Thirst for Love

by Yukio Mishima

  It started that summer. He began to take pleasure in making his wife’s jealousy overflow.

  Etsuko noticed that he was acquiring neckties she had not seen before. One morning he called her to him as he stood in front of the full-length mirror and asked her to tie his necktie. Etsuko’s fingers shook in joy and anxiety; she couldn’t seem to get it tied. Finally it was done. Ryosuke stepped away from her brusquely and asked: “How do you like it? Nice pattern?”

  “Oh? I didn’t notice. It’s new, isn’t it? Did you buy it?”

  “Come on! You noticed; I can tell.”

  “Well, it suits you.”

  “I should say it does.”

  From the drawer of Ryosuke’s desk, a woman’s handkerchief protruded—as if he had placed it there deliberately. It reeked of cheap perfume. After that there were things even worse, things that filled the air of the house with a bitter smell. Etsuko put a match to the pictures of a woman he had arranged on his desk and burned them one by one. Her husband had anticipated as much. “Where are my pictures?” he asked when he came home. Etsuko stood before him with arsenic tablets in one hand and a glass of water in the other. He swept the tablets from her hand, and she fell over a mirror stand and cut her forehead.

  But, oh, the fervor of her husband’s caresses that night! That capricious storm one night long! That ironic caricature of happiness!

  The evening that Etsuko resolved to poison herself again her husband came home. Two days later he took sick. Two weeks later he died.

  “My head! My head! I can’t stand it!” Ryosuke said in the entranceway; he didn’t come in.

  Etsuko had intended to take poison again when he returned. Now that was thwarted. It looked as if her husband had come home to torture her. This evening she did not feel the joy she usually felt at the return of this husband—a joy that exasperated her with herself. She rested her hand coldly on the sliding door, looked down at her husband sitting unmoving on the step, and felt proud. It was a pride in the success of the wager she had not proposed, with death as the stakes. She did not realize that the idea of death had already flown lightly out of her mind.

  “Have you been drinking?” she asked.

  Ryosuke shook his head and glanced up at her. He wasn’t conscious that in his eyes as he looked up was the same dog’s look he loathed, the look his wife always wore. A sluggish, feverish, earnest look—like that of an animal ignorant as to why a disease is developing within itself. It was the earnest, pleading look an animal might turn to its keeper. Perhaps now, for the first time, Ryosuke had an inkling that something inexplicable was happening in his body. He was sick; but sickness is not sickness alone.

  The short sixteen days after that were the happiest in Etsuko’s life. How alike they were—her honeymoon and her husband’s death—those two short periods of joy! Now she traveled with him to death’s resort. There was in this trip, as in the wedding journey, the same abuse of body and soul, the same untiring, insatiable desire and pain.

  Her husband lay with his chest bare, haunted by feverish nightmares, manipulated by the dexterous puppetry of death, groaning like a bride. In the last days, as his brain was being attacked, he would suddenly sit up as if doing calis-thenics, stick out his parched tongue, bare his front teeth dyed terracotta by the blood that oozed from his gums, and laugh out loud.

  In their room on the second floor of the Atami Hotel, the morning after the first night, he had laughed like that. He had opened the window and looked down at the gently undulating lawn. There was a family of Germans, guests of the hotel, with a big greyhound dog. The five- or six-year-old son was about to take the dog for a walk. Suddenly the dog saw a cat slinking under the shrubs and took off after her. The boy forgot to let go of the chain and was dragged on his backside across the lawn. Watching this, Ryosuke broke out in a laugh of pure, uninhibited joy. He bared his teeth and roared. Etsuko had never seen him laugh like that.

  Etsuko put on her slippers and ran to the window. That morning blaze on the lawn! That bright sea at the edge of the garden so deftly sloped that it seemed to join imperceptibly with the beach. They went down to the lobby. In the letter rack on a pillar were colorful travel booklets under a sign saying: “Help yourself.” Ryosuke took one, and while they were waiting for breakfast, he cleverly folded it into a paper airplane. Their table was by a window that looked out on the garden. “Look,” he said, and sailed the travel booklet airplane out toward the ocean. How silly!

  It was nothing but one of Ryosuke’s many tricks to ingratiate and delight the woman he was interested in. At that time, let it be said, he was really interested in pleasing Etsuko. He really wanted to impress this new wife. What sincerity!

  She still had some money. Until recently there had been just Etsuko and her father—all that were left of a wealthy old family tracing its lineage back to a famous general of the civil war period. Their fortune lay gathered in a stubbornly defended heap. Then the end of the war, the property tax, her father’s death, and Etsuko’s inheritance—a shockingly small bundle of securities. At any rate, that morning at the Atami Hotel, the two were a couple in every sense of the word. Ryosuke’s fever later made the two one once more. In this cruel joy that unexpectedly came to her again, Etsuko seemed to find the fullest, the most detailed, the greediest, the most wretched of pleasures. Her nursing of her husband was almost enough to make an onlooker avert his eyes.

  It took time to diagnose the illness as typhoid. For a long time they thought it was a peculiar, pernicious cold accompanied by catarrh. There was the relentless headache, the sleeplessness, the complete lack of appetite; yet there were no indications of the two characteristic symptoms of early typhoid—the mounting fever and the irregularity of body temperature and pulse. In the first two days, there was the headache and general body lassitude, but not the fever. The day after he came home, he did not go to the office.

  All that day, oddly, he passed docilely putting things in order, like a child playing in someone else’s house. An amorphous, incomprehensible anxiety arose out of his numbing lethargy. As Etsuko entered his six-mat study bearing him coffee, she found her husband spread-eagled on the tatami in his blue and white lounging robe. He was biting his lip as if testing it. The lip wasn’t swollen, but it felt as if it was going to be.

  When he saw Etsuko, he said: “I don’t want any coffee.”

  She hesitated, and he went on: “Move the knot of my sash toward the front. It’s digging into me, and I can’t stand it. I’d do it myself, but it’s too much trouble.”

  For a long time now, Ryosuke had not liked Etsuko to touch him. He didn’t even like her to help him put on his coat. What made him act this way today? Etsuko put the coffee tray down on his desk and knelt beside him.

  “What are you doing?” he asked. “You remind me of a masseuse.” She wedged her hand under his body and slid around the polka-dot sash and its perfunctory knot. He did not attempt to raise his body—his haughty, heavy trunk bearing down on Etsuko’s slender hand. It hurt her, but even in her pain she regretted that the task took only a few seconds.

  “Rather than lie here like this, wouldn’t you like to go to bed? Shall I lay it out?”

  “Leave me alone. I feel fine this way.”

  “How about your temperature? It seems higher than before.”

  “It’s the same as before—normal.”

  At this time Etsuko dared something that surprised even her. She pressed her lips against her husband’s forehead to determine his temperature. Ryosuke said nothing. His eyes moved languidly under his closed eyelids. The greasy, grimy skin of his forehead . . . Yes, it was a forehead that after a time would lose its ability to perspire—typhoid’s special effect—and then would dry up and burn like fire. A mad brow, and before long the dirt-colored brow of a corpse.

  The next evening Ryosuke’s temperature swiftly climbed to 103.4. He complained of low back pain and headache. He moved his head constantly, seeking a cool place on the pillow, and thus smeared his pillow c
ase with hair oil and scurf. That night Etsuko brought out the water pillow. He could take only liquids, and those with difficulty. She pressed apples, put the juice in a feeding cup and gave it to him to drink. The next morning the doctor came and said he had only a cold.

  So I saw my husband at last come round to me, come round before my eyes. It was like watching a piece of flotsam wash up before me. I bent over and carefully, minutely, inspected this strange suffering body on the surface of the water. Like a fisherman’s wife, I had gone every day to the water’s edge. I had lived alone and waited. Thus I finally found, in the sluggish water among the rocks in the bay, this washed-up corpse. It was still breathing. Did I pull it out of the water right away? No, I did not. All I did was, fervently, with passion and effort, without sleep, without rest, bend over the water and stare.

  So I watched this still-breathing body, completely immersed in the water, to see if it would groan again, shout again, until finally its hot exhalations died away. I knew: if he were revived, this piece of flotsam would leave me. He would without doubt flee with the tide to some infinitely distant shore. He would not come back to me a second time.

  In my ministrations, there was a purposeless passion. Who would know? Who would know that the tears with which I washed my husband through his dying hours were shed in grief for the passing of the passion that had brightened those hours for me?

  Etsuko remembered the day she hired a car and took her recumbent husband to be admitted to the hospital run by a friend, a specialist in internal medicine. Three days later the woman of the pictures came into his room and met Etsuko’s wrath. How did she find out? Did she hear from one of his friends at the office? Surely they didn’t know. Maybe she smelled it out as a dog would. Another woman came—three days in a row, in fact. Still another came. Sometimes the women ran into each other, glaring at each other as they went by.

  Etsuko wanted no one to infringe upon their island for two. She didn’t inform those in Maidemmura of Ryosuke’s danger until after he had breathed his last. She still remembered the joy she felt the day her husband’s illness was diagnosed. There were only three rooms on the second floor of the tiny hospital. There was a window at the end of the hall—a blank window, giving a blank view of the neighborhood.

  That odor of Lysol in the hall! Estuko loved it. When her husband dropped off into short dozes, she walked up and down the hall boldly inhaling that scent, which she preferred to the outside air. The action by which this chemical purified death and disease was to her not the action of death but the action of life. This smell, for all she could tell, was the smell of life. Like the smell of morning, it stimuated her nasal passages—this relentless, cruel, chemical body odor.

  Although the fever had been 104° for ten days, Etsuko still sat by the frame of her husband as it enfolded that fever, painfully seeking an outlet for it. Ryosuke was like a marathon runner at the end of the race: gasping for breath, his nostrils flaring. In his bed, his existence was the epitome of the human body involved in ever-racing track competition. Etsuko was his claque: “Just a little more! Just a little more!” Ryosuke’s eyes rolled upward. His fingertips clawed for the tape, but all he grasped was the edge of his blanket, warm as hay and rank with the odor of the animal that slept in it.

  The head of the hospital examined Ryosuke as he made his morning rounds and exposed his chest, alive with labored breathing. When the physician touched the fevercrammed skin, it piled up under his fingers as if about to geyser hot water. Is sickness perhaps, after all, only an acceleration of life? When the doctor applied his ivory stethoscope to Ryosuke’s chest, the yellow ivory created slightly white pressure marks; then here and there in the skin suddenly charged with blood, fine, opaque, rose-colored spots floated up.

  Etsuko asked about the spots: “What are they?”

  “Well, now,” the doctor said in a detached, yet friendly tone: “Roseola. I’ll explain it to you later.”

  When the examination was over, he led Etsuko to the door and said drily: “It’s typhoid fever. We finally got back the results of the blood tests. Where on earth did Ryosuke pick that up? He said he drank some well water while on a business trip; maybe that was it. But it’s all right. If his heart can bear it, there’s no problem. It’s a rather strange case, though, so the diagnosis was slow in coming. Today we must take steps to move him to a hospital specializing in what he has. We don’t have an isolation room here.”

  The doctor drummed with his dried-up knuckles on the wall posted with “No Smoking” signs, and in an attitude tinged with ennui waited for this woman with dark circles under her eyes—exhausted by days of nursing—to shout something, plead something: “Doctor! Please! Don’t report it; keep him here! If you move that man, sick as he is, he’ll die! Surely a man’s life matters more than the law. Doctor! Don’t just send him to a hospital for infectious diseases. See if you can have him placed in the isolation ward of a university hospital. Doctor!” He waited with educated curiosity for hackneyed appeals like these to issue from Etsuko’s mouth.

  But Etsuko said nothing.

  “You’re tired, aren’t you?” said the doctor.

  “No,” said Etsuko, in a tone some might call heroic.

  Etsuko was not afraid of catching typhoid. (This seemed to be the only reason she escaped it.) She returned to the chair beside her husband and went on with her knitting. Winter was coming, and she was knitting him a sweater. The room was cool in the morning. She slipped off one zori, then picked up that foot and rubbed the instep of the other.

  “They know what I have, don’t they?” asked Ryosuke, his voice lilting like a child’s.

  “Yes.” Etsuko got up intending to sponge his dry lips, cracked in fine fissures by the fever, with a piece of wet cotton. Instead she pressed her cheek against his. His unshaven, sick man’s face burned hers like hot beach sand.

  “It’s all right. Etsuko will make sure you get better. Don’t worry about a thing. If you died, I’d die too.” (Who would hold her to that false pledge? There were no witnesses anyway—not even God, whom Etsuko didn’t believe in.) “But that isn’t going to happen. You’re going to get better; that’s certain.”

  Etsuko kissed her husband’s parched lips frenziedly. They were constantly exhaling hot breath, as if fed by subterranean heat. Etsuko’s lips moistened her husband’s blood-smeared lips, thorny as roses. Under his wife’s face, Ryosuke’s face writhed.

  The gauze-wrapped door handle turned, and the door opened slightly. Etsuko heard the sound and released her husband. It was a nurse, beckoning to Etsuko with her eyes. They went out into the hall. A woman was there, in a long dress and fur cape, leaning by the window at the end of the hall.

  It was the woman of the pictures. At first glance she seemed to be Eurasian. Her teeth were so lovely they looked false. Her nostrils were shaped like wings. The wet paraffin paper around the bouquet she was carrying struck to her red fingernails. There was something impotent, frustrated, about this woman’s bearing, as if she were an animal standing on its hind legs trying to walk. She could have been forty: the wrinkles in the corners of her eyes would suddenly spring out as if from ambush, belying the twenty-five years one might first have given her.

  “How do you do?” the woman said. There was in her words a faint, elusive accent. Etsuko saw her as a woman stupid men might find exotic. Yet this was the woman who had caused her so much pain. Etsuko found it difficult at this short notice to bring together that past pain and this present embodiment of its cause. Her pain had already matured (strange way of saying it!) to the point at which it was something imaginative, having no connection with this concrete entity. The woman was an extracted tooth; it hurt her no more. Like a sick man who has weathered all the little, phony illnesses and now is face to face with the killer itself, Etsuko found herself demeaned by the thought that this woman had been the cause of all her troubles.

  The woman held out a calling card with a man’s name on it, saying she had come in her husband’s place. On
the card was the name of the general manager of the firm for which Ryosuke worked. “He is not supposed to have visitors,” Etsuko said; “no one is allowed in.” Something like a shadow darted across the woman’s eyes.

  “But my husband asked me to see him and find out how he is.”

  “Well, that’s how my husband is: no one can see him.”

  “If I could just look in at him, my husband would be satisfied.”

  “If your husband were here I would let him in.”

  “Why is it that my husband could go in, but I can’t? That doesn’t make sense. The way you talk makes me feel you’re worried about something.”

  “All right, nobody is to go in to see him. Does that satisfy you?”

  “I find the way you speak extraordinary. Are you his wife—Ryosuke’s wife?”

  “I am the only woman who calls my husband ‘Ryosuke!’”

  “Please, may I, please, just look in at him? I beg of you. Here, this is not much, but I thought it would brighten up his room.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Mrs. Sugimoto, may I see him? How is he? He isn’t seriously ill, is he?”

  “He may live, and he may die—no one knows.”

  Etsuko’s derisive tone shook the woman. She threw etiquette aside and said: “Well, if that’s the way it is, I’m going to see him whether you like it or not.”

  “Come right this way. If you don’t mind going in, make yourself at home.” Etsuko turned and led the way back to the room. “Do you know what my husband has?”

  “No.”

  “Typhoid.”

  The woman stopped, her color changing. “Typhoid?” she whispered.

  Here was an uncouth woman, surely. Her shocked reaction was that of the old wife who upon hearing someone has tuberculosis says: “Heavens preserve us!” She might even go so far as to cross herself! This foreigner’s concubine! What was she waiting for? Etsuko amiably opened the door. The woman’s startled reaction pleased Etsuko. She moved the chair at her husband’s bedside even closer to him.