by Naoya Shiga
She had an abortion. There were those who denied this and claimed that the child was actually born but was immediately smothered to death by her. Whatever it was that was done to the child, all agreed that it destroyed her voice.
Shortly thereafter she apparently went to Niigata with her man, and there became a geisha. Then she went to Hokkaidō. The man—he was simply a pimp—remained with her. The story was that because he knew her guilty secret, she was virtually his prisoner. But since Kensaku had heard about it, it must have been a fairly widely known secret.
Such, then, was Eihana’s story as Kensaku knew it. He had heard nothing more about her for these past three or four years. Then one day, as he was glancing through the gossip column in an entertainment magazine, he happened to see Eihana’s name. She had returned to Tokyo, it said, and was now a geisha in Yanagibashi. Her new name was Momoyakko.
One of the geisha said, “You have no idea how busy we are now that the sumō season has begun.”
“Do you go much yourself?” asked Ishimoto.
“We manage to see most of the matches.”
“Whereabouts is your box?” Ishimoto himself went fairly regularly.
“On the north side of the ring.”
“I see. Is it anywhere near the Ishimoto family’s box?” Ishimoto and his sumō-loving friends had a box, but he was referring to the one held by the main branch of his family.
“Well, yes—they’re not too far from us. We’ve seen them there a couple of times.”
Casually Ishimoto then asked, “Are any of the young men of the family known in these parts?” He had numerous nephews, most of whom were playboys.
The geisha quickly looked at her companions. They all smiled strangely. “We know of one,” she said.
“About how old is he?”
“He’s a cadet at a military school, I think. He’s the young man we were telling you about—you know, the one that likes Momoyakko so much.” She suddenly started to giggle.
Kensaku was surprised. He had pictured the son of some wholesale merchant in the role of Momoyakko’s infatuated pursuer. That he should have turned out to be one of Ishimoto’s nephews struck him as a little incongruous.
After a few more questions Ishimoto said, “I’m not so sure it’s such a good thing for this young Mr. Ishimoto to get mixed up with a woman like Momoyakko.”
The women all nodded in agreement.
Momoyakko, the former Eihana, never did appear. The maid was very disapproving. “If she doesn’t want to come, why can’t she say so in the first place,” she said. At about nine o’clock the three men left.
“What an interesting coincidence,” said Ishimoto as they walked. “I knew something of the sort was going on because my sister-in-law told me. But I had no idea he hung about in Yanagibashi. You know, he had the gall to go up to his parents and ask for a car. If he had a car, he said, he would stop misbehaving. So they gave him fifty thousand yen, and with ten thousand of that he went and bought himself a car. Can you imagine anyone being so gullible? How could my brother have seriously believed that his son meant what he said? Stop misbehaving if he had a car, indeed!”
Nobuyuki and Kensaku both laughed. Ishimoto turned to Kensaku and said, “But this would make a good short story, surely. Not only what we learned today, but there’s all that background stuff about Eihana you seem to know so well.”
“Quite so,” said Kensaku with an obvious lack of enthusiasm. “At least, it’s good conversation material.” This last remark was ungracious, but he had to make it; for he resented Ishimoto’s assumption that the stuff of gossip could immediately be translated into writing.
They walked at a leisurely pace as far as Ginza, and there the two brothers parted from Ishimoto. They returned to Kensaku’s house in Fukuyoshichō at about eleven o’clock. With Oei, who had waited up for them, they sat down in the morning room and talked for a while.
Nobuyuki recounted for Oei’s benefit the story of Eihana. It was a tale told with little pity and in a spirit of censure about a woman steeped in evil. Kensaku was not pleased. Oei listened attentively, looking appropriately disgusted. “What terrible women there are,” she said.
Kensaku was filled with anger. He thought of that little pale-faced girl on the stage, so helpless yet proud, and wanted to tell them, “It’s not Eihana that’s bad!” But they had never seen the girl, and they would not know what he meant; and as he sat there trying to contain his anger, it suddenly occurred to him that here was something he could write about.
12
It was already past two o’clock in the afternoon when Nobuyuki and Kensaku left the house. They went to Gotanda first. They walked up a hill past a small steel mill, then along a ridge that overlooked a wild field of about a quarter of an acre. They soon found the house. It was a shabby bungalow. It had a fairly large front garden, but Kensaku doubted that it saw much sun. The whole place looked as if it would need a lot of work before it became habitable. Inexperienced as he was in house-hunting, he had no idea how such a house would turn out to be after one had lived in it. All he could say was that as it now stood, it looked dirty and uninviting. The next house they looked at was in such cramped surroundings that Kensaku didn’t want to go anywhere near it. Lazily they walked along the highway toward Ōmori. The strong smell of budding oak leaves was everywhere. Nobuyuki talked about Zen with almost an air of smug authority. He also had the enthusiasm of the novice, and recounted one story after another from The Blue Rock with obvious delight.
He stopped, looked about him, and said, “Yes, our property is at the end of this lane here. Shall we go and have a look? We had a new hedge put in all around it, and none of us have seen it yet.”
“All right.”
“Do you remember Kamekichi, the gardener?”
“I think I’ve seen him at the Hongō house. A small fellow with an enormous head—am I right? Looked like a village idiot, I recall.”
“That’s him. He’s goodness personified, one might say. He’s a devout follower of the Tenrikyo sect, you know. ‘In all matters I follow the teachings of our Divine Prophet’—have you heard him say that?”
Once when Kensaku was having tea with the family at Hongō this gardener had come in. He bowed so low he was almost bent double. Even his legs seemed to participate in the bow. He was the picture of humility, goodness and, alas, idiocy. Kensaku’s sisters began to giggle, but the fellow seemed not to notice. He sat down and received his cup of tea as though it were a gift from heaven. His speech, too, was incredibly polite. The show of meekness in him was so overwhelming that only the most heartless would have refused to entrust him with everything they had.
But Kensaku at the time had wondered to himself if the fellow wasn’t really a little too good to be true. There was something about him, he felt, that didn’t quite ring true. And later, at home, he had written down his suspicion in his diary.
Kensaku now said to Nobuyuki, “You know, all that goodness may just be on the surface. It’s too obvious for my taste.” Nobuyuki disagreed.
They came to the property. It was a rectangular area of about two acres which stretched alongside the road. Until recently a cultivated field, it had been changed to a residential site. A rough fence filled in with a cypress hedge had been built around it.
“How do we get in?” muttered Nobuyuki as they looked for an entrance. “I do believe they forgot to put in a gate.”
“That’s hardly likely.”
“But can you see an opening anywhere? Come to think of it, I don’t know that I said anything about a gate when I gave Kamekichi the job.”
The two laughed as they continued their search. The hedge proved quite impenetrable.
“I’m afraid he must have completely forgotten about it,” said Nobuyuki resignedly. The oversight was not without its charm. They went to see the farmer who was nominally managing the property and asked him to tell Kamekichi about the gate. (A couple of months later it was discovered that Kensaku had not been wrong a
bout Kamekichi. For a fee that was too high considering the size of the property he had agreed to keep the grass cut. He had then secretly rented it out as grazing land and let the horses deal with the grass. In this way he had pocketed a double fee for doing no work at all.)
The sun was about to set. They went to look at a two-storied house in the Sannō neighborhood in Ōi. It stood by itself and had a pleasant appearance. “It’s new,” said Nobuyuki. “That alone makes it attractive. Besides, the rooms seem nicely arranged.” Kensaku was too tired to want to look at another house; this one was good enough, he decided. “I’ll rent it,” he said. They immediately went to see the landlord who lived in the neighborhood, and made the necessary arrangements.
The first train to come in at Ōmori Station was west-bound, going toward Kamakura. It was agreed that Kensaku would go as far as Yokohama with Nobuyuki; they would have a Chinese dinner there together, then part company. Late that evening Kensaku caught the train back to Tokyo.
Five days later he and Oei moved. He had looked at the house hurriedly, and in the evening. Now that he was in it, he found it considerably less pleasant than he had thought. It was unquestionably a house built to rent. If one walked at all heavily upstairs the whole house would shake and the rooms below would be covered with dust let loose from the ceiling. “My hair has been filthy ever since we moved here,” complained Oei, who was always downstairs.
Nevertheless Kensaku’s mood changed somewhat for the better. It was an opportune time to start working seriously again. There was the long piece that he had worked on in Onomichi and was still unfinished, but he did not want to touch that for the time being. He would write about Eihana, he decided.
He had no idea how he would feel about her if he were to meet her. But was there not something wrong about his uncertainty as to how she would seem to him in person? Who was this woman he wanted to write about? Was it Eihana, or someone he wanted to think of as Eihana? Could there be anything between them, some measure of mutual understanding and sympathy, if they were to meet? He simply didn’t know. And it was discomforting to know that what made him want to write about Eihana in the first place was only his anger at Oei’s total lack of sympathy for her. It might be a good idea, he said to himself, to try to meet her sometime. The thought was very tentative, however; for he knew that he would find it most difficult to initiate such a meeting.
He tried to imagine what the meeting would be like. How would Eihana behave toward him? Would the awareness that he knew her past revive in her some part of her old self? Or would she, made thoroughly cynical by her experiences, just pretend to be moved by memories of the past? Either way, he thought the very hopelessness of her condition would touch him. Save her from despair—such a thought now occurred to him; and he imagined himself giving succor to this woman who had murdered her own child and committed countless other sins but was now repentant. Eihana thus imagined remained a peculiarly unreal figure, however. It was not pleasing, either, to think that on meeting her he might indeed be tempted to act like a simple-minded Christian proselyte. How truly difficult it must be, he thought, for just one human being to be saved.
He was reminded of a woman calling herself “Omasa the Viper” whom he had seen in Kyoto the year before. She was performing in a small makeshift theatre—it was hardly more than a hut—-near Yasaka Shrine in Gion. He happened to pass by the theatre late at night, and had stopped to look at the large, illustrated signboard outside. On it was the picture of a woman, her head shaved clean like a nun’s, engaged in a monologue. According to the caption it was Omasa telling the true story of her life—as “an act of confession,” it said. Thinking no more of it he was about to walk on when he saw a tall figure, dressed in a long cloak and wearing a kind of lay priest’s hat, coming out of the theatre at the head of a group of young women. If Kensaku had not seen the signboard, he would have assumed it was a man. But it was Omasa the Viper. She was, he guessed, in her fifties.
The young man who had come out to take down the signboard bowed to her. She looked at him briefly and gave a slight nod. She was standing directly under an electric light, so that Kensaku was able to have a good look at her. What he saw was an ill-tempered and extraordinarily cheerless face. It was the face of someone whose heart knew no joy.
He knew nothing about Omasa the Viper. But he thought he could surmise this much: she had been in prison, and probably had been given an early pardon for good conduct and signs of repentance; in order to make a living, she traveled from town to town at the head of a cheap theatre troupe, vending her so-called confessions of past sins.
He thought he could not be far wrong in his surmise. And it was enough to look at her face to know how she felt about her present life. He wished he didn’t know. Her present condition, as he saw it in his mind, became too vivid for his own comfort. Her cheerlessness and her loneliness began to pervade his own being. He did not know what offenses she had committed, and he had no feelings about them one way or the other. But what depressed him was the thought that at the time she was engaged in wrongdoing, her condition could hardly have been less enviable than it was now. For then there must at least have been some sense of life in her, a fullness of spirit that gave her some kind of pleasure. What did she have now instead? Going from town to town, offering her shame for sale. Of course, “confession” or not, what she was doing was in fact acting on the stage. She performed for audiences who had come to be entertained. But at the same time she had to satisfy their need for vicarious participation in crimes committed in “real life,” acted out by the criminal in person. What a degrading life it must be, Kensaku thought, to have to feign repentance on the stage day after day for the pleasure of strangers. And he wondered if such degradation was not in some measure forced on all who had done something very wrong and had repented.
Omasa was a big woman with a strong, masculine face. When young, she must have cut an impressive figure.
And so as he thought of Eihana, he could not help remembering that woman he had seen in Kyoto. It was oppressive enough to think of Eihana as she must be now—her lot was pitiable enough; but how much more hopeless and dark Omasa’s life seemed, to be than Eihana’s. If true salvation was beyond Eihana, then surely she would rather live as she did now than live the degrading, sham existence of the mock penitent. Yes, Kensaku thought, it would be in Eihana’s nature to continue to flaunt her sins and never give in; and perhaps that’s the way one ought to be.
Deciding he hadn’t the courage to arrange a meeting with Eihana, he went to his desk and began writing her story.
He came across Yamamoto some time later, and he told him that Eihana was back in Tokyo. “Yes, I thought so,” said Yamamoto. “My wife and I went peony-viewing the other day, and when we were waiting for the boat at Ryōgoku, I thought I saw her standing at the end of an alley. She was looking at us.”
Kensaku was certain that the woman had been Eihana, for she lived in that alley. He asked Yamamoto, “Do you have any inclination to see her?”
“I shouldn’t mind seeing her, I suppose.” There was no enthusiasm in Yamamoto’s voice.
13
Kensaku once more began to decline, both in spirit and body. The weather was bad; and on days when the humid south wind blew mercilessly, he would feel quite ill. His way of life again became disorderly.
In trying to write about Eihana he was forced to think about women in relation to sin. He asked himself why it was that women were so relentlessly pursued by their own past sins while men were not. Not many days before he had taken a walk through the neighborhood where Eihana had lived as a girl. He passed by the bookstore that her former lover’s father owned, and saw the young man sitting in front with a baby on his knee. It was strange to see this man younger than himself already a father. He sat there lazily with the baby, gazing at the passing scene with vacuous contentment. No one would have guessed that here was a fellow who had once been involved in a scandal. But surely even over such a man a cloud must occasionally pass,
carrying disquieting memories of the past. Would he not remember now and then his child that was killed? Perhaps, but Kensaku thought that the past had almost been erased from this man’s memory, that little of the old pain was still remembered. Then why was Eihana’s present life so inextricably bound to her past, why was it so clearly an unbroken extension of that one affair? Perhaps it was not necessarily because she was a woman. There must be many men who, having committed one crime, were thrown willy-nilly into a life of desperate abandon. But there was no denying that women on the whole were more prone to be plunged into a life of despair. They were more blind to the threats of fate and thus were its easiest victims. But if this were so, then there was all the more reason to treat them with greater generosity. If it was all right to forgive children because they were children, why could not women in their misfortune be forgiven because they were women? Instead, they were subjected to particularly severe reprisals; worse than that, the public was disappointed if ever they escaped payment for their sins. Guilty women destroyed themselves, and everyone stood aside, thinking the self-destruction perfectly proper. It was strange, Kensaku thought, that women in particular should be accorded such treatment.
He was then forced to admit to himself that his mother was perhaps more fortunate than many other women might have been under similar circumstances. What might her fate have been if she had been surrounded by ignorant men? She might not have survived at all. Luckily her father in Shiba and her husband were both intelligent men. For that alone, he told himself, he ought to be grateful to his father in Hongō. But the admonition to himself was without emotional conviction.
He tried writing about Eihana from his own point of view; quickly it became evident that the story would be too bare told that way, and he decided to tell it from her point of view, giving his imagination free rein. He toyed with the idea of having her meet Omasa the Viper. He wondered, too, if he should not introduce another such character whom he had seen recently on the popular stage, a woman by the name of Hanai Oume. She had killed a man—he was a box maker-—and, like Omasa, had become a professional penitent. He had found her act both pathetic and distasteful, and had come away feeling more sympathetic than ever toward the defiantly unpenitent.
