by Naoya Shiga
“Yes, do tell him not to do that sort of thing again. I’ve never met him, so I have no idea what sort of person he is. But if you’re that close to your cousin, I should think you could be quite frank with him.” Again Naoko made no reply. “And that fellow Mizutani really annoys me. What did he think he was doing, coming to meet me at the station and rushing around like a damn devoted houseboy. I suppose even that clown felt guilty about the way he’d behaved in my absence, and was trying somehow to make up for it.” Naoko was still silent. “He must have asked Suematsu to come with him to the station, but I know Suematsu wouldn’t want to make such a fuss over someone who had been away for only ten days. He has taste.” Kensaku was now so angry, he couldn’t check himself. “Suematsu knows I can’t stand Mizutani. That may be why he didn’t come to the station.” He paused briefly, then went on. “I’m going to tell Mizutani not to come to this house again. I don’t say he’s really bad. He’s just unbearably small and cheap. All I have to do is look at his face, and immediately I become irritated. And whenever I’m off my guard and unwittingly laugh at his jokes or something, I hate myself afterward. It’s stupid to associate with fellows like that. What I can’t understand is why a fastidious chap like Suematsu associates with him. But Suematsu aside, I’d have serious doubts about anyone who goes around with fellows like that.” Kensaku realized that he was now indirectly attacking Kaname, but he was in no mood to be reticent.
“I should have known better,” Naoko said. “I’ll never let anything like that happen again, so do forgive me.”
“I can’t say that I like what you did, but I’m not attacking you. It’s those fellows that make me angry.”
“It was my fault. They were simply taking advantage of my stupidity. I should have been more firm.”
“No, that’s not so.”
“I’ll tell my cousin never to come here again—yes, that would be the best thing to do.”
“Don’t be an idiot. What would your uncle think if you did a thing like that?”
“My uncle has nothing to do with it.”
Kensaku thought of that dignified old man, Mr. N, who had never been anything but kind to him, and felt a twinge of guilt at his own intolerant attitude toward the man’s only son, who was after all still a student and had committed what was at worst a harmless indiscretion. One of his own great weaknesses, Kensaku was aware, was his tendency not to control his initial disapproval of someone, and to allow it to develop into an irrational dislike that was out of all proportion to the cause. It was not merely guilt toward Mr. N that he felt after his outburst, then, but a certain uneasiness over his own state of mind. Kaname’s behavior, he reminded himself, was really not worth getting so angry about. If he had kept silent, his resentment would have remained moderate and under control. It was a bad habit of his to be carried away by the momentum of his own rhetoric. Only a short while before he had succeeded in persuading Naoko that he was no longer in a bad mood, yet here he was now, haranguing her. Once having cheered her up, why could he then not have let well enough alone? Why had he to be so mean?
Once more, he looked for ways to bring her back to her normal self. “But never mind,” he said. “I tend to let little things bother me—you know, things that other people take in their stride. I always get over them eventually, but it takes a long time. I have to let them slowly work their way out of my system, so to speak. You see, it was my seeing Mizutani at the station that started it all. As soon as I saw him, I felt something was wrong. And you must admit I wasn’t altogether mistaken. But never mind, so long as you understand how I feel, so long as you promise to be careful from now on, no more need be said. Don’t give it another thought.”
They went to bed a little while later. Outwardly at least, harmony had been restored; yet a certain restraint had developed again between them which could not be easily overcome. Naoko was clearly despondent. And though Kensaku knew that he ought to go to her bed and hold her in his arms, he could not do so for fear of seeming theatrical. She did not cry, nor was she in a sulk; but she lay on her back, utterly still, with the coverlet pulled right up to her eyes. There was something almost menacing in the air, beyond Kensaku’s power to dispel; and it prevented him, for all his solacing words, from bringing his body to hers.
Kensaku could not bear the thought of spending the night thus. He would have preferred it if something violent had happened, for then it would have cleared the air. He was tired, but he was loathe to desert Naoko in her present condition and try to go to sleep. He could not have gone to sleep anyway. He reached out and sought her hand, but she did not respond. Hurt by her unresponsiveness, he said sharply, “Are you angry about something?”
“No.”
“Then why are you looking so miserable?”
4
An unpleasant thought suddenly occurred to him, which he instinctively tried to dismiss. It had had its effect on him nevertheless. Controlling the agitation that he felt mounting within him, he said with forced calm, “Why don’t you say outright what you’re thinking? You don’t think I’m still reproaching you, do you?”
“Of course not.”
“I really don’t mean to reproach you, but quite honestly, I can’t help feeling there’s something very wrong. There’s been something between us ever since I saw you at the station. It’s all very vague, I’m sorry, and I wish I could be more precise, but there’s something wrong, I know. You may think I’m still bothered about Kaname and Mizutani, but they have nothing to do with it. Perhaps they’re not entirely irrelevant, but what I’m talking about is you and me. Somehow we seem to have lost touch with each other, and that’s what I’m talking about. What has happened? It’s never been like this with us before.” Naoko was silent. Kensaku moved over to the side of his bed. “We don’t want to be heard upstairs. Come here so that we can talk more quietly.”
Wearily Naoko got out of her bed and sat down beside Kensaku. Her face was so gloomy and expressionless it was ugly. She looked away from him toward the alcove, but she was not seeing the pottery and the box there that had pleased her earlier. “Don’t sit there like that, come and lie down,” Kensaku said, but she would not move.
For a while neither said anything. Kensaku’s mind felt like that of a man with fever, heavy and tired, yet animated. It was a very still night. They were surrounded by the silence of a world gone to sleep. Only they, it seemed to Kensaku, were kept wide awake by the invisible little spirits of calamity who danced maliciously in the heavy air of their room.
“Can’t you say something? We can hardly go to sleep in this state. Or are you determined to stay silent?” He paused, then tried again. “Try to be open with me, will you? True, what you have to tell me may make me angry, but my being angry may at least clear the air. How can we hope to settle anything by saying nothing?” Still there was no response from Naoko. “I don’t think either of us could stand this kind of strain for very long. If only I had some notion of what it was that I was trying to force you to say! If you have nothing to tell me, just say so, and I’ll be satisfied. What’s so difficult about that? Just say there’s nothing you have to tell me. Or is there something? Well, is there? Tell me, is there something?”
Naoko suddenly shut her eyes tight and hung down her head. She held her breath, then covering her crinkled face with her hands, threw her head down on her knees and started to cry violently. Kensaku felt his face going cold. He stood up and stared down in fear at her quaking shoulders. For a moment he lost awareness; then, as he regained it, as he awakened from the terrible dream, he asked himself the question: how am I to interpret this outburst? And he knew clearly then that whatever it was, something quite awful had happened to them.
5
There was an incident that occurred when Naoko and Kaname were still children that lent a not entirely innocent character to their relationship. It was no more than a game that they once played, a game which expressed merely childish curiosity and dimly understood desires. Yet it held lewd implicatio
ns which neither ever forgot afterward, and which later excited in Naoko a certain romantic longing whenever she remembered Kaname.
It was early spring, when the snow had not yet disappeared from the ground. Kaname, who had first gone home from school, was sent to Naoko’s house by his father to fetch her mother. Naoko was at the time playing house with a neighborhood girl, a little younger than herself, on the sunlit verandah. She was so enjoying the game that when her mother suggested she go with her, she refused and kept playing with her friend.
Naoko assumed that Kaname had gone back with her mother; but a few minutes later he came into the garden through the side gate and joined the two girls. Packing a metal basin with snow and pretending that it was rice in a cooking pot, the three played quite amicably until their hands became numb and the verandah was covered with water from melted snow. They then went inside and warmed themselves at a footwarmer under a coverlet. “Why don’t you go home?” Kaname said to Naoko’s playmate repeatedly, but she refused to leave.
Kaname now wanted to play a new game. It was called, he told them, “the turtle and the snapping turtle.” Would Naoko fetch something like an inkstone? Obediently Naoko went and found one. It was a round slab made of Akama stone. This was to be hidden in the garden, Kaname explained, and Naoko’s friend, in the role of a young girl, was to go and look for it. When she had found it she was to call out from the other side of the door, “Mama, I’ve found the turtle.” Naoko was then to say, “But that’s not a turtle, that’s a snapping turtle.” And just as she had finished saying this, Kaname was to shout, “A snapping turtle!” The two girls had no idea what the game was all about, but were willing enough to play it.
Kaname and Naoko lay under the coverlet while her friend searched outside for the inkstone Kaname had hidden. And when the little girl announced from the other side of the door that she had found it, Kaname leapt in the air shouting, “A snapping turtle!” He clapped his hands, stamped his feet on the coverlet, turned somersaults, and otherwise made a wild spectacle of himself.
He had been taught the game by a manservant, and was not unaware of its lewd implications. Naoko of course was utterly puzzled by it. But when they were lying in each other’s arms under the coverlet while her friend was outside, she had experienced a sensation that was new to her, a sensation that put her almost in a trance. The three children repeated the game a number of times. It was finally interrupted by the return of Naoko’s elder brother from school. Naoko and Kaname jumped up, guilty and frightened, as he walked into the room. And for reasons not clear to Naoko then, she was too ashamed to look at her brother.
Never again did Kaname and Naoko indulge in such play. But of all her childhood memories of him, the memory of that game remained the most vivid in her mind.
And so it was with some uneasiness that she received her cousin when he appeared unannounced at their house after Kensaku’s departure for Korea. But such uneasiness was indecent, she told herself, and resolved to treat him in a bright, cousinly manner. And when on the following day Mizutani and Kuze came and the card game began, she was so relieved there were others in the house that she joined the game, giving no thought to the propriety of such conduct on her part. Morning came, and still they played on. Exhausted and unable to sit up any longer, she asked Sen to take care of the guests, then retired to the small room at the back of the house and promptly fell asleep.
When she woke up, it was already dark. As she passed the living room on her way to the bathroom, through the opening between the sliding doors she saw the three men, their eyes sunken and their faces grimy, still seated around the cushion. They seemed easily amused, and laughed or giggled at the slightest provocation. Even Kuze, who was normally not particularly flippant, seemed now to be possessed of an unending supply of witticisms.
When she had finished her toilet she went into the kitchen and helped Sen prepare dinner.
Even while eating the three men could talk only about the game. It would be fun, one of them said, if they could complete fifty year-cycles; that would be some kind of a record.
After dinner they immediately started playing again. Naoko played with them. The three men had had no sleep whatsoever since the day before, and whenever one of them had to play dummy, he would lie down and promptly fall asleep. Kaname suffered from extreme stiffness around his neck and shoulders, and complained constantly about it.
At about ten they stopped at last. The men had a bath together, and even then they had enough energy left in them to splash about rowdily. Kuze and Mizutani left soon afterward.
Kaname lay down in the middle of the living room, using a folded cushion as pillow. Naoko pressed him several times to go upstairs and go to bed. “Yes, yes, I’ll go up in a minute,” he would say, but showed little inclination to get up. Resignedly Naoko put a wadded kimono over him, sat down beside him and began to read. Not many minutes had passed when Kaname stood up abruptly, and saying, “Good-night,” went upstairs.
Naoko, wide awake, continued to read. Then she thought she heard Kaname’s voice. She got up, went to the foot of the stairs and called out. He said something incomprehensible in a sleepy voice. She went to the top of the stairs to see what it was he wanted.
“My shoulders are terribly stiff,” he said. “Could you possibly call in a masseur?”
“The only one I can think of lives rather far from here. Besides, it’s past midnight.” Kaname looked disappointed. “And Sen has just gone to bed,” she added. “It would be a pity to wake her up.”
“All right, then, no masseur.”
“Is it really bad?”
“Yes, it is. It’s a stinging pain, and even my head feels funny. I couldn’t possibly go to sleep in this state.”
“Would you like me to massage you?”
“No, thank you.”
“I’m pretty good at it, you know.”
Naoko went into the room and sat down beside him. She began to massage his neck and shoulders, but the stiffness was such that she could hardly hope, with her limited strength, to alleviate it much.
“Is it doing any good?”
“Perhaps.”
“It’s pretty useless, isn’t it?”
“Perhaps.”
“Make up your mind,” she said, laughing. “Try to go to sleep while I’m massaging you. As soon as you wake up in the morning, I’ll have the masseur come.”
Naoko continued the massage for a while. Kaname lay still with his eyes closed. She was not sure whether he had fallen asleep or not; if he had not, it would be rude to stop massaging and leave.
Kaname suddenly rolled over toward her and grabbed her hand. Taken aback, Naoko tried to pull away. Kaname, his eyes still shut, put his free arm around her neck and pulled her toward him. “What are you doing!” she said in a shocked whisper.
“I won’t do anything bad, really I won’t,” he said, and forced her to lie down.
Nearly beside herself with shock and anger she tried to free herself, but he kept her down with his entire body, saying, “Really, I won’t do anything bad. It’s my head, it feels funny.”
The struggle continued for a time. Then Naoko felt herself drained of all power to resist. Indeed, she soon lost even the capacity to think.
Later she came down the stairs quietly, desperately afraid that Sen would know. She got into bed, and lay awake for hours.
Next morning, when she awakened, Kaname was no longer in the house. He had left Kyoto.
6
On the following day Kensaku was on Ichijōdōri, headed east. He walked quickly. The south wind was warm and humid, and his skin felt clammy. Partly because of the weather, partly because he had not slept, his head felt heavy and dull. Yet his senses seemed acutely receptive, and his overall state could not be described as despondent. He was too stimulated to brood, to engage in sustained thought; only fragmented perceptions, memories, and questions would run across his mind like little revolving wheels.
“I do not want to condemn her,” he said to
himself, repeating what he had said to Naoko the night before. “I want to forgive, not because it’s virtuous to forgive, but because I know that if I can’t forget what she did, the unhappy incident can only cause more unhappiness. I have no choice but to learn to forgive her.” A moment later, however, he could not avoid adding, “And so I shall be the only fool in the entire affair, the only loser.”
It was his habit whenever he went to Suematsu’s lodgings to catch a streetcar at Shimonomori. But when he got near there he found a festival in progress at Kitano Shrine. Reluctant to push his way through the great crowd, he went around to the back of the Hall of Martial Arts with the intention of going to the Kitano terminal. But this route, too, was packed with people. Everywhere, even in the riding ground, there were stalls selling sweets, balloons, toys, ice cream. Peepshows, showing picture-story versions of popular romances, had been set up too, mostly in the open area by the gateway. Such old favorites from the Edo period as “Oshichi the Grocer’s Daughter,” he noted, had been replaced by more recent romances, such as “The Gold Demon” and “The Cuckoo.” But the faces on the pictures were still as exaggerated and vulgar as ever, and the colors, done in distemper, as lurid.
He entered the pleasure quarter of Kamishichiken, intending to catch a streetcar on Senbondōri.
“I shouldn’t mind if we were both to forget the incident, if in time we were able to live as though it had never happened; but supposing I were to remember, and she alone were to forget, or at least appear to have forgotten, could I accept that? Could I bear to watch her carefree face?” His reply to his own question was that he probably could; but it was a reply given without confidence. More fearful was the prospect of their both pretending to each other that they had forgotten, when indeed they still remembered.
