Modern Japanese Short Stories

by Ivan Morris

  During the following year she lived at home and helped her mother with the housework. Kanako’s mother was a fierce, dauntless woman who had been brought up in the hinterland and who, after many long years, had still not been softened by city ways. She was a stubborn old realist and when she was not preparing for the morrow she was making sure that not a grain of today’s rice was being wasted. Even when Kanako sat down to do her sewing she felt her mother’s eagle eyes on her and she could not relax for a moment.

  In the end the atmosphere in the house became unbearable and Kanako went to Shitaya, where her elder sister ran a little teashop. There she was able to help in the kitchen and with the clothes and the bedding. When it came to waiting on customers in the shop, however, Kanako was too heavy and sluggish by nature to be of much use. Not that she did not try. The relative gaiety of her sister’s life filled her with envy and she did her best to mix with the male customers. Yet she was not sufficiently self-confident about her looks or her manners. She tried copying the other waitresses by powdering her face and curling her hair, but it all struck her as rather pointless. As soon as she began to make herself amiable, she felt that she was in some way betraying her own nature.

  “Your eyes are just like Madam’s,” the girls in the shop used to tell Kanako. “You’ve got a nice round face and lovely white skin like hers, too.” She could not help smiling at these compliments; yet she was well aware that, much as she might resemble her sister in some ways, she had none of the elder girl’s attraction. Never once was Kanako flattered into believing that she possessed any real charm. Her face was always slightly crooked as though she were about to cry; it reminded one of Chōjirō, the actor.

  One of the waitresses in the teashop had formerly been a dancer and she told Kanako about the easy life in the dance halls. Kanako decided to take some lessons, but at her first visit to a dance hall she was thoroughly disillusioned. She could not bear the idea of being dragged round the floor in the arms of one man after another, all complete strangers.

  Kanako was afraid that if she continued her present life she might succumb to temptation. She was therefore glad to accept the job as cashier in a Ginza restaurant that one of her sister’s patrons, a wool draper, mentioned to her. Here at least she was safe. But it was no easy job to stand by the cash register all day and late into the night.

  Meanwhile marriage plans were being discussed. A couple who came from the same village as Kanako’s mother called separately on her parents with the suggestion that she should marry Sōichi, the husband’s son by his first wife. Originally it had been intended that she should be the bride of Sōichi’s stepbrother, Shinichi (who was the wife’s son from her first marriage), and negotiations had gone on for some time between Kanako’s parents and Shinichi’s mother. Shinichi was a fairly pleasant young man. He often used to call at Kanako’s house with a bundle of clothes for repair, and he would sit for hours discussing horses with her father, who was a great racing fan. Kanako came to know him quite well. Shinichi’s position as a shopkeeper was entirely to her taste and she grew used to the idea that in due course she would become his wife.

  Then in the middle of it all Shinichi’s stepfather, Wasao, had proposed to Kanako’s parents that she should marry instead his own son, Sōichi, who was three years younger than the stepbrother. Her parents made no objection. At first Kanako felt that she was somehow acting wrongly toward Shinichi, but since he did not seem to care particularly, she silently resigned herself to the new arrangement and exchanged the traditional betrothal cups with Sōichi, about whom she knew next to nothing.

  * * *

  Sōichi, who worked in a large clock factory where his father was the foreman, had recently come back from military service in Manchuria. Before entering the army, he had fallen in with a set of bad companions who were employed in the same factory under his father’s superintendence. Through their influence he had started gambling and had also visited bars and brothels. It was with the aim of having his son settle down that Wasao arranged for him to be married immediately on his return from Manchuria. There was no pressing need for his wife’s son, Shinichi, to get married, and Wasao had therefore substituted Sōichi as Kanako’s bridegroom.

  After the marriage the young couple moved into Wasao’s house. The father gave them the second story, which consisted of one six-mat room and one three-mat room.1 For himself, his wife, and their two daughters he reserved the six-mat room and the four-mat room on the ground floor. Despite this arrangement, Kanako soon found that the crowded house prevented her from enjoying the happiness of married life to which she had so eagerly looked forward.

  The younger of the two sisters, who had just turned sixteen, had suffered from an attack of pleurisy and since her recovery had been hanging about the house doing nothing. Yoshiko, the other sister, was eighteen. She had recently started to learn sewing. After the marriage she announced that it was too crowded for her to work downstairs and installed her sewing machine in the three-mat room on the second story. Kanako soon became accustomed to the whirring of the machine, but when Yoshiko took to spreading her bedding next to the room where she and Sōichi slept, she really found it intolerable. She felt that strange eyes were peeping into the happy world which they shared at night, and soon she became extremely reserved with her husband.

  Yoshiko, on the other hand, felt as if Kanako were an elder sister who had been added to the family, and for a time she tried to make friends. It soon became clear, however, that they had little in common. Kanako, thanks to her mother’s training, had an eminently practical approach, whereas Yoshiko thought of nothing but films and revues. The young girl was a great fan of Chōjirō, the film actor. Not long before, Chōjirō had made a personal appearance at the nearby Kinshi Hall. Yoshiko had pushed her way through the throng of girls and young wives who flocked from the neighborhood to admire him. When she saw that the actor was going to step into his car, she leaped out in front of the crowd and tried to approach him as he stood there in his formal crested kimono. With a frenzied look in her eyes she seized his hand and screamed out his nickname, “Chōsan.” There was a stir among the onlookers and they broke into loud applause. Even Chōjirō, accustomed though he was to overenthusiastic fans, was taken aback by this, and he looked at the girl in blank amazement.

  When Kanako heard the story, it gave her a strange feeling. She realized that such giddy behavior was fairly frequent among the younger generation, yet it seemed odd that she should be living in the same house with so uncontrolled a girl. Every time that Kanako looked at Yoshiko’s freakish features, which she had obviously inherited from her mother, she felt amused and at the same time deeply sorry for her.

  In order to show her friendliness, Yoshiko said that she would make a light dress for Kanako to wear in the early spring. From then on she began pestering Kanako about the exact sort of material and pattern that she wanted. It was all the more annoying in that Kanako did not have the remotest intention of wearing the dress. She would gladly have had an extra kimono to add to her wardrobe, but Western-style clothes were utterly out of character.

  Kanako’s main occupations were washing and sewing. As a rule she would spend the greater part of the day working in her room on the second floor without saying a word to anyone. The cooking was the responsibility of the mother and her daughters. Kanako would have liked occasionally to prepare a meal with a variety of dishes that she could enjoy with her husband. But the household stuck strictly to the rule of having only one kind of food with the rice each day. If there were potatoes, there would be nothing but potatoes for all three meals; if they had cod, there would be nothing but slices of cod. There was never the slightest effort to combine different dishes and Kanako could not help feeling depressed as she sat down with the family to their monotonous meals. To make things even more trying, they never had vegetable pickles. Whatever else she might have missed during her life, Kanako had always had plenty of pickles, and rice without pickles struck her as extremely insipid. Her pa
rents’ house was fairly near and she now began stopping by on her way back from the hairdresser’s or the public bath. She would slip in by the back door and ask for some pickles, which she then mixed in a bowl with rice and tea and gulped down greedily. Yet the knowledge that she now belonged to another family made her ashamed of these visits and took away most of the pleasure.

  Her husband liked Kanako’s hair best when she did it up in the old-fashioned, matron style. At first she used to take great trouble in arranging it and would tie the chignon with a red band. Yet gradually she became imbued with the drab, gloomy atmosphere of the household. The mood that had buoyed her up during the early months of her marriage disappeared and she no longer took any pains with her coiffure. Why make her hair beautiful when everything else was so unlovely?

  It was just at this time that Sōichi came home late one night thoroughly drunk. Earlier in the evening Kanako had sat downstairs with the younger sister and listened to records. Then she had heated the saké for her father-in-law to sip when he came back from the bathhouse. Wasao returned and said that he would wait for his son to join him at his saké as was their habit in the evenings. Time went by, but still the young man did not return. Wasao was reminded of his son’s nocturnal outings in the past and the saké failed to produce its usual enlivening effect. He began to mumble some halfhearted apology on behalf of Sōichi. It made Kanako rather uncomfortable and she took the first opportunity to leave him and go upstairs.

  Ten o’clock passed, then eleven, and still there was no sign of Sōichi. Kanako became impatient. She emptied some old photographs out of a drawer and examined them. Then she began to rummage through some old magazines and storybooks which had been gathering dust in a cupboard. At that moment she became aware of a pungent smell of saké. Sōichi was back. Without a word he sprawled out on the floor like a refractory child and fell into a drunken sleep. This was Kanako’s first experience of such behavior and she felt that in a flash she had been confronted with the true nature of men.

  * * *

  Some time after this incident the young couple moved into a little rented house not far from the parents’ home. Wasao, who would normally have objected strongly to the change, was in no position to do so. For on a certain evening while Kanako was pouring saké for him he had made an objectionable suggestion that had utterly infuriated her.

  His wife had gone out that evening to the local cinema. She had taken along the younger daughter, but Yoshiko had stayed behind. The elder girl’s mental condition had been growing steadily worse and when the time came for the cherry blossoms she had lapsed into real lunacy. After the worst period had passed, they found that her nature had completely changed. The girl, who had formerly suffered from manic frenzy, now became extremely subdued. Occasionally she fell into fits of fearful depression, but most of the time she was reasonably calm. The genesis of Yoshiko’s disorder appeared to be in her obsession with her beloved Chōjirō. One night she had jumped out of bed, crying that Chōjirō was passing outside the window, and she had tried to rush into the street. Evidently she had been aroused by the sound of a group of factory girls walking by after a visit to the cinema; this had in some way stirred up images of the memorable occasion when she had seized Chōjirō by the hand. Wasao was well aware that his daughter’s tendency to madness was shared by his wife, who loved him so frenziedly, and he felt that he was imprisoned by bonds of cause and effect from which he could never escape. He sighed deeply and took another sip of saké. Until that year Wasao had always observed the strictest economy. He never made any objections, however, when his wife used to dress up and go out shopping. She used to get terribly lonely when he left for work and sometimes she could not bear to stay in the house.

  His wife really adored him. Even in front of the children she would nestle up amorously to her solemn-faced husband and cause him the liveliest embarrassment. The fact that she was a couple of years older than Wasao made her affection all the keener.

  “You know, my girl,” he said to Kanako, “I really love the old woman. So long as she’s alive I won’t do anything to cause her unnecessary worry. But when she’s dead I’m going to find myself someone better. After all, what’s the use of sweating away and making a pile if I can’t get any pleasure out of it? The way things are now, I come straight home from work every day. I never set foot in a teahouse, I never go to the races or have any real fun. I just have a bottle or two of saké, get a little tipsy, turn out the lights, and go to bed. Sometimes I feel pretty fed up, I can tell you. There are lots of ways a man can enjoy himself in this world if he’s got a little money. Why shouldn’t I want to do the same things that Sōichi likes doing? Most men my age, when they’ve made a decent position for themselves, keep a mistress or two. Now don’t get the idea that I’m waiting for the old woman to die. But sometimes I can’t help feeling that it would be a good thing if she did die fairly soon. It’s not simply that I want my freedom. Just think what would happen if I died first! It would be terrible for my poor wife, and the rest of the family would be in a pretty bad state, too.”

  Wasao muttered away affectedly. He drained his cup and handed it to Kanako.

  “Here, have some saké” he said.

  Kanako found it irritating enough to have to pour the saké; to be asked to drink it was doubly annoying. “Me?” she laughed. “How absurd!”

  “Too shy to drink, eh, my girl? That’s rather sweet.”

  He pressed the cup on her, but when she again refused he gave up and resumed his rambling monologue. “That boy of mine’s an awful fool,” he said, “but I still love him the best, you know. Of course, my children are all the same and there’s no real reason I should love one of them more than the others. But Sōichi is the living image of my dead wife. I suppose that’s why I worry about him most of all. If only you could have a child by him, my girl, I could pass on my money with a free mind. The trouble is—well, I suppose it’s something you should have been told about before you got married, but it was a terribly hard thing to mention at the time. Now that you’re a wife you’ll understand quite easily and you’ll realize it’s nothing so bad. The fact is that Sōichi led too wild a life before he went into the army and as a result he can’t have any children. It’s not too bad, is it? Still, it makes me rather sad that my family line is going to end when Sōichi dies. Now please don’t think I’m using all this as an excuse. I’d hate you to think that. But suppose you were to have a child for Sōichi. You know what I mean, girl, don’t you?”

  Kanako had been listening carefully to what her father-in-law had to say, but suddenly her expression changed. She jumped to her feet and ran upstairs without paying the slightest attention to Wasao’s apologies. A few moments later he heard her quietly leaving the house. He did not even try to stop her.

  Thus Wasao’s plans for a united family in which all the money would remain secure were abruptly shattered. The young couple rented a separate house and the family was split.

  Kanako was happy about the change. She thought that at last she and her husband would be able to live a life of their own. She remembered the hosiery factory, which she had not thought about for a long time. When she had worked there, she had given part of her earnings to her mother, and this had been a great help for the household expenses. Why should she not help her husband by doing some work now? As soon as they were settled in the new house, she visited the proprietress of the factory and discussed the matter. It was agreed that she could very well work at home on mending socks which came out of the machine with tangled threads, tears, and other imperfections.

  Kanako promptly set to work and to her satisfaction found that she was earning enough to pay for their rent and their rice. So long as Sōichi handed her his monthly pay envelope intact, they would have enough to pay a visit to the cinema a couple of times a month, to have a meal in the restaurant of one of the big department stores when they went shopping, and even to deposit something in the postal savings account.

  “I’m not going to s
top you two from living apart if that’s what you’ve decided to do,” Wasao had told them when they left, “but you’ll have to manage your own finances from now on. Of course if you get ill or something I’ll try to help out, but you’d better not count on me too much.”

  Kanako determined not to ask him for money whatever happened, and she made her plans for their new budget accordingly. Everything would have been all right if Sōichi had given her his full pay as agreed. But he did so only the first month. Toward the end of the second month Sōichi took on someone else’s work in the factory and Kanako was happily looking forward to the extra money that he would be earning. When pay day came, however, Kanako found that all her household plans had been in vain. Profiting from the fact that his father no longer was watching him, Sōichi had gone back to his old habit of gambling and had succeeded in losing over half his month’s pay. He came home drunk and without a word threw his pay envelope on the floor. Kanako picked it up and emptied the contents.

  “Is this all?” she said, holding up two notes.

  Sōichi did not answer. He merely stood there, smoothing his unkempt hair.

  When they had moved into their new house, Sōichi had taken out his tool box and busied himself with putting up shelves, installing the radio that he had brought from his father’s place, and other odd jobs. Occasionally he had taken his wife to a shrine festival, and they had bought themselves something at a stall—a little potted tree or a cage of singing insects. Or again, he had locked up the house and taken her out to a film. Once they had been to see some Western-style dancing at the pleasure pavilion in Sumida Park and had been so captivated by the gaiety of the event that they had not returned home till quite late in the evening.