and started to drift away, joining the muddy stream that cut though Midori Park heading towards the Kanakana-Dō. But still neither of us would concede.

  “Just come over. You’ll see that I’m right. You don’t know what you’re refusing!”

  “I’m telling you—it doesn’t exist.”

  “But Hiwako, dear, you should listen to me. I am your mother!”

  “You are not!”

  “Well, let me explain!”

  “No.”

  “How will you understand, if you don’t listen?”

  “I don’t want to understand!”

  “See what I mean? Putting on your little act!”

  As we yelled, the room and everything in it was being swept away. It was early morning, and the Kanakana-Dō’s shutter had been raised. Mr Kosuga was sweeping the pavement in front of the shop. I could see Nishiko sitting at her desk, quietly threading strands of prayer beads. In front of the shop a festival float crammed with flowers and girls in traditional dancing costumes was being pulled merrily along on its way, and from the float came a song, the song of the credit association, playing loudly over the speakers:

  You can’t be too careful.

  Keep hold of the things you love…

  The words rose up around the Kanakana-Dō in an endlessly coiling loop of sound, while inside the shop I could see Mr Kosuga and Nishiko, unperturbed, busy with their tasks. Miss Sanada, it’s important to practise, to keep on your guard, Mr Kosuga told me, watching me as I floated by, giving me a wink. This isn’t “practice”, I retorted—and even on your guard, things can still catch you when you’re unawares! But Mr Kosuga merely rubbed his head, a filterless cigarette in his mouth, his usual impassive self.

  “Hiwako, dear, stop being so stubborn, open your eyes!” the woman was saying.

  “You should open your eyes!”

  “Oh, that’s so hypocritical.”

  The woman was squeezing her fingers tighter and tighter. She still had that expression on her face, an indeterminate mixture of pleasure and pain. Well, if she is strangling me, I thought, placing my fingers around her neck…

  In the flashes of intense blue and white light, everything around became dazzlingly, searingly bright, and surrounded by that brightness, pitting our equal strengths, the woman and I struggled, locked in a battle to throttle each other, as the apartment hurtled away at an unbelievable speed.

  PUSHKIN PRESS

  Pushkin Press was founded in 1997, and publishes novels, essays, memoirs, children’s books—everything from timeless classics to the urgent and contemporary.

  Our books represent exciting, high-quality writing from around the world: we publish some of the twentieth century’s most widely acclaimed, brilliant authors such as Stefan Zweig, Marcel Aymé, Antal Szerb, Paul Morand and Yasushi Inoue, as well as compelling and award-winning contemporary writers, including Andrés Neuman, Edith Pearlman and Ryu Murakami.

  Pushkin Press publishes the world’s best stories, to be read and read again. Here are just some of the titles from our long and varied list. For more amazing stories, visit www.pushkinpress.com.

  THE SPECTRE OF ALEXANDER WOLF

  GAITO GAZDANOV

  ‘A mesmerising work of literature’ Antony Beevor

  BINOCULAR VISION

  EDITH PEARLMAN

  ‘A genius of the short story’ Mark Lawson, Guardian

  TRAVELLER OF THE CENTURY

  ANDRÉS NEUMAN

  ‘A beautiful, accomplished novel: as ambitious as it is generous, as moving as it is smart’ Juan Gabriel Vásquez, Guardian

  BEWARE OF PITY

  STEFAN ZWEIG

  ‘Zweig’s fictional masterpiece’ Guardian

  THE WORLD OF YESTERDAY

  STEFAN ZWEIG

  ‘The World of Yesterday is one of the greatest memoirs of the twentieth century, as perfect in its evocation of the world Zweig loved, as it is in its portrayal of how that world was destroyed’ David Hare

  JOURNEY BY MOONLIGHT

  ANTAL SZERB

  ‘Just divine… makes you imagine the author has had private access to your own soul’ Nicholas Lezard, Guardian

  BONITA AVENUE

  PETER BUWALDA

  ‘One wild ride: a swirling helix of a family saga… a new writer as toe-curling as early Roth, as roomy as Franzen and as caustic as Houellebecq’ Sunday Telegraph

  THE PARROTS

  FILIPPO BOLOGNA

  ‘A five-star satire on literary vanity… a wonderful, surprising novel’ Metro

  I WAS JACK MORTIMER

  ALEXANDER LERNET-HOLENIA

  ‘Terrific… a truly clever, rather wonderful book that both plays with and defies genre’ Eileen Battersby, Irish Times

  SONG FOR AN APPROACHING STORM

  PETER FRÖBERG IDLING

  ‘Beautifully evocative… a must-read novel’ Daily Mail

  THE RABBIT BACK LITERATURE SOCIETY

  PASI ILMARI JÄÄSKELÄINEN

  ‘Wonderfully knotty… a very grown-up fantasy masquerading as quirky fable. Unexpected, thrilling and absurd’ Sunday Telegraph

  RED LOVE: THE STORY OF AN EAST GERMAN FAMILY

  MAXIM LEO

  ‘Beautiful and supremely touching… an unbearably poignant description of a world that no longer exists’ Sunday Telegraph

  THE BREAK

  PIETRO GROSSI

  ‘Small and perfectly formed… reaching its end leaves the reader desirous to start all over again’ Independent

  FROM THE FATHERLAND, WITH LOVE

  RYU MURAKAMI

  ‘If Haruki is The Beatles of Japanese literature, Ryu is its Rolling Stones’ David Pilling

  BUTTERFLIES IN NOVEMBER

  AUÐUR AVA ÓLAFSDÓTTIR

  ‘A funny, moving and occasionally bizarre exploration of life’s upheavals and reversals’ Financial Times

  BARCELONA SHADOWS

  MARC PASTOR

  ‘As gruesome as it is gripping… the writing is extraordinarily vivid… Highly recommended’ Independent

  THE LAST DAYS

  LAURENT SEKSIK

  ‘Mesmerising… Seksik’s portrait of Zweig’s final months is dignified and tender’ Financial Times

  BY BLOOD

  ELLEN ULL
MAN

  ‘Delicious and intriguing’ Daily Telegraph

  WHILE THE GODS WERE SLEEPING

  ERWIN MORTIER

  ‘A monumental, phenomenal book’ De Morgen

  THE BRETHREN

  ROBERT MERLE

  ‘A master of the historical novel’ Guardian

  About the Author

  HIROMI KAWAKAMI was born in Tokyo in 1958. She has written numerous novels—among them Strange Weather in Tokyo, The Nakano Thrift Shop and Manazuru—and short-story collections, and has garnered many of Japan’s top literary prizes. Kawakami was shortlisted for both the 2013 Man Asian Literary Prize, and the 2014 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. Her work has been published in more than twenty languages. Her story “A Snake Stepped On” in this collection won the prestigious Akutagawa Prize in 1996.

  LUCY NORTH, born in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, studied at the University of Cambridge and Harvard University and has a PhD in modern Japanese literature. Her translations of Taeko Kōno were published in Toddler Hunting and Other Stories. Lucy lived for many years in Boston and Tokyo, and is now based in Hastings, on the south coast of England.

  Copyright

  Series Editors: David Karashima and Michael Emmerich

  Translation Editor: Elmer Luke

  Pushkin Press

  71–75 Shelton Street

  London, WC2H 9JQ

  HEBI O FUMU © Hiromi Kawakami, 1996

  English language translation © Lucy North 2017

  Record of a Night Too Brief was first published as Hebi o Fumu in 1996

  First published by Pushkin Press in 2017

  Parts of “Record of a Night Too Brief” appeared, in slightly different form, in Words without Borders, July 2012.

  The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the British Centre for Literary Translation and the Nippon Foundation

  ISBN 9781782272724

  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

  www.pushkinpress.com