by Ivan Morris
“So this time it’s your wife we’re asked to look for, is it? Do you think the police force has nothing better to do all day than chase after you and your wife?” Constable Miyoshi, heartily sick of the business, had refused to help, and Sakutarō had soon afterward shut up his house and had apparently, ever since, been moving about from one cheap lodginghouse to the next.
“That’s right,” said Constable Kobayashi. “The fellow’s back to his old games. Picked this woman up. Thought he’d seduce her. But …” Constable Kobayashi, who was fresh from the training depot and had lately, with admirable thoroughness, been reporting everything from a bicycle without lights to a public urination, now assumed an expression of intense seriousness, saluted his senior colleague Miyoshi, and continued: “… the thing is, this woman’s a man. I found them together at a lodginghouse, in the course of my patrol, and brought them in.”
Miyoshi looked at the woman. The skin on her face and neck was hidden beneath a thick layer of powder, but the bushiness of the eyebrows and a certain directness in her gaze did seem somehow more appropriate to a male. The hips, too, were surprisingly narrow.
“So this is a man, eh? Hi, you! Lift those skirts a bit and let’s see your legs.”
The woman fidgeted about, pleading with her eyes to be spared this indignity.
“Come on, pull them up!” Constable Wakamatsu now intervened, rising from his desk. Seeing the look of obstinacy on the woman’s face, however, he took an abacus from a nearby desk, and with this quickly lifted up the skirt himself. A thick, hairy skin was revealed. The man in female guise clutched at the disordered skirts in a flutter of coquettish modesty and gave a little shriek.
“Now really”—the voice was shrill and feminine—“whatever are you gentlemen doing?”
Miyoshi was taken aback. “Well, listen to that! Are you sure this is a man?” he queried.
The same momentary doubt was clearly registered on the faces of his colleagues.
“Hi, let’s hear some more like that,” urged Constable Wakamatsu. “Speak in that womanish voice again.”
But the ambiguous person stood silent with downcast eyes. Constable Kobayashi took the abacus from Wakamatsu’s hand.
“Where,” he cried, delivering a resounding and well-timed blow with the flat of the implement, “would you find a woman with breasts as hard as this?”
His surprised victim tottered backward and fell to the floor. Constable Wakamatsu tugged roughly at a sleeve of the man’s kimono.
“And how did you get hold of these woman’s clothes?” he demanded. “Pinched ’em?”
Still the bogus woman made no reply but fumbled fussily with the material at the base of one sleeve, where a seam had split. The hand was delicate, like a woman’s, but the wrist, peeping out from the edge of the yellow sleeve, was decidedly large-boned.
“Well, that’s as you say, I suppose,” said Miyoshi, turning now to look at Sakutarō. “But what’s this other fellow done?”
Constable Kobayashi resumed his posture of stiff formality.
“Ha. This fellow, of course, is a fellow having a relationship with the person masquerading as a woman, and I found him in heated argument with that person at a cheap lodginghouse near Sengen Temple and brought him in.”
All this was delivered in one breath. Then: “Hi, you! Come here!” he shouted, and he pulled the man forward. Sakutarō, his hair thinning and his skin burned almost black—both conditions the result of his restless, year-round wanderings up and down country roads—was painfully embarrassed, and he gazed with apprehension at Constable Miyoshi, whom he had given so much trouble in times past.
“Where and when did you fall in with this person?” he was asked.
“It was this evening, sir,” he replied. “We met at Iwasaki.”
The two of them had walked back together to the town after that, singing and begging from door to door as they went, had done a further round of the gay quarters in town, and then, late at night, had put up at a cheap lodginghouse, where they had drawn their hard, wafer-thin mattresses together and lain down side by side like man and wife. So far all had gone smoothly; but Sakutarō, utterly woman-starved since the decampment of his outraged wife after that last unfortunate affair, had even at this late stage failed to observe the truth about his partner. And, out of the warmth of his feelings, he had not only treated her this evening to a bowl of rice and fried prawns, but had even, when she complained of having no money for face powder, allowed himself to be wheedled out of the whole of his day’s takings.
“You damned swine!” he had shouted in his moment of disillusionment. “Give me back that money!”
But his companion had been stubborn—what had been given, she said, was given to keep—and before long the quarrel had roused the whole house, and a toffee vender, a clog repairer, and a hawker of drugs had joined in, protesting vigorously against this disturbance of their night’s repose.
It was just at this moment that Constable Kobayashi had come by on his patrol. On reaching the otherwise deeply stilled neighborhood of Sengen Temple and hearing the angry shouts emerging from this lodginghouse, he had been prompted to investigate at once, and what had particularly roused his curiosity was the fact that earlier this year, at the time of the snows, he had run across a similar sort of disturbance at this house. It had been at this very hour, and the culprit on that occasion, grown wild and disorderly with drink, had been one of those begging priests who walk about playing a bamboo pipe. Kobayashi had been horrified at what he had seen on forcing his way into that room. The priest was grappling furiously with the toffee vender, who was attempting to restrain him from further drunken violence, and on seeing the constable he had stumbled across to embrace him, fixing him with glassy, befuddled eyes, and had wailed sorrowfully and incoherently: “Constable, ah Constable, haven’t touched a drop for years. Not for years. Is this a divine punishment, Constable, for drink-again after all these years? Ah, Constable, Constable.”
The money he had spent on the saké had been an allowance for his child’s funeral. His wife, who was lying on a mattress, still suffering from the aftereffects of her recent confinement, had a moment before been hurling venomous abuse at her drink-sodden husband, but now, with a vacant expression on her pallid, sickly features, as if she had completely forgotten the cause of all this commotion, she was gazing fixedly at a sliding door, where the paper had been torn in the recent scuffle. Close by her pillow, however, in an orange crate before which there burned a single half-ounce offering candle, lay her child, born less than half a month ago, and dead since yesterday. According to the toffee vender’s account, this now drunk and incapable priest, having no money to bury his child, had gone in tears to the district welfare man to plead for help, and as a result had received a grant of five yen from the Town Office. But he had come home swinging a half-pint bottle of saké in one hand, which, though little enough in itself, had been quickly augmented by a pint bottle and then by a quart bottle; and when he had finished them all off and was in a most exhilarated frame of mind, his wife had started to cry, saying how could they ever send the child to the cemetery now that all the money had been drunk, and he had shouted “If it hadn’t been for you lazing about in bed all day, the child would never have got ill!” and had shaken and kicked her so violently that the toffee vender, unable to bear the sight any longer, had rushed to the woman’s rescue. The next morning, after a night in the cell, the priest had been brought before the superintendent. In the days before drink and women had ruined him, it turned out, he had been the resident curate of a small branch temple. “And what,” the superintendent had exclaimed before dismissing him, “do you think of a temple priest who can’t even bury his own child?” “Ah, I don’t know what to say,” the man had replied, as he backed toward the door, pale and heavy-eyed, almost doubling himself up in apology. “I don’t often see a wad of money like that nowadays, you see, and I just lost my head. It’s unforgivable.”
Memories of that affair had
been in Constable Kobayashi’s mind as he had rushed in to investigate this second disturbance. At his entry Sakutarō, seeing that it was the police, had at once stopped his shouting.
“It’s nothing, officer,” he had said, composing himself. “This woman here made some remark I couldn’t understand, and then she started a row. That’s all.”
But the woman, seated on the flimsy mattress and now hastily rearranging her dress, was showing considerable agitation, and while Kobayashi was eyeing her suspiciously, the toffee vender, who had as usual been seeing all that he could, had sidled up to him.
“Constable, Constable,” he had whispered confidentially, bobbing his glistening, prematurely bald head up and down in an obsequious manner and assuming the expression of one about to render a great service, “that’s a Kabuki actor. A female impersonator.”
“Hi, you! You’re a man, are you?” Kobayashi had demanded.
But there had been no reply. The person on the mattress, readjusting a disarrayed neckline with meticulous care, had silently fixed the officer with the sulky stare of a woman wronged. Young Kobayashi had experienced a moment of panic, during which he stood rooted helplessly to the floor, but, with sudden resolve, he had thrust a hand inside the person’s kimono, in the region of the breast. And, sure enough, it was a man.
“Do you still pretend you’re a woman, then?” he had shouted, feeling considerably relieved. “You come along with me to the station.”
“Hi, come over here!” Constable Kobayashi moved across to his own desk, took out his notebook, and began a leisurely interrogation, making notes as he proceeded. “When did you start dressing up like this? …”
It was much as the toffee vender had said. The man had formerly been an actor of female parts, going by the stage name of Kawakami Yoshio, in the “New Kabuki” troupe of Hanamura Masao, which had done a tour of the northeast on foot some two or three years past. It had been at a time of depression for farming people, and the company had broken up after a series of disastrous failures—whereupon Kawakami Yoshio, stranded in the wilderness, had exploited his dramatic gifts and training off-stage, walking from village to village in the guise of a female entertainer, complete with samisen and dancing kimono. He had done well by comparison with the ordinary kind of strolling beggar, but circumstances had obliged him to engage as a side line in the risky business of flaunting his charms and wheedling money out of male admirers. For the poisonous white powder with which he habitually plastered himself in order to conceal his sex from the public had unfortunately worked itself into his system, and life had lately come to seem intolerable without morphine.
“And you”—Constable Kobayashi turned banteringly to Sakutarō—“what technique did you use in attempting to seduce this woman? A demonstration, please!”
Sakutarō looked as if he had just stepped on a pile of cow dung. When they told him he could go, he merely pursed his lips, and continued to loiter about.
“Look here,” he said at last, “I’m not going till you get that fellow to give me back my money.”
But Kawakami Yoshio had already spent it on morphine, and they could find nothing in his purse except a solitary brass sen.
“That’s a just punishment,” Sakutarō was told, “for being too sexy.” And, glumly scratching his sparsely covered head, he shuffled away.
In the small, old-fashioned station building, where the only room of any distinction was the superintendent’s private office, there was considerable confusion and overcrowding during the remainder of that strangely eventful night. The old woman Kin, who had passed the whole time in the night-duty room, left at about seven, her ceaseless moaning having effectively deprived Constable Miyoshi of all rest. Again and again she had risen to go to the toilet, and each time, on returning, she had settled herself down for no more than a few moments before stirring and departing once more. It was clearly a case of severe diarrhea, with violent stomach pains, and Miyoshi, kept awake by her sounds of distress, had at one time half risen from his mattress and called across: “Here, old lady, if it hurts that much shall I fetch a doctor?”
But the old woman had scorned the idea. “It’s nothing,” she had answered. “I’m used to these stomach-aches. Sometimes they go on for four or five days. And as for calling a doctor, the bills finish you off quicker than the disease.”
Miyoshi rose at dawn, and Kin rose too, with much fussing and rustling, and started preparing at once for the journey back.
“Hold hard, old lady, are you going to walk back on an empty stomach? Will you be all right?”
But Miyoshi’s concern was wasted on Kin, whose will, for all the weakness of her flesh, was of manly strength.
“I’ll be all right,” she said. “So do what you can, please, to find Yoshie. I’ll come again.”
She folded her cloth wrapper about the remains of the millet and boiled rice, fastened the bundle across her shoulders with a cord, and left. The interrogation of the bogus woman had proved a fairly simple matter, and soon after the superintendent arrived a written report was ready for his inspection, but in the case of the poultry thief it was clear that little headway could be expected, no matter how many hours the penal officer devoted to his task. The number of chickens stolen ran into several hundreds, and Kisuké, who had never taken more than one from one place, found it impossible to recall each individual house he had robbed. The first twenty or thirty he managed to identify smoothly enough, but for every case after that the sieve-memoried Kisuké would mumble “Well, let me see, what house might that be? … what day was that, I wonder?” and lean his head sideways for interminable periods of vacant, open-mouthed silence.
Miyoshi was worrying, in a vague and drowsy way, about Kin—had she collapsed, perhaps, somewhere along the road?—and was stifling yawn after yawn as he listened at the same time to the vapid, painfully slow replies of Kisuké immediately behind him, when a gentleman in a dark-blue jacket entered the room and bowed with stiff formality before the reception desk. Miyoshi, glancing at the title of “Junior School Instructor” on the card handed him by the reception clerk, rose to attend to the visitor.
“Please, please,” he said, “come this way.”
The owner of the card, Onozaki, rose and slowly approached.
“The fact is,” he began, after a brief bow, “one of my girl pupils is being sold as a factory hand, and is due to leave on the next south-bound express. I’ve just come from seeing her at the railway station. It didn’t look,” he continued, with signs of annoyance, “as if I had any chance of stopping things by myself, so I hoped someone might come along with me and talk to them.”
“Much obliged, sir,” said Miyoshi, accepting the information as if it had been offered with no other purpose than to assist the police in their efforts to suppress this sort of traffic. “Very good of you, taking the trouble to let us know. Fujioka!”—he turned to one of his subordinates—“get along quickly to the station with this gentleman.”
The two men had scarcely gone before another visitor arrived, a woman of forty in a serge kimono, with her hair bound tightly back, and with the ample girth of a Sumo wrestler. Judging by the way she puffed and panted, and by the redness of her face, she had walked no little distance to get here. It was the unlicensed midwife Ueda Yaé, who had been served with a summons two days ago. Immediately she sat herself down before the legal-affairs officer. Her flesh bulged over the chair’s rim and whenever she moved the chair swayed to one side or the other, creaking alarmingly as if in imminent danger of collapse.
“About how many births have you assisted at?” she was asked.
Yaé, who had just carried her considerable weight some six miles on foot, wiped the sweat from her brow with a neatly folded hand towel, probably a token of someone’s gratitude for recent assistance, and replied quite frankly: “Well, I couldn’t give you the exact figure. I’ve had any number of children myself, you see, so I know a lot about these things, and if ever there’s a birth in the neighborhood, I’m asked i
n to help, and nowadays it seems people won’t have anyone else.”
Just lately a qualified midwife had come to work in the district, sponsored by the Prefectural Health Authority, but until her arrival it had been the universal custom at the time of a birth—unless a midwife was called in from the neighboring district, or the patient brought about her delivery unaided, heaving on a rope suspended from the ceiling—to go running off for help to Yaé’s place. After the death of her husband, Yaé had come to rely for her subsistence almost entirely on the rice or bean curd given her in appreciation of those services, and gradually had come to feel that this was her profession. Even now, when a fully qualified midwife was available, the women in the village still went only to Yaé. They shrank from the newcomer, convinced that her fees must be exorbitant. Until recently there had never been any talk behind Yaé’s back, nor any feeling that it was wrong to give payments to a person like that; but when the new midwife appeared—having returned to her native village after long years of nursing in a succession of large city hospitals, resolved to settle down quietly in the country for the rest of her days, even if it meant being a midwife—and discovered that there was surprisingly little demand for her services, she at once took a strong dislike to Yaé and started to create trouble. Realizing that she could not overthrow her rival merely by calling her an unqualified amateur, she had spread the rumor that Yaé was unlawfully practicing as a doctor—and it was this charge that the legal-affairs officer now wished to investigate.
“Now then,” he continued, slowly coming to his point by a purposely devious route, “what sort of payments do you receive for this work?”
Yaé, who had no idea what was in the constable’s mind, prattled on as if she were enjoying the conversation immensely.
“Payment? There’s not many who bring me anything like that, I can tell you. Times are bad, of course, so you can’t blame them, but like as not they’ll just promise to bring a present over after the next good harvest, or say the child will give me something when he gets older, or could I please let them do a bit of work for me instead? Or, at best, they’ll send me over a bag of bean curd or a pound of rice. In fact, far from getting paid, I often have to provide all the cloth and cotton wool from my own stocks, free of charge.”
