Modern Japanese Short Stories

by Ivan Morris

  First she had gone the rounds of the shops, choosing those which looked likely to have old people somewhere on the premises, living in retirement, but no one had wanted a bird and her hopes had been sadly dashed. Then, thinking that the salaried workers in public offices might, after all, be more likely customers, she had abandoned her tour of the shops and come to the police station.

  “Why not forget about it, officer?” said Dr. Yokota, interceding on Miyo’s behalf. “Let her sell the bird to me.”

  Miyoshi, however, ignored the remark. “We’ll have to set it loose,” he said, and he moved toward the cage.

  “But, officer!” Miyo pleaded, turning red in the face and clutching at Miyoshi’s coat, “even if it is against the law to catch these birds, I didn’t catch it with a net or a trap or anything like that! If it really flew into the house of its own accord, it’s all right, isn’t it?” But by this time a shadow had darted across the square of pale blue sky framed by the window, and the bird was gone.

  “What an awful thing to do!” wailed Miyo. “Just when this gentleman”—with a bewildered, mortified air she turned to gaze at Dr. Yokota—“was going to buy it, too! I’ve spent my whole day trying to sell this bird, and what shall I say now when I get home? Can’t you gentlemen do something?”

  No one had anything to say to this, and Miyo, realizing that the bird was irretrievably lost and growing steadily more indignant as she visualized the faces of her children, waiting impatiently at home for their mother to return from town with the presents, walked red-faced from the room. Soon Harukichi too departed, drifting aimlessly off like a kite from a snapped string; but Haru clattered hastily after him in her flaking red-lacquer clogs and, looking straight up into his face, cried: “Father will you let me go on the outing?” Having been told that if she went with her father to Owari she could have rice to eat on the train and could wear her red kimono, Haru had lost all interest in the school excursion, but now, after today’s events, the thought of missing that too was unbearable. Harukichi’s mind, however, was fully occupied by other matters—as far as the advance from the agent was concerned, he thought he could get Onozaki to settle that, so there was nothing much to worry about there; the railway fare, too, would have to be returned, but he had that intact in his pocket; and, before all else, something (though he couldn’t imagine what) would have to be done about the debts on the security of his house.

  “The outing, eh? Let me see, that’s the day after tomorrow, isn’t it?” he mumbled vaguely. And he walked on again.

  The examination of Yaé, on which the legal-affairs officer was still engaged, was concerned not merely with her midwife activities but with the question of whether or not she was setting herself up as a doctor. But on this latter point Yaé had quite openly confessed that the neighboring countrypeople, rather than go all the way to a doctor and be asked to pay a fee which they could not possibly afford, frequently came to her house for advice on things like burns, stomach trouble, or boils, and that on these occasions—since she had done some nursing in her younger days and was not entirely uninformed—she only said to the best of her knowledge what treatment was good for this or that, and sometimes gave people medicines or ointments out of her own household stock, so it did not seem likely that there was any more than this to the charges of the qualified midwife that Yaé gave medical treatment and dispensed medicines.

  While the examination was proceeding, and not ten minutes after the departure of Harukichi, a woman of middle age, big with child, came half running, half stumbling into the entrance way. Close behind her, clutching at her mother’s sleeve, gripping a mud-splattered rubber ball in her other hand, and gaping up stupidly at the policemen, came a podgy girl of six or seven; but the woman seemed almost in a trance, completely oblivious of the child’s presence.

  “I need help, please, I need help,” she managed to gasp, and then her pallid face twisted in pain and she sank down, as if crushed by a weight from above, and crouched low on the floor.

  Even at this the reception clerk remained stolidly motionless in his chair, but Miyoshi, who had been watching from the rear of the room, now came up shouting “Here, here! What’s all this? What’s all this?” and peered over the handrail of the reception desk.

  The woman, letting her kimono flap loosely open at the front, began pacing up and down the stone-floored porchway like a caged animal, apparently in agony.

  “Help me, please,” she was crying. “It’s dreadful! The birth has started!”

  Miyoshi, who at first merely gaped at the woman in wide-eyed bewilderment, now seemed for the first time to grasp the situation. “A baby, eh? Oh, this is serious, this is! What shall we do?” He ran out onto the porch, and then, in a panic of indecision, began to follow the woman wherever she moved. Suddenly a surprising thought appeared to strike him, and he dashed back into the room toward the desk of the legal-affairs officer.

  “Hi, you’re a midwife, aren’t you?” he called out to Yaé. “Just give us a hand, then. It’s you or nobody, so come on. Quick!”

  “Oh, a birth? Here?” said Yaé, used to these things and rising unhurriedly. Realizing, however, after a brief glance at the woman, who was hovering about distractedly in her almost crawling posture, that the baby’s head must already be more than half way out, she said: “We’ll have to lay her down some where on a matted floor. And you!”—with a calming gesture to Miyoshi—“stop running round in circles and lay out a mattress as quick as you can.”

  Leading the woman by the hand, she followed Miyoshi into the night-duty room. Two other policemen hurried across to help Miyoshi, and the old caretaker also came out to lend a hand, and when the four of them, with a tremendous amount of fussing, had got the woman safely stretched out on the mattress, Yaé lowered her own massive form ponderously onto the matting and, sitting there in rock-like solidity, moving only her head, directed a stream of instructions at the policemen—to get boiled water, to go out and buy cotton wool, and so on—and, having taken her hand towel from her pocket and spread it out ready, in case the cotton swaddling cloth should not arrive in time, drew the sliding door across behind her. For a time there was only the sound of Yaé repeating again and again, in a school-teacherly tone: Don’t strain, now; don’t strain.” This was very soon followed by the thin, uneasy wail of a baby.

  “It’s arrived!” one of the policemen cried out involuntarily.

  “I wonder who the woman is?” said another, in a low voice. “Let it go pretty late, didn’t she?”

  But the legal-affairs officer rose quickly from his chair and said: “The child’s safely born, that’s the important thing. Even an unlicensed midwife comes in useful at a time like this, eh?” And he walked excitedly up and down, beaming with pleasure, as if it was his own child that had just been born.

  At this moment, however, he saw Constable Saitō and a patrolman, just back in the station’s car from their job of disinfecting the room of the dysentery patient, enter in the company of the prayer-chanter, garbed in black robes like a genuine priest. He turned to greet them.

  “What’s this?” he asked. “So he’s really been doing doctor’s work, has he?” Constable Saitō saluted and, setting a bundle of roots, weeds, and tree bark on the table, together with a large bottle of cloudy-white liquid which he had hastily transferred to his left hand before saluting, said: “Doctor’s work? I wouldn’t call it that. This is the sort of stuff he doses his patients with, he says. Hi you! That’s right, isn’t it?”

  He turned sharply to the priest standing behind him. The scanty remnants of the man’s hair were cropped close and his eyes were cold and dull. He had formerly been an itinerant beggar, walking from village to village with an alms bag strung about his neck, but, instead of spending his takings on drink and tobacco, he had economized assiduously, and last spring he had built a ramshackle hut for himself on the outskirts of the town at Tora-no-kuchi, banged away on a big drum, and commenced chanting prayers. The sound of the drum had drawn large numbe
rs of old women to his place for secret consultations, and in a very short time it was widely believed that you could be cured of chronic diseases if you asked this priest to pray for you, so the fame of the Tora-no-kuchi prayer-chanter had spread even to the remotest mountain villages.

  When Constable Saitō had arrived in all haste at the hut, the priest had shown no trace of agitation, greeting him with foolishly elaborate ceremony. On an altar raised in the hut’s dim interior were offerings of apples and other fruit, set on dishes of chipped red lacquer, and, as a further decoration, there was displayed a volume entitled “One Hundred Sutras” or something of that sort, from which the priest apparently gave recitals to his assembled flock twice each year, in the spring and autumn; but it was in the three-mat room next to this, beneath a thin cotton quilt, that the sick woman lay. She was breathing very faintly and showed no sign of seeing Saitō’s face when he bent low and peered at her. He saw that it was Kin, the old woman who had passed the previous night at the police station. Like all those other old women—too poor and too settled in their ways to think of consulting a doctor—who had come from far and wide on hearing of the priest’s mystic powers, Kin too had called in here for a cure on her way back. Even when Miyoshi had been vainly urging her to see a doctor, she had probably already secretly decided on this course. As for the priest, he had started his drum-beating and prayer-chanting immediately, thinking that this was just another fine bird flown into his net, but he soon saw that he had taken on a difficult proposition, and, realizing that things might be very awkward if the old woman should thoughtlessly pass away on him, he had called in Dr. Yokota to make an examination.

  “Up to now, about how many patients have come to see you?” he was asked.

  “Well, even if you put it as low as one every three days,” the priest replied, without a moment’s hesitation, “that would make it about a hundred.”

  “And have they all been cured?”

  At this question the priest assumed a look of humility and said: “Ah, whether they have really recovered completely or not is something I can’t say. But any number of them have come back and said that, thanks to me, they are feeling much better.”

  The legal-affairs officer picked up some of the plantain leaves and pieces of tree bark that had been thrown onto the table and thrust them under the priest’s nose.

  “Do they get better by swallowing stuff like this?” he shouted angrily. “Are you serious?” Taking the written report handed him at that moment by Saitō, he vanished immediately into the superintendent’s office, returning in a few moments to say briefly: “For today, just lock him up.”

  Constable Saitō led the priest to a corner of the room, where he obliged him to remove his waistband.

  “Come on, down here,” he said, and, pushing his way toward the corridor through the crowd of policemen gathered outside the night-duty room to see the new baby, he dragged his charge without ceremony to the detention cell. There was a melancholy grating of bolts; then the constable returned and went over to speak to Miyoshi.

  “It’s a shame, you know,” he began. “The patient up at that priest’s place was the old lady who stayed here last night.”

  Miyoshi was leaning forward, gazing intently at the woman in the night-duty room. Now that the afterbirth, too, had been removed, she was lying perfectly still, and her eyes were shut.

  “Eh, the old lady?”—he swung around, opening his eyes wide—“I told her to see a doctor, didn’t I? And she wouldn’t listen! Will she pull through?”

  “At her age it’s unlikely,” said Saitō. “They’ve moved her to the isolation hospital, but she’s in a bad way and there’s not much hope.”

  From beyond the front section of the main office, deserted now except for the policeman on reception duty, there had sounded the steady beat of a rubber ball being bounced, but now, the noise ceasing abruptly, a girl came running in with a loud clatter of wooden clogs. Poking her head through the barrier of policemen, she yelled at the top of her voice: “Mum, I’m hungry! Give me something!” But when her ravenous gaze lighted on the wrinkled face of the new-born infant, wrapped in her mother’s cloak and silently wriggling its hands and feet at her mother’s side, she rounded her eyes and stared in blank, speechless astonishment.

  “How is it?” one of the policemen called across to Yaé. “Everything all right?”

  Yaé, squatting on the floor and looking as massively immovable as ever, wrinkled the narrow corners of her eyes in a brief smile.

  “You don’t often get a birth as easy as this one,” she said. “It’s a little on the small side, but it’s a fine, strong baby.” She adjusted the edges of the woman’s bedding and then, turning to the old caretaker, called out: “Hi, dad, I suppose you haven’t any oil, have you? Camellia hair-oil or anything like that will do.”

  “Well, a bald-headed fellow like me doesn’t keep fancy things like camellia oil.” The old man laughed, but he soon returned from the pantry with a bottle of sesame oil, and Yaé, after rubbing a little of it over the baby’s body, started to bathe the infant in a pail of warm water. Constable Saitō, however, seeing that the mother continued to lie inert with eyes closed, now burst out angrily, in a voice so loud that everyone standing at the woman’s side jumped in surprise: “Hi, all you people, where have you come from? What are you doing here?”

  The woman, who had apparently been lying so still, with eyes tight shut, from some overwhelming sense of shame at her mismanagement, feeling that she would like to creep into a dark hole and hide herself, now opened her eyes with a start, and at once commenced to apologize.

  “Forcing myself on you in this state, and giving you gentlemen so much trouble. I don’t know what to say …” she began.

  “Now, that’s all right,” said Miyoshi, restraining her as she attempted to rise. “You get some sleep. Don’t try to move yet.”

  But the woman seemed not to hear him and, making no attempt to return to her former position, went on: “I’ve been at Higashine until now, but I couldn’t stay there any longer, you see …” Two broad tearstains appeared unexpectedly on her face, a face so emaciated and drained of color that one would imagine its owner no longer capable of feeling any misfortune or suffering; then suddenly, like streams swollen by a cloudburst, the tears came flooding down in glistening torrents. “… And I had nowhere to go, so I thought I’d come here for help.”

  Miyoshi had been studying her face intently. “Here,” he now asked abruptly, “did you work in a circus troupe when you were a girl?”

  The woman was clearly shaken. “Well, how did you know that?” she exclaimed, staring at him in blank astonishment.

  “So it’s true, eh? You had a child with you, too, so I thought you might be the one. And it’s true, eh?” Miyoshi repeated.

  When he had told her the complete story—how her foster mother, Kin, had come on foot the whole thirty miles from Akazawa just to find her, had fallen sick with dysentery, and was now lodged in the isolation hospital—Yoshie, who had raised herself on the mattress to a sitting position and was now staring straight ahead with a dazed look on her face, said “Then I must see her just once; it would be awful if she died” and rose unsteadily to her feet.

  “Hi, stop!” cried Miyoshi. “You can’t go anywhere in that state!”

  “I’m all right,” she replied obstinately. “And I must see her, just once, you see.”

  But, for all this display of determination, within a few moments her face turned deathly white and she crumpled exhausted to the floor. In January of the previous year, having been left without means of support by the death of the man who worked at the cotton mill, Yoshie had decided that if times were to be bad she would prefer to be in her native village, where she hoped she might also see her foster mother; so, selling her few household possessions to provide money for the journey, she had come all the way back to these parts after an absence of twenty years. But the snows had checked her progress, falling, as they had always fallen, until it s
eemed the houses would be buried up to their roofs; and since, in any case, she had no idea what to do next in the aimless quest for a person called Kin, who might or might not be alive, and whose village was no more to Yoshie than a vague childhood memory, she had taken a room in this town at a cheap lodginghouse near the railway station. Her landlady, seeing her sit for days perplexedly staring out at the snowy skies, had eventually taken pity on her and, employing Yoshie as a serving maid, had allowed both her and the child to remain as long as they pleased.

  Then, taken in by the usual promises of marriage, Yoshie had foolishly allowed herself to be got with child by a traveling timber dealer who stopped briefly at the lodginghouse each month. As soon as her condition became obvious, the man ceased to call any more. The thought of showing herself in this state before her kind landlady was more than she could bear, and, carefully draping a sleeve of her kimono across the now prominent bulge in her figure, she had moved to the Seifu Inn; there, with the time of the birth steadily approaching and with no idea where she could stay when it came, she had met up with a ready-tongued sympathizer called Yashichi, who, unlike the timber dealer, had very soon taken her back home to live with him; but he too, it seemed, had wanted no more than a little temporary amusement, and, as if worried that things might get even worse if he waited until after the birth, he had seized as an excuse upon the bickerings between Yoshie’s daughter and his child by his late wife and the resulting deterioration of his relationship with his mother-in-law, and, thrusting a single five-yen bill into Yoshie’s hand, he had driven her forcibly from the house. In a deep calm following upon the tremendous labor of giving birth, Yoshie, with an abstracted and rather troubled look in her eyes, had turned to regard in silence the baby at her side, which was crying continuously and wrinkling up its face.