A Dark Night's Passing

by Naoya Shiga

  The party was then shown to another room, and there a plump, fiftyish woman tried to persuade them to stay. Untempted, they all left the teahouse and followed the maid back to the inn.

  The next morning Kensaku had a rickshaw take him to the inner shrine, then to the museum, and from there to the outer shrine. There was a pond in the woods of the outer shrine, with hundreds of wild mandarin ducks on it; and perched in tight formation on a large tree branch that stuck out over the water were still more of these birds. In amusement he remembered that scene in the dream.

  From Futami he went to Toba, where he spent the night. On the way back to Kyoto he got off the train at Kameyama. There was an hour and a half until the next train, and he spent that time seeing the town on a rickshaw.

  Kameyama was the birthplace of his dead mother. It was a shabby town, standing on a hill. After a quick tour of its center he went to the old castle grounds, where now a shrine stood. Kensaku, who remembered Kameyama as Hiroshige had depicted it in his “Fifty-three Stations,” wanted to see the big slope in full view, but he had no idea where the vantage point might be.

  He had the rickshaw wait at the gateway and took a walk around the grounds. Below him was an old, secluded pond, and on the other side was a hill of about the same height as the one he stood on. He went down, then climbed the steep path on the other side. The top of the hill had been made into a sort of park. There was no one about except for a woman in her fifties, poorly dressed but with an air of gentility about her, sweeping the ground. When she saw him she stopped sweeping and looked at him directly. It was almost a stare that she was giving him, but it was not at all offensive. Something about her manner appealed to him immediately, and made him want to speak to her. She was about the same age as his mother would have been, he thought, and probably from a samurai family too. “Is this,” he said as he approached her, “a part of the old castle grounds?”

  “Yes, it is,” she answered. “The secondary tower used to be here.” She then pointed toward the shrine. “And the main keep was there.”

  “Did you ever know a family by the name of Saeki that lived in these parts?”

  “They were samurai here before the Restoration, weren’t they?”

  “Yes, they were.” For some reason he was blushing. “There was a woman named Oshin—did you know her?” Then expectantly and betraying a trace of excitement he added, “She would be about the same age as you.”

  The woman cocked her head, trying to remember. “I don’t think I knew her. There’s Okin, and her younger sister named Okei, but I don’t remember anyone by the name of Oshin.”

  “She had no sisters—at least, I don’t think she had any. Was there another family called Saeki?”

  “I wonder. You see, the only families I know are those that remained after the Restoration, and I remember nothing about those that moved away. But do go and ask the Saekis, they should be able to tell you.”

  In his disappointment he was reminded of how little he knew of his mother’s childhood, of how little opportunity he had had to ask her about it. When had she gone to Tokyo, and what relations had she left behind? He hadn’t the slightest idea. He didn’t even know what the first name of his maternal grandfather had been, despite his love and reverence for him. “Grandfather at Shiba”—that had always been sufficient for Kensaku.

  The woman proceeded to direct him to the Saekis’ house, and he listened politely, without any intention of going there. He thanked her and walked away, thinking again how little he knew, what little chance he had ever had of knowing, about his mother.

  The setting sun shone on the woods on the other side, where the main keep had been. Only the sumac had turned red, and stood out prettily among all the green. “What does it matter?” he thought as he scampered down the steep, busily winding path toward the pond that seemed already cloaked in autumnal quiet. “It’s better this way. I am the ancestor, everything begins with me.”

  9

  Ishimoto was waiting for him when he returned. “It’s working out very smoothly,” he said.

  “Really?” said Kensaku, wondering if Ishimoto had heard something concrete.

  “I gather Mr. and Mrs. N got a favorable impression of you.”

  “I liked them very much too.”

  “I’m glad.” Ishimoto waited, then asked, “Did they say anything about it after Mr. S had left?”

  “No.” Kensaku gave Ishimoto a simple description of the interview, and added that he was feeling uncharacteristically optimistic about the outcome of the proposal. “And I do thank you,” he then said, “for taking the trouble to come all this way for my sake.”

  “It’s no trouble at all.”

  “I really am grateful.” Kensaku could not remember ever having thanked Ishimoto so openly; but he felt no awkwardness.

  “Let us assume, then,” said Ishimoto, “that there will be no difficulty. But how shall we carry on from here? I shouldn’t imagine you could manage everything by yourself?”

  “You’re right, I couldn’t.”

  “There are certain things S can handle best. At any rate, would you like to leave the entire matter in my hands? I’ll always consult Nobuyuki, of course, before I do anything.”

  Kensaku consented readily.

  “And I’ll try at every stage of the negotiations to get your approval first.”

  “But that would be far too much trouble, surely. By the way, I suppose it will be Mr. S that they will send their preliminary answer to?”

  “That’s right. But don’t worry about that.”

  What Ishimoto meant, Kensaku gathered, was that Mr. N, before he left, had said something unmistakably reassuring to Mr. S.

  That night Ishimoto left for Tokyo on the express train.

  The next day those of Kensaku’s belongings that he himself had packed arrived from Tokyo. He sent these off to his new house, and immediately had some people go there to unpack them and at the same time clean the house.

  The maid in Tokyo had been let go, and in her place another one had been found for him by his Kyoto landlady. A skinny old woman she was, with sunken eyes and cheeks. Quite like a dried sardine, he thought. Her name was Sen. She, too, was at the house to help, though Kensaku had not asked her to be there that day; and it was agreed that she would remain there from that night on.

  Three days later Oei arrived. She was anxious to go to the house and see to it that it was in proper order, but Kensaku dissuaded her. “There’s no need,” he said. “Let’s wait at least until all my things have arrived. Stop fussing over me and try to have a good time. Let’s do some sightseeing, I’d enjoy that. How long can you stay in Kyoto?”

  “She’ll be coming here from Gifu in four or five days.”

  “In that case we haven’t much time. Forget about the house, please, and just let yourself be entertained.”

  As soon as she was settled at the inn Kensaku was ready to take her out. But before leaving Oei took a package wrapped in good, heavy Japanese paper out of her suitcase and gave it to Kensaku. “It came the day before yesterday.” It was a large photograph of the young woman. Kensaku looked at it and said, “Yes, this is she. But she doesn’t look much like one of those ‘Feather Screen’ beauties, I must say.”

  Oei responded by comparing the subject of the photograph with Aiko. In the comparison there was the suggestion of a woman’s long-harbored resentment at an old slight. Kensaku was offended by Oei’s mention of Aiko; yet as he sat there in silence, remembering the unpleasantness he was subjected to at the time, he could not help becoming resentful himself.

  The two went by rickshaw to Kurodani, and starting with Shinnyodō visited several other temples—Ginkakuji, Hōnen’in, Anrakuji —and finally came to his house in Kitanobō in Nanzenji. There they decided to rest a while, and sent the rickshaw away.

  Oei was full of praise for the house. As she looked out from the living room, she noticed that on the cozy, pine-covered hill behind Nyakūoji were numerous red flags fluttering in t
he wind. “What are those?” she asked Kensaku. Sen’s voice called out from the next room, “That’s where they’re picking mushrooms!”

  The Kyoto-style kitchen, long and narrow like a back alley, fascinated Oei, and she had Sen take her through it and explain every feature of it. She had shown no such interest when taken to the famed garden of Hōnen’in.

  They decided not to see Nyakūoji and Eikandō that day and to end their tour with a visit to Nanzenji nearby.

  Kensaku was so eager to point out everything to Oei that his own volubility became embarrassing to him. He knew he was being childish, but he could not restrain himself. The child in him seemed always to come to the fore when he was with Oei.

  Halfway up the hill behind Nanzenji they came out above the embankment of the canal. They stopped briefly to look at the incline the boats were pulled up on, then walked to a restaurant named Hyōtei.

  It was dark by the time they set off for Kensaku’s inn. In his small room two beds had been laid out, so close together that the sides of the two quilts overlapped. Before they left the inn that day the landlady had asked Kensaku whether Oei might want to sleep in another room, and he had answered casually that his room would do. But now that he saw the two beds together he began to wonder at his own earlier blitheness. As far as he could remember, they had not once slept in the same room in all the years of living together—except, of course, when he was a very small child. “A tight squeeze, this,” he muttered with a grimace.

  Oei, on the other hand, seemed not at all to share Kensaku’s apprehension. She sat down tiredly in the little open space at the head of the bed and said, “It was fun seeing Kyoto. Thank you very much.” Was she suggesting, Kensaku wondered, that she had seen all there was to see?

  “Is this arrangement all right with you?” he asked.

  “Certainly.”

  “You’ll be going to bed immediately, I suppose?”

  “How about you, Kensaku?”

  “I think I’ll go out for a while. Take a quick walk around town, you know.”

  “I didn’t sleep very well in the train last night, so if you don’t mind, I’ll go to bed right away.”

  “Do, by all means.”

  Once in town Kensaku as usual walked straight down Teramachi, his mind still troubled by the thought of those two beds.

  He returned to the inn very late. Oei was sleeping soundly under the bright electric light. At first she seemed undisturbed by Kensaku’s movements, but a few minutes later, when he was in bed, she opened her eyes painfully in the glare—she looked rather ugly then—and said, “Did you just come in?” She rolled over away from him, and presumably went back to sleep.

  Kensaku had always found it difficult to go to sleep with someone else in the room. He pulled down the light close to his head, and began reading a book he had just picked up at a secondhand bookstore. It was a translation of a comedy called As You Like it. He intended to read it until he dropped off to sleep from exhaustion.

  Ever since he saw the film version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and enjoyed it, he had been reading such comedies avidly. Just as works of art of the ancient Orient had given him such comfort by drawing him back to another age, so now these comedies offered him an opportunity to savor, even though only momentarily, a world of freedom and lightheartedness so different from what he had known. Tragedies he now avoided like the plague.

  He read about half of the comedy, then put out the light. Sleep came to him with surprising ease. But sometime during the night he found himself suddenly wide awake again. And after that he could not make himself go back to sleep. He lay there in the dark, listening to Oei breathing easily beside him.

  The room seemed to get increasingly stuffy, and his head began to feel hot and heavy, almost feverish. In near-desperation he tossed about in his bed; and more than once he threw his arm out noisily toward Oei.

  He must have gone to sleep again. When he woke up the next morning Oei was gazing out at the view as she sipped her morning cup of tea.

  She turned around when she heard Kensaku moving in bed. “So you’re awake at last.”

  “What time is it?”

  “It must be about nine. Are you getting up?”

  “I think so.”

  “This room is a bit too small for the two of us, isn’t it?”

  “I’ll see to it that you get a separate room.”

  “I really don’t mind staying in this room so long as you don’t. But haven’t you any work to do?”

  “I’m not doing anything right now.” Was Oei being perfectly innocent in remarking on the smallness of the room, Kensaku wondered, or was she mindful of something else? Not that it mattered particularly, for the thought that she might be aware of his terrible frustration last night embarrassed him not at all. He was not being shameless here; rather, he simply knew that she would forgive him, that she would be neither indignant nor contemptuous.

  “There’s another little room just across the corridor,” he said, “so why don’t you move in there?”

  “All right, I’ll do that. By the way, one can see from here most of the places we went to yesterday, can’t one?”

  After lunch they went to Arashiyama. He had intended to take her to Kinkakuji Temple after that, but she said no, she had seen enough. Besides, it was already rather late, so they went straight back to the inn.

  “We’ll go to Nara tomorrow,” Kensaku said. “And then we can perhaps go to Osaka on the electric train.” Oei would not be with him very much longer, and there were so many places that he still wanted her to see.

  “Thank you very much, but you really have shown me enough,” she said more than once. Whether she was thinking of her own comfort or his was not clear to him.

  The tour proposed by Kensaku became an impossibility anyway, for the next morning a telegram arrived from Osai saying, “Coming through tomorrow noon, be ready.” Oei, accompanied by Kensaku, spent most of that day shopping.

  The next day the two went to the station earlier than necessary. Oei, handing Kensaku the money for the fare to Shimonoseki, said, “I think we’ll be traveling third-class.”

  “Will it be just you and that person?”

  “No, the children will be with us, I imagine.”

  “She has children?”

  “Of course not,” she said. There was impatience in her smile. “I don’t mean real children. We just call them that. There may be one or two joining us from here, as a matter of fact.”

  There was a gaudily dressed woman of indeterminate age hanging about on the platform. She had slack eyelids and carried a huge male doll. With her were two other women, there presumably to see her off. Kensaku looked at her, and decided she was one of the “children.”

  The train came in and stopped alongside the platform. Osai and two young women stuck their heads out of one of the third-class windows. The woman with the slack eyelids was led quickly toward them by one of her companions, a woman in her fifties. Kensaku looked at them all, hating the thought of Oei becoming one of them.

  With an empty feeling in his heart Kensaku stood facing the window, a step behind the two women that had come to see the other woman off. The younger of the two was in a festive mood and talked incessantly. “I cried last year when you went off like this,” she was saying, “but this time I feel really cheerful. It must be a good omen.” Kensaku, listening to this chatter, was made to feel all the more fearful for Oei.

  “So you think we’re going to be successful, eh?” said Osai mockingly. “In that case, why don’t you share some of your capital with us? Sell your six-hundred-yen private telephone and give us the proceeds. That’ll do for a start.”

  The loud woman, thus challenged, fell into an uneasy silence. Oei stood behind Osai on the train, smiling gently and saying nothing. There was dignity in her manner, yet it made Kensaku cross; for it was with the very same attitude that she had allowed Osai to talk her into participating in this ill-advised venture. Here she was, about to set off for wintry,
remote Tientsin, seemingly without any awareness of her partner’s crude avarice. “You’re a fool,” he wanted to tell Oei to her face, “a bigger fool than this silly, chattering creature standing beside me.”

  The woman of the eyelids sat by the open window, leaning out. She held the older woman’s hand close to her face, and from time to time would rub her cheek against it, up and down, up and down. “Look here,” Osai said to her, “you’d better put this thing on the rack.” The woman obediently stood up and put the large doll on the rack above. She then sat down, reached out for the other woman’s hand and again began rubbing her cheek against it. It seemed most likely to Kensaku that she was a little retarded.

  10

  It was on an unpleasantly chilly day for autumn, dark and windy, that Kensaku at last moved into his new abode. It was not the sort of day he would have picked for moving, but Sen had come that morning to say that the rest of his belongings had arrived from Tokyo, leaving him no excuse to delay the move any longer. Once at the house he proceeded to open packages wrapped in straw matting, carry up to the attic those things he had no immediate use for, and arrange his own room. Very soon his head was covered with dust, his face and hands felt raw, he had a headache from exposure to the cold drafts, and his nose was irritated beyond bearing by the dust. In short, he felt quite awful.

  Sen, though she worked hard, made matters worse for him by constantly demanding his attention.

  “Please sir, what is this thing here?”

  “What thing?”

  “This thing I’m holding.” It was his iron foot warmer, no easy thing for an old woman to carry. “A bed warmer, isn’t it?”

  “More or less. Will you put it away somewhere?”

  “Don’t you want to use it?”

  “Perhaps I shall, but not now, so please put it away.”