by Ivan Morris
“What if the child should look like you?” Startled at her own words, she turned back, warm and at peace.
Footnote
1 The hero of a Kabuki play by Mokuami.
NIGHTINGALE
BY Einosuké Itō
TRANSLATED BY Geoffrey Sargent
The present work (Uguisu in Japanese) won a coveted literary award soon after its publication in 1938 and is probably the best known of Einosuké Itō’s many stories of Japanese rural life. The author, born in the northern city of Akita in 1903, was active for some years in Tokyo as a left-wing literary critic before turning in 1931 to the writing of fiction. He writes mainly of the impoverished farming people in northeastern Japan and Hokkaido, and the series of stories with bird or animal titles (e.g., “The Owl,” “The Crow,” “The Swallow,” “The Cow,” “The Horse”), which he has produced since 1937, has been widely popular. These stories are written in a highly individual style, with speech and narrative closely intertwined, and convey, in an amusing anecdotal form, the author’s faith in the essential goodness and simplicity of the Japanese peasant. The spoken parts, which play a large part in Einosuké Itō’s work, are in north-country dialect, and the reader should bear in mind that the effect of this is largely lost in translation.
The uguisu, from which the story takes its title, is actually a bush warbler or mountain tit but is popularly called a Japanese nightingale because of its melodious song.
TOWARD EVENING, when the wind had dropped and the dust had settled, a little old woman with a small cloth bundle on her back came slowly up the street, dragging her feet wearily and trailing loose ends of straw from the frayed heels of her sandals. After every ten yards or so she would pause briefly, move on a few steps, and then stare intently at the front of a shop or at its signboard. She gave the impression of someone noting in amazement the changes which time had wrought in a once familiar town; or perhaps of someone searching out a strange house at which to call. On arriving before the Inspectorate of Agricultural Products—a building fronted by broad glass doors and a particularly prominent signboard—she stood motionless for an age, like a hawk hovering above a marsh, her neck strained toward the sign; and then, as if resolved at last, she stepped quickly forward and pushed back the glass doors.
“I’m from Akazawa.” The black-uniformed clerk turned from his bored inspection of the street and waited for her to continue. “I want you to help me find where my daughter lives, sir.”
The man leaned forward, not certain that he had heard correctly, but when the old woman went on—“They said she was at the Seifu Inn, so I came to see, but she’s not there, so could you please help me find where she is, do you think?”—he broke in before she had finished: “Well, looking for people, you know—we don’t do that sort of thing here. If that’s what you want, you should go to the police station.” He turned away to inspect the street once more.
“Oh, then this isn’t the police?” The old woman cast her eyes slowly about the walls and furnishings of the room, and her face registered keen disappointment.
The police station was only two or three blocks farther up the street, but on entering it the old woman found the policemen all turned the other way, watching with evident amusement a pair who had arrived before her, and it was some time before anyone chose to look in her direction. The two people in question—one a sharp-featured woman of about fifty, the other a girl with plump cheeks and large eyes—were standing dejectedly, with bowed heads, before an officer whose hair had receded in a broad sweep from his temples. Both women wore bloomer-like work trousers, and through the side slits in the girl’s a bright red undersash was visible.
“Now show us the money you stole.” The girl, doing as the constable directed, reached into the folds of her sash and, after much rustling about, brought out a dirty striped-cotton purse. The constable examined the contents.
“Well, there it is. She hasn’t spent a thing. Ten yen fifty sen—that’s the lot, isn’t it?”
He directed his question to the older woman, who nodded and gave a look as if of immense relief.
“This is a fine state of affairs, this is,” continued the constable. “A mother robbed by her own daughter. A daughter robbing her own mother. You, young woman, you’ve gone too far. But you too”—addressing the mother—“isn’t it time you stopped turning your daughter’s husbands out of the house? Well? …”
He paused, but the mother offered no reply, managing to convey by her silence that, so far as that matter was concerned, she had her reasons. The policeman at the reception desk now intervened. His body was twisted around in his chair, and his ruddy-complexioned face was twisted yet further around on his shoulders, to enable him to view the scene.
“Hi!” he shouted, “How many sons-in-law have you thrown out now?”
When this produced only a long silence he put his question again, this time to the daughter.
“How many husbands have you had thrown out?”
The girl raised her eyes a moment to look at her mother, but quickly lowered them and stared once more at the floor.
“The last was the fifth,” she whispered.
“What! The fifth! Five husbands at your age? That’s no joke, I should say.”
The policeman’s gaze swept back around the room and came to rest upon the face of the old woman, who was standing directly before his desk. At once, as if at a sudden recollection of urgent business, he started writing something on a sheet of paper.
“Turned out five sons-in-law, eh?” resumed the first, the balding policeman. “What on earth makes you do it? If you intend to try any more of that sort of thing we certainly can’t let your daughter go back home with you just like this. Stealing your purse is bad enough, but who knows what she might do next? Supposing she set the house on fire? What do you intend to do about it, then? Are you going to turn out any more? Well … are you?”
The mother was clearly shaken by the policeman’s bullying tone. She started to wipe her hands nervously with a piece of damp cloth. Her hands were black with grime, as if she had come straight from some sort of work in the fields.
“Yes, sir; I see, sir,” she said. “I don’t think I’ll do it again.” She spoke in a half-hearted mumble, keeping her sullen eyes glued to the floor.
“Don’t think? That’s not much good,” said the policeman standing at her side, the patrolman who had brought the two women in. “If that’s the best you can say, when it comes down to it you’ll do it again, just the same as before.”
Having administered this rebuke he turned to the daughter:
“You, now. How do you feel about that husband? Do you want him badly?”
The girl made no reply, but grew red in the face.
The policeman repeated his question: “Well, do you want him or don’t you?” This time the girl nodded, very faintly, and the policeman turned at once to the mother.
“This money business is settled now,” he said, “but that’s not the important thing. You’ll have to take your son-in-law back. Is that agreed? Well … is it?”
“Yes, I see,” the woman said simply; but the policeman, observing in her face traces of some strong emotion which suggested she was far from convinced, now abruptly changed his tone and started shouting at her angrily.
“Look here! That’s enough lip service! You can’t go on and on—just because you’re a widow—turning your daughter’s husbands out of the house! You’re old enough to know better. It’s all very well wanting the youngster for yourself, but there’s a limit. Tell me the truth. Are you really going to make it up with that last husband?”
At this point the young woman, her eyes filling with tears as memories of her dismissed husbands came crowding back upon her, burst suddenly into loud, convulsive sobs. Everyone turned in surprise and looked at her. She wept on unabashed, her mouth wide open, and in a matter of seconds her face was drenched in tears, which spurted from her eyes as if from a fountain.
“What on earth’s the mat
ter now?” The examining officer rose from his seat, turned his back to the girl, conversed briefly with the policeman at the reception desk, who was still immersed in his writing, and then walked aimlessly about the far end of the room with a disgusted look on his face.
“Mothers or daughters, there’s not much to choose between them. Look here, you!” He approached the girl and pushed her on the shoulder. “That husband meant a lot to you, I dare say, but you can go too far with all this blubbering and stealing purses.”
Still the young woman wept noisily. The mother, who had been distracted at the thought of her only daughter’s love being taken from her by a son-in-law, now seemed for the first time to emerge from her trance. She patted her daughter on the shoulder.
“What is it, my dear?” she said soothingly. “Really, you know, in front of all these gentlemen…”
The district patrolman, on being called to the woman’s house to investigate the disappearance from a drawer of a purse containing ten yen, had found no signs of forced entry. He had known, moreover, that the woman, since losing her husband while still in the prime of her life, had been subject to violent fits of jealousy over her daughter, and had driven from the house a long succession of adopted sons-in-law, the latest being a particularly steady and respected young man called Naokura; and in view of this he had decided to question the daughter. He had found her working in the fields and, her answers to his questions proving evasive, had brought both women straight to the police station, where the examination had shown that his suspicions were correct. The thief was the daughter. She had stolen the money to suggest to her mother the insecurity of a house without a man, to get the dismissed Naokura recalled.
A door swung open noisily and the superintendent appeared, ready to go off duty. The policemen sprang to their feet, as if jerked upright by invisible strings, and saluted stiffly.
“What’s all this crying? If you’ve given them a talking to, send them home,” said the superintendent. He made as if to approach the crying girl, thought better of it, and walked out into the street. At once everyone appeared to relax. The policemen going off duty, chatting idly, started preparing to leave.
“Now, ma’am, you understand, don’t you?” said the balding policeman, who took charge of all criminal matters. “And you, too, young woman. No matter how badly you miss your husband, this stealing and such-like has to stop. If you understand, you can go.”
Hanging their heads, the two women moved toward the door. Constable Wakamatsu, the inspection officer, gazed idly after them as they went.
“I wish I had a way with the women,” he said, tidying the things on his desk, “like that girl’s husband seems to have had.”
This gave rise to a discussion about which of the station staff had the greatest sex appeal.
“Whatever you say,” said Constable Miyoshi, the military service officer, “Tangé Sazen is the desperado the girls admire.”
Miyoshi’s left eyebrow and eyelid were marked by a scar. While angling for trout the previous summer he had slipped on a smooth, mossy rock, breaking his glasses, and because of the red scar that had formed when the wound healed, like some brand burned into his flesh to proclaim his overindulgence in fishing, his associates had secretly dubbed him Tangé Sazen, after the celebrated murderer. One purpose of his remark was to let it be known that he was aware of this nickname.
“It’s no good,” said the balding criminal-affairs officer. “People like you and me don’t stand a chance against the youngsters.” He turned to gaze in ironic admiration at Constable Kobayashi, a young man fresh from the training depot. “Now, if only the ‘ko’ was knocked off his name, Kobayashi Chōjirō would certainly be our number-one glamor boy.” He enjoyed his joke loudly.
“True, true,” laughed the military-service officer. “If we had film-star Hayashi Chōjirō here, I should be only second best.”
He raised his head as he laughed and, looking straight before him, noticed the old woman, who had seated herself on a bench before the reception desk. While waiting for the reception clerk to look her way, she had been overtaken by a sudden drowsiness and had dropped off to sleep.
The policeman called across to her. “Now, my old dear, what can I do for you?” At the sound of his voice she forced open bleared eyes and blinked vaguely about her for a few moments.
“Oh, I … I wanted some help to find my daughter,” she said. Rising slowly to her feet she moved forward and pressed her face close to the handrail running along the rim of the reception desk. She was short, and only her eyes and the top of her head were visible. Constable Miyoshi, who, in addition to dealing with military-service matters, was the officer for general consultations, had a flair for listening sympathetically to the most trivial problems, and he now got down to business at once, speaking with genuine kindliness.
“Your daughter, eh? Has she run away from home?” he asked.
“Well, no; she was taken away by someone when she was ten years old, you see …” and the old woman started to tell her daughter’s story. The old woman’s name was Kin, and this daughter, Yoshie, was really an adopted child. Kin had decided upon adoption when she was past thirty and had lost hope of ever having a child of her own; but finding someone willing to offer a son or a daughter to a poor household like Kin’s, where she and her husband earned the meagerest of livings as charcoal makers, had been no easy matter, and in the end Kin had been obliged to take in the bastard daughter of a woman called Sugi, a seller of dried seaweed, who came on business into that rather remote and mountainous locality once every five days. Sugi had been delivered of the child while her husband was away working in Matsumae, and she had brought it to Kin’s house very soon after the twenty-first day, carrying it all the way herself, strapped to her back. So to Kin, who had been fervently praying for a child for all these years, the girl Yoshie had seemed from the very beginning exactly like her own baby. And then, one day in autumn, when she was ten, Yoshie had suddenly disappeared. The village was searched in vain. Parties were sent out into the nearby mountains, directed by the divinations of a fortuneteller whom Kin consulted, but they discovered no trace of the missing girl. Then it was reported that someone had seen Yoshie going off with a woman who was possibly the seaweed seller, and Kin and her husband went at once to the woman’s home, where there was a heated argument. Sugi, however, perhaps because her husband was present, stubbornly maintained she had no idea what girl they were talking about—that she had never even seen her—and the argument produced nothing. Some time later a rumor came to Kin’s ears that Sugi had sold the girl to a traveling circus troupe which had passed through her town shortly after Yoshie’s disappearance. In the years that followed, Kin had never been able to forget Yoshie. If ever there was a circus encamped in any of the towns at which she and her husband chanced to call when they brought charcoal down from the mountains, Kin would somehow find the money for a ticket, and she would sit in breathless attention throughout the performance, hoping against hope to catch a glimpse of her Yoshie. But no one in the least like Yoshie had ever appeared.
“Now, let me see,” said Constable Miyoshi at this point, breaking into Kin’s story, “would the husband of this seaweed-selling woman be a fellow called Kintarō? A horse dealer?”
Kin looked up in amazement. “Yes, that’s right, sir. She was Kintarō’s wife. But how do you know about Kintarō, sir?”
The constable made no reply to this question, but went on as if talking to himself, seemingly absorbed in recollections of the dim past. “If that’s the case,” he said, “I’ve seen that daughter of yours.”
Fifteen or sixteen years back, when Miyoshi had been stationed in a neighboring division of the prefecture on his very first assignment in the police force, he had become involved in a squabble concerning a girl member of a circus troupe that had just arrived in town. The man who claimed at that time to be the girl’s father had been, he could clearly remember, the horse dealer Kintarō, now deceased. Not only the girl’s foster mo
ther Kin, it seemed, but her real mother Sugi, had been watching out for the reappearance of this particular troupe; and Sugi—though it was difficult to know exactly what her feelings were in the matter—had, with better luck than Kin, managed to see the girl again. Her husband Kintarō had formerly been a day laborer, but when things were bad and his earnings had sunk below the level required for three square meals a day, he had switched to horse dealing, in which trade—with the help of the little capital provided by the sale of Yoshie—he had, in the optimistic tradition of horse dealers, assumed that he would soon make himself a fortune. But his various schemes had met with disaster, with the result, among other things, that he had been unable to buy Yoshie back.
His story was that the girl had been sold by Sugi for a mere thirty yen, which was not much more than the price of a cat; and when Constable Miyoshi heard this, being new to his job and anxious to win himself laurels by some startling feat, he had exclaimed in indignation at the idea of buying a human being at such a price, cruelly deceiving a poor, ignorant countrywoman, and he had gone so far as to say that the least the circus manager could do, if he wished to stay out of jail, would be to return the girl at once, together with a fair sum of money as compensation. Unfortunately the avaricious Kintarō had seized upon this suggestion only too readily, first of all proposing a hundred yen as a suitable recompense, then raising it gradually to two hundred, and finally insisting upon three hundred, at which point Constable Miyoshi had washed his hands of the affair and told the horse dealer, if he wanted to be that greedy, to settle things by himself. But Kintarō’s impudence had been no match for that of the circus manager. That man had turned the tables on him, insisting that he would return the girl only if he, the circus manager, were given three hundred yen as compensation for his trouble in keeping and training her; and so Kintarō had come away with neither the money nor the girl.
