by Неизвестный
A drawing of the Holy Mother cradling the Christ child—no, it was a picture of a farm woman holding a nursing baby. The robes worn by the child were a pale indigo, while the mother’s kimono was painted a murky yellow. It was clear from the inept brushwork and composition that the picture had been painted many years before by one of the local kakure. The farm woman’s kimono was open, exposing her breast. Her obi was knotted at the front, adding to the impression that she was dressed in the rustic apparel of a worker in the fields. The face was like that of every woman on the island. It was the face of a woman who gives suckle to her child even as she plows the fields and mends the fishing nets. I was suddenly reminded of the woman earlier who had removed the towel from her face and bowed to Mr. Nakamura.
Jirō had a mocking smile on his face. Mr. Nakamura was pretending to look serious, but I knew that inside he was laughing.
Still, for some time I could not take my eyes off that clumsily drawn face. These people had joined their gnarled hands together and offered up supplications for forgiveness to this portrait of a mother. Within me there welled up the feeling that their intent had been identical to mine. Many long years ago, missionaries had crossed the seas to bring the teachings of God the Father to this land. But when the missionaries had been expelled and the churches demolished, the Japanese kakure, over the space of many years, stripped away all those parts of the religion that they could not embrace, and the teachings of God the Father were gradually replaced by a yearning after a Mother—a yearning which lies at the very heart of Japanese religion. I thought of my own mother. She stood again at my side, an ashen-colored shadow. She was not playing the violin or clutching her rosary now. Her hands were joined in front of her, and she stood gazing at me with a touch of sorrow in her eyes.
The fog had started to dissipate when we left the village, and far in the distance we could see the dark ocean. The wind seemed to have stirred up the sea again. I could not see the Isle of Rocks. The mist was even thicker in the valley. From somewhere in the trees that rose up through the mist, crows cried out. “In this vale of tears, intercede for us; and turn eyes filled with mercy upon us.” I hummed the melody of the prayer that I had just learned from Kikuichi. I muttered the supplication that the kakure continually intoned.
“How ridiculous! Sensei, it must have been a terrible disappointment to have them show you something so stupid.” As we left the village, Jirō apologized to me over and over, as though he were personally responsible for the whole thing. Mr. Nakamura, who had picked up a tree branch along the way to use as a walking stick, walked ahead of us in silence. His back was stiff. I couldn’t imagine what he was thinking.
HAYASHI FUMIKO
Hayashi Fumiko (1903–1951) was one of the most remarkable writers of her generation, and her creative work spanned both the prewar and postwar periods. The daughter of an itinerant peddler, Hayashi was raised in poverty, and her early works record her struggles to eke out a living in difficult and sometimes harrowing circumstances. These early experiences gave her a strong sense of compassion for the poor and, in her later years, for those ordinary citizens who suffered because of the deprivations of war. Her characters, whatever the complexity of their personal circumstances, often show remarkable resilience and self-respect. Her story “Blindfold Phoenix” (Mekakushi hōō, 1950), composed late in her life, looks at the vagaries of old age as lived in occupied Japan.
BLINDFOLD PHOENIX (MEKAKUSHI HŌŌ)
Translated by Lane Dunlop
Turning his eyes clogged with mucus toward the garden, Kenkichi gazed at the flowers. In full bloom, they seemed to be laughing excitedly together. Nearly six hundred pots of “May azaleas” were in rows along the garden shelves.
Yesterday, a foreigner’s car passing by on the road stopped outside the hedge. A soldier, his face flushed, got out and looked at the rows of potted plants for a while. Then he opened the gate and briskly entered the garden. Gesturing as if to say “they’re beautiful,” he walked among the shelves, studying each plant. When he came to one, nicknamed “Passing Shower,” he stopped. The petals, white, were crinkled like fine crepe silk, with speckles of pale vermilion here and there. Now was the very best time to see it. All along the branches, the flowers had bloomed in profusion. The soldier, although very enthusiastic about it, could not make himself understood to Kenkichi. Taking out his wallet, he seemed to be telling Kenkichi to take as many bills from it as he pleased. In his incomprehensible language, he seemed to be praising the “Passing Shower” to the skies. Kenkichi, shaking his head, refused. This plant is not for sale, he wanted to say. I have put my whole life into it, my very soul. Seeing the old man shake his head, the soldier, looking disappointed, went out into the street again. Following him out, Kenkichi gazed in the direction in which the car had gone. Most likely it was headed for Iyo.
Looking at the “Passing Shower” in its pot, Kenkichi thought: Since the foreigner liked it so much, I should have given it to him. —He went into the garden. A mist was flowing through it. This morning, the Benkei was in flawless full bloom as if it were in an insanely good humor. Its large blossoms, with fleshy, vermilion-colored petals, did not have a single insect on them. Putting his hand to the flower, Kenkichi gazed at it entranced. The drops of evening dew on the petals were like the pleasurable awakening of the flower, he thought. Displaying all its charms, the Benkei seemed to lean against him coquettishly. Outside the hedge, two young men, peering in at the array of flowers, went by. These days, dealers in black market leaf tobacco could be seen even out here.
At the approach to this village of Hakuchi, about six kilometers from Awa-Ikeda, a yellow signboard with sideways writing in the Roman alphabet had been put up. Every now and then, magnificent vehicles of the Occupation forces rolled through the village. Although Kenkichi had heard that Japan had lost the war, the fact of defeat had no effect on his own life. The world did not seem to him as though it had utterly changed.
Then, taking the portable earthenware stove out to the front of the garden, he kindled a fire in it. The smoke, wavering in all directions, flowed out. The indescribably fresh fragrance of spring titillated Kenkichi’s nostrils. He loved this kind of morning calm, undisturbed by people. Picking out the bits of burned charcoal with his bare fingers, he tossed them onto the flames and put on the teakettle. Gradually, beams of soft sunlight were filtering through the trees. The sky had paled to a bright, whitish blue.
For Kenkichi, who had wandered all over Japan for sixty years, no place felt so comfortable to him as this, his native village. He was now seventy-eight. Leading an idle existence, just like a dog or cat, he had put up this house with his own hands. In the single six-mat room, a morning glory had been trained to grow on the wall by his pillow. It was his pride and joy. But the room always smelled of the privy. Putting in an ornamental alcove on the west side of the room, he’d hung up an inexpensive lithograph of a Buddhist picture scroll there. The alcove posts were made of the bamboo for which this part of the country is known, but having been improperly seasoned, they were beginning to show vertical cracks. Instead of tatami, he had laid down thin straw mats. The bed was perpetually unmade. It had been seven years since he had built this little house for himself.
Throwing open the veranda rain shutters, he brought the small earthenware stove into the room. When he sat down on his bedding, a burst of glittering sunlight fell across the plant shelves in the garden. The flowers seemed alive with color. The purple-bordered Sukeroku, although already displaying the colors of its demise, in Kenkichi’s eyes was still fresh and innocent looking. Perhaps because he’d skimped just a little this year on oil-cake fertilizer, the life span of the flowers seemed somehow briefer. Stepping down into the garden again, Kenkichi looked closely at the Sukeroku’s petals. A little ladybug had crawled into the many-folded, translucently freckled heart of the flower. With a pair of handmade bamboo tweezers, Kenkichi picked out the ladybug and crushed it beneath his straw sandal.
“Old man. Good morning. . . .”
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O-Yasu of the Fishing Hole, unusually gussied up, was passing by the garden on her way somewhere. “Won’t you go with me?” Kenkichi, his eyes narrowed, looked at her. “Where are you going?” When she had come to the edge of the veranda and sat down, O-Yasu wrinkled up her nose at the pervasive smell of the privy. “Elder brother has been repatriated. I’m on my way to Awa-Ikeda to meet him.” Although he’d heard of O-Yasu’s “elder brother,” Kenkichi had no memory of him.
After sixty years of wandering around the country, Kenkichi had come back to this village of Hakuchi in his seventy-first year. He had been eleven when he’d left the village. It had been a long vagabondage, more than half a century. He didn’t know the villagers well, even by sight. Because he had returned with two cartloads of potted azaleas from Osaka, he’d been nicknamed “Old Man Flowerpot.” —To enter the village, you had to cross over a long bridge. Hakuchi was situated on a triangular patch of land that led toward the Iyo Highway. The broad Yoshino River flowed past the approach to the village. The combination restaurant and inn called “The Fishing Hole” stood on the bank of the river. “The Fishing Hole” was the villagers’ name for the place. By the blackboard fence of the entrance was a signboard inscribed with characters that said: “The Pavilion of Brocade Spray.” The old man who was the inn’s proprietor was the younger brother of the old man of the flowerpots. Kenkichi was the oldest of the three brothers, the offspring of the village carpenter. Yōjirō, the proprietor of “The Pavilion of Brocade Spray,” had been born after Kenkichi had left home. Sixty years had passed without the brothers meeting each other. Coming back after those sixty years, Kenkichi had brought with him the masses of potted azaleas as a sort of homecoming gift. It was summer. The very next day, carefully putting out the straw-wrapped flowerpots one by one around the Pavilion’s miniature lake and clearing a plot in front of the stonemason’s, Kenkichi began to put up plant shelves. Being a carpenter’s son, he had good instincts in such matters. In less than a week, the shelves for the azaleas were finished. When they’d taken the straw off the pots, the waitresses from the Pavilion brought them to the shelves. Among those waitresses, Kenkichi’s eye had happened to fall on the diminutive O-Yasu. A plump woman, like a freshly pounded rice cake, O-Yasu wasn’t much on looks. Most likely it was her gentle disposition that attracted Kenkichi. Taken with this girl who might have been his own granddaughter, whenever he had some errand Kenkichi always used O-Yasu. The teetery, lanky Kenkichi and the maidenly, petite O-Yasu made a strange pair. But whether or not anyone had guessed what was in Kenkichi’s heart, even when O-Yasu and he went down to the dry, white riverbed for walks, it excited no gossip among the villagers. —One day in early September, the two had walked upstream along the riverbed. Reflecting the light thrown off by the white, sandy bed on either side, the river’s deep current clearly mirrored in its surface the shadows of the mountainside. From the hushed, dusky thickets, a late-season nightingale sang out every now and then. As the riverbed narrowed, the scent of water hovered all the more densely in the air. The scene sank into an even deeper quietness. O-Yasu, who was wearing wooden clogs, seemed to be having a hard time making her way over the pebbles and rocks of the riverbed. As she walked, O-Yasu clung to and dangled from Kenkichi’s arm. “How old are you?” Kenkichi abruptly asked. “Why, how old do I look?” O-Yasu looked up at the tall Kenkichi. Apparently Kenkichi’s set of false teeth had been badly fitted, for each time he spoke they made a sound like crockery. “Eighteen?” O-Yasu suddenly giggled. “I’m twenty-one.” At the year’s end, O-Yasu had intended to go on leave from the Fishing Hole and marry Masa san of the barber shop. But this summer, she told Kenkichi, he had departed for the front. Everything had been left up in the air. As O-Yasu clutched his arm, Kenkichi gently felt around with his fingertips the area beneath her sash. O-Yasu, seemingly quite used to that sort of thing, was singing to herself in a low voice popular songs and the like. Sitting down on a big rock, Kenkichi lighted his long, slender Japanese pipe. Picking up some pebbles, O-Yasu tossed them at the quiet surface of the water. None of her tosses went very far. A hazy cloud of insects wavered annoyingly to and fro in front of their eyes. Kenkichi could remember nothing of the past, only what was in front of his eyes. O-Yasu, throwing pebbles like a child, was unbearably adorable. “Old man, don’t you have a wife or children?” Although her teeth were yellow, O-Yasu’s skin was white. She was beautiful. Kenkichi did not answer. He was afraid that if he told her about his six wives, he would lose her friendship. Among those six wives was one whose death Kenkichi had caused. It was forty years ago.
At the time, he’d been a contractor for railroad ties in Sendai. After becoming intimate with a geisha from Ishinomaki, he had lived a desperate life of passion with her for about two years. Finally the couple decided to throw themselves into the sea at Matsushima. The woman died. Kenkichi was rescued. The woman was twenty-four, with weak lungs. Now that forty years had passed, Kenkichi had no memory of her face. But even now, at night, Kenkichi sometimes felt a vague fear of the woman’s ghost. It was not that he had seen any suspicious apparitions, but late at night he would suddenly awake, gasping for breath, as if his shoulders were being pressed down. And sometimes he would hear a rustle of silk as if someone were standing by his pillow. Although he had seen nothing with his own eyes, he was oppressed by what he’d heard and felt from such ghostly manifestations. Eventually he became unable to fall asleep unless a light was burning brightly in the room. After the geisha, he had had other wives, from all of whom he had separated forever. He had no news of any of them. Some of the wives he had hated. Some were disagreeable. Some whom he had parted from in tears. All of them, now, had faded out of Kenkichi’s memory. —When he’d run away from home at eleven, crossing over from Muya to Awaji on the ferry, Kenkichi had gotten a job in a sesame oil extraction plant in Fukura. Midway across the tidal straits of Naruto, there had been a terrible storm. The blue waves, in choppy patterns that resembled nothing so much as a cabbage field, had churned up whirlpools. Having heard in his mother’s bedtime stories about the great naval battle in this area between the rival Heike and Genji clans and how the princesses of the defeated Heike had leaped into this sea of Naruto in their scarlet formal divided skirts, Kenkichi had retained a vivid memory of the whirlpools of Naruto at the time he left home. His job at the sesame oil extraction plant, where he’d worked stark naked in the vats, hadn’t lasted two years. Fleeing to the Tennozan District of Osaka, he fell into an existence of virtual poverty. But when he’d run away from Hakuchi, Kenkichi had brought along a carpenter’s plane. Rummaging in each house’s trash cans, he would collect old wooden sandals and skillfully fashion them into memorial tablets, selling them cheap to the altar utensil shops in the temple district. Back in those days, in front of the Umeda railway station, Japanese sweet shops, restaurants, and cheap hotels were lined up close together. Kenkichi had only the memory of a neighborhood of weather-darkened wooden houses and shops. Sometimes he would steal a pair of high-heeled sandals that had been washed and set out to dry and make them into memorial sculptures, complete with a lotus calyx. When he’d sold about four of them, he would go to one of the food shops in front of Umeda Station. There he would have sushi, which sent up fragrant steam from its basket. As he ate, he would marvel at there being such delicious food in this world. Strips of fried egg, shrimp, and oak mushrooms were served on top of the hot vinegared rice.
When he’d collected the sandals, Kenkichi would hollow out the holes where scraps of thong still clung, and assiduously whittle them down to flattish memorial tablets. If it were a high-heeled clog, the middle part would be thick and well suited to carving out a lotus calyx. Most of the clogs he found were made of paulownia wood.
Either he would sleep in Umeda Station, or in hot weather, as the nightwatch boy of the billiards parlor, he would line up some chairs and sleep on them. When Kenkichi was a boy, the city of Osaka had considerable glamour. Alongside the station was a bathhouse that catered to the gue
sts of the inns. Once, at the request of the stoker when he delivered some coal there, Kenkichi went out in the dog days of August to help weed the paddies of a farmer in Kawachi. After five days or so, though, he’d been fired. Although he was given all the rice he could eat, he never pulled out the weeds properly; instead, as if caressing them, he gently removed the stems from the mud. “You really know how to do your job, don’t you?” he was sarcastically complimented by the exasperated farmer. Of course, it was no easy task weeding out the paddies in the sweltering August heat. Kenkichi had been glad to get back to Osaka. Through an employment agency, he got a job as a delivery boy with an ice company. Every day, he would push a large wagon around the streets making deliveries. At one house he was given an iced bean-jam bun as a reward. He thought the bean jam was especially delicious at that house.
Kenkichi changed jobs many times. Each time he changed his job, he also changed his name. When he was working at a rice-candy store in Tamatsukuri, he went by the name Umeda Tamatsukuri—that kind of thing. Kenkichi hadn’t even bothered to go for his draft physical. When he was twenty-two or twenty-three, he’d gotten a job as a performer at a theater in Fukuchi-yama, which featured a combination of movie and vaudeville show popular at the time. Tall and awkward, he hadn’t been much of a hit. But it was there that he had met the actress Umezu Keiko and had his first affair. Umezu Keiko had been two or three years past thirty.
O-Yasu, who had been singing popular songs and marches to herself, abruptly turned around toward Kenkichi. “Old man, I wonder if you could lend me some money . . .” Caught by surprise, Kenkichi said: “I might lend you some money, but what do you need it for?” “Elder brother is going to the front soon. So I’ll need around fifty yen.” Kenkichi wondered whether it had to do with her marriage to Masa san of the barber shop at the year’s end.
