Modern Japanese Short Stories

by Ivan Morris

  “What’s happened, miss?”

  A man’s voice startled Ruriko, and when she looked up she saw a middle-aged peasant standing by the ditch staring at Umé.

  “Granny fell in,” said Ruriko. “I’m carrying her to my sister’s at the Shimomura farm.”

  “The Shimomura farm, eh?” said the farmer in his rustic dialect. “That’ll be about another mile and a half, I reckon. Look miss, I’ll be going most of the way myself. I’ll carry her for you, if you like.”

  The man bent over and without any effort picked old Umé out of the ditch. She shook her long arms, as if to make sure that they were still properly attached, and her movements were as jerky and disconnected as those of a badly manipulated puppet. Lifting her onto his shoulders without a word, the man started walking briskly down the hill; he strode along freely, as if he were simply carrying a sack of rice.

  “That’ll be your sister’s place,” he said after about half an hour, pointing to a farm on the top of a nearby hill. “I’ll leave you here.” Ruriko thanked him profusely and bent down while he shifted Granny to her own back. She climbed the hill with new vigor and soon reached the gate of the farm, where her three small nephews caught sight of her.

  “Ruriko’s here, Mummy! She’s brought Granny. Is Granny coming to stay?” they shouted.

  Ruriko quickly unfastened the straps and lowered the old woman to the floor. She was propping her against the wall as the door opened and Sachiko burst out:

  “What do you mean by this? How could you bring Granny without even giving us warning?”

  “Senko told me to.”

  “She did, did she? How old are you anyway, Ruriko? I should think you’d have enough sense not to bring a helpless old woman into the mountains like this without at least letting us know beforehand. Do you realize how we live here? There are five of us in two rooms. There isn’t space for an extra chair, let alone for an old woman who needs constant attention.”

  “I had to bring her,” repeated Ruriko dully.

  “Had to! What do you mean, had to? Senko and Itami have a lovely big house; they don’t have any children and they’ve even managed to keep a maid. We all know that Itami has made plenty on the black market. As for us, we have one eight-mat room full of cupboards, trunks, and packing cases where we all sleep. Then we’ve got a six-mat living room where we keep Minobé’s painting equipment, the food stores, the tea chest, and the bookcases. Where on earth do you expect us to put Granny?”

  Ruriko’s face was red with indignation. After the four hours in the train and the grueling walk over the hills, this was more than she could bear. Her face twisted and she burst into tears.

  “It’s not my fault! It’s not my fault!” she repeated between sobs.

  The door opened and Minobé stepped onto the porch. After nodding to Ruriko, he glanced at Umé with a horrified expression.

  “I really don’t know how they could do such a thing,” he murmured. “What goes on inside such people’s minds, I wonder?”

  “Itami threatened to move into his office if Granny stayed any longer,” Ruriko said, still sobbing. “He swore that Granny was driving him mad.”

  “Well, so she probably was,” said Sachiko. “But this was Senko’s responsibility and she’s got no right to wriggle out of it. A few years ago, when Granny could still be of some use for errands, Senko didn’t mind having her around; now that she’s become just a burden, Senko throws her out like a worn-out glove…

  “Well, there’s no use going into all that,” Minobé interrupted. “She’s here and I suppose we’ll have to make the best of it. One’s always at a disadvantage when dealing with people like your sister and Itami; patience, kindness, self-sacrifice—those are all so many words for them. As I said, though, we’ll manage somehow. But good heavens, Ruriko, where did all that blood and dirt on Granny’s face come from?”

  “She fell into the ditch.”

  “H’m. She’ll certainly need a good washing,” said Minobé, studying old Umé’s battered face. “Hello, Granny,” he addressed her. “I’m afraid you’re going to find life a bit primitive here after Tokyo. We don’t have any electricity, you know.”

  Umé had been gazing with a bored expression at the unaccustomed fields and mountains. Now realizing that she was being addressed, she blinked vaguely at Minobé, put both hands on the porch, and began to lower and raise her head, rhythmically striking her forehead on the floor in the old-fashioned ceremonial manner.

  “I’m just a nuisance,” she said. “Forgive me, forgive me.”

  Everyone was amazed at this remarkable access of lucidity.

  “Don’t worry, Granny,” said Minobé and went indoors.

  Ruriko spent the night at the farm and left for Tokyo the following morning. She was delighted to be returning to Senko’s household, where a large circle of acquaintances enlivened the days; also, she was glad to escape from the unpleasant atmosphere that had prevailed at the farm since Granny’s arrival. She remembered that she was going back to a house with no old woman inside, and her step was springy as she hurried down the hill.

  III

  For some days after her arrival in the country, Umé complained of pains in her legs, in her chest, in her arms—in fact almost everywhere. Actually, her fall into the ditch had caused no more than a few bruises and after about a week she was as fit as ever. It would take more than a little fall to kill Granny!

  They installed a bedroll for her next to the charcoal brazier in the living room and put a folding screen round it. The door of this room opened on the back porch, which the family had improvised as a kitchen. Now and then, Granny would peep from behind the screen and, if no one was about, shuffle out stealthily to the porch and appropriate whatever she happened to find—a box of matches, a dishcloth, a kitchen knife. At such times she would acquire a speed of locomotion and a nimbleness of gesture quite remarkable for a woman in her eighties; as her hand darted out toward the coveted object, she looked like someone whose whole life had been devoted to the art of pilfering. Stealing had become such a habit with her by now that she was hardly conscious of it.

  On warm days, Sachiko used to carry her grandmother onto the front porch and leave her to bask in the sun. One morning as she sat there dozing, she suddenly rolled off the porch, hit her head on the ground, described a complete somersault in her sleep, and woke up—quite unscathed. Then she toddled back to her room and began poking the charcoal brazier. She was evidently unaware that anything had happened; nor had it occurred to her to wonder why she had awakened lying flat in the grass.

  Often Minobé used to sit looking intently at old Umé for minutes on end, as though studying a model for his painting. The hair on top of her head was no more than a fuzz, but at the sides it grew in thick white tufts; her eyebrows, too, were white and bushy. She had an oval face with deep-set eyes, an aquiline nose, and a small, elegant chin. It was not hard to imagine that it had once been a beautiful face. Recently freckles had begun to spread from her forehead to the crown of her head.

  After a while, becoming aware that she was being observed, Umé would laugh awkwardly. Then she would turn aside and gaze into the distance, as if she were quite alone. To Minobé there was something almost frightening about this instinctive movement of Umé’s. It made him think of animals who can from one moment to another disregard the human onlooker. He felt that only someone who had lived an immense number of years could effect a gesture of such strange, almost inhuman aloofness; never could it be acquired by deliberate study or imitation.

  One day a young friend come to visit Minobé from Tokyo. They were talking in the living room when Umé tottered out from behind her screen. The guest gave a start—indeed, anyone would have been shocked at this strange, ghost-like figure.

  “Is he from Echigo?” Umé demanded, and stared straight at the visitor.

  “I’m afraid not, Granny,” answered Minobé. “This is a friend of mine from Tokyo.”

  “Are you sure I didn’t know him
in Echigo?”

  “Yes, quite sure, Granny,” said Minobé. “You’ve never met him before.”

  After that, Umé was forever asking if people came from Echigo. It was her home province, which she had left over sixty years before, at the time of her marriage. Anyone whom Umé had known there would by this time be at least in his eighties. But such a detail did not bother her. Minobé wondered whether the approach of death brought vague memories of her distant youth to Granny.

  Studying her with almost scientific objectivity, Minobé became more and more interested in his aged grandmother-in-law. Often he used to question Sachiko about her. It seemed that Umé’s family was of ancient lineage; there was even a tradition that in the twelfth century the great military leader Minamoto no Yoshitsune had lodged at their house. After her marriage Umé had moved to Tokyo, where her husband had died when she was thirty-two, leaving her with an only daughter. The next fifty-four years had been spent as a widow.

  Now widowhood was certainly a worthy state, thought Minobé. But would not a woman be ashamed to face her husband in the grave after outliving him even for twenty years? By then she would have changed beyond recognition and, besides, her own memory of the man would be growing very dim; they would meet like two embarrassed strangers. Yet Umé had had the audacity to linger on more than fifty years, and even now there was no telling when she would take her place beside her husband. Their names had been engraved next to each other on the tombstone, with Umé’s name colored in red, as tradition demanded, to show that she was still alive. The red had long since worn away—and still Umé survived. She was a stubborn old woman!

  Among her more valued possessions had been a photograph of her husband taken shortly before his death. As she belonged to the Lotus sect of Buddhism, Umé had for years been in the habit of making offerings before this photograph; when she shared Minobé’s house in Tokyo, he had often seen her prostrating herself before the dead man’s image. Yet she had outlived her husband so long that any stranger would have taken this to be a picture of her son, or even her grandson. When the house was bombed, the photograph had disappeared, and from that moment Umé seemed to forget completely about it.

  Apparently she had also forgotten the Lotus Sutra and religion in general. Perhaps she had passed the age when religion could any longer have real meaning. There were quite a few old women in the village where Minobé now lived in whom religion, and indeed all moral emotions, had long since atrophied. Bereft of higher feelings, some of them had sunk to levels of almost unbelievable squalor.

  Only the other day an old hag had died at the age of eighty-eight. For the last two years she had spent nearly all her time by the manure piles, which seemed to have acquired a strange fascination; half blind and covered with dirt, she sat for hours rooting about in the filth. When finally she died, the neighbors did not bother to make the usual inventory of her possessions but took everything from her room, including the straw mats, and burned them by the side of the paddy fields. For the rest of the day the air was redolent with the smell of death and excrement.

  Another old woman of seventy-nine, who lived with her family on a nearby farm, was equally sunk in filth. She used to take lumps of night soil and mold them into different forms as if they were clay. Then she would call to her grandchildren: “Come along, kiddies, here are some nice toys for you to play with.” It was as though all that gives beauty to human existence had passed out of these old women into the hearts of younger, more sensitive people. Was it, Minobé wondered, that they had ended by rejecting the finer feelings of life, or did the feelings themselves abandon people when they became too old and too ugly?

  IV

  It soon became clear that Umé was going to be at least as much of a nuisance in the farmhouse as they had feared.

  “You’ll be the death of us all, Granny” moaned Sachiko. “We haven’t had a proper night’s sleep since you’ve been here. When will you get it into your head that the toilet is directly to the left when you go into the passage?”

  Despite frequent injunctions of this kind, Umé almost invariably ended by going astray in the unlit house. Old age had evidently deprived her of all sense of direction, and as soon as she got out of bed, she began groping helplessly for the door to the passage. The room was small, but as she crawled around in all directions, it was like some vast deserted plain. She stretched her hands out into the darkness, hoping to touch the brazier, the table, in fact any object that would rescue her from this dreadful sense of isolation and link her once more to the safe world of human beings. Yet, though the room was crowded with furniture, she somehow managed to crawl about for minutes on end without finding anything.

  “Where on earth can I have got to?” she muttered, as she changed her course once again. Then her forlorn voice echoed through the darkness: “Sachiko, Sachiko! For mercy’s sake, child, come and help me! I’m completely lost! Help!”

  In the next room, Sachiko and Minobé had already been awakened by the noise and were sitting up in bed. Suddenly there came a thump on the door and a moment later the sound of a handle being turned.

  “Oh, Granny, that’s the wrong door!” cried Sachiko, jumping out of bed. “You really are hopeless!”

  Striking a match, she hurried into the next room, where she found Umé in a state of utter disarray, desperately grasping the handle of the door that led to the porch. With a sigh of resignation, Sachiko took the old woman by the hand, led her to the toilet, and then brought her back to bed.

  On the following night they were awakened on three separate occasions; the routine was almost identical each time. When Umé had finally found the sliding door that opened to the passage, she would clutch the handle and lift herself to her feet, almost pulling the door out of its groove. Once in the passage, she started shuffling toward the toilet, dragging her left hand along the wall to orient herself. As soon as she felt the door of the toilet, she knew that she was nearing her goal. However, this did not end her trouble; the next hurdle was to find the door handle and that meant moving her hand all over the door, a process lasting several minutes. By this time Sachiko and her husband were wide awake. They would hear a voice croaking in the darkness: “Ah, here it is. Now all I’ve got to do is to turn it. Then I open the door—so—and walk right in.”

  Finally they heard the toilet door shut and all was blessedly silent. But not for long. A moment later Umé was again in the passage, lost and bewildered. She stretched out her left hand, remembering that she had used it on the journey from her room. Since she had turned round, however, what she now touched was the wall beyond the toilet, and this led her not to her door but to another wall, into which she bumped regularly every night. Thereupon she would let out a dismal wail: “Help, help, Sachiko! I’m lost! Which way do I go?” Once again Sachiko had to get up and rescue her.

  These nightly excursions were only one of Umé’s unpleasant habits. Despite strict orders to the contrary, she insisted on tampering with the charcoal brazier, with the result that she invariably managed to put it out. Then her querulous voice could be heard through the apartment: “The fire’s gone out, Sachiko. Do come and light it, child. I’m cold. I’m dying of cold!”

  Almost every morning when Sachiko made Umé’s bed, she would come upon some object—a button, an envelope, a ball of string—that Granny had stolen and carefully sequestered under the bedding. The fact that these things would eventually be retrieved did not deter the old woman; the habit of stealing had become far too deeply ingrained for the most strenuous reprimands to have effect. Moreover, there seemed to be little use in lecturing her, as Umé apparently failed to hear or to understand; she simply stared ahead with a blank, bewildered look, and Sachiko assumed that in her old age Umé was becoming deaf. However, the children were not so easily deluded, and they took great delight in exposing their great-grandmother’s pretense.

  “Would you like a raw onion, Granny?” said one of the little boys, standing at the other end of the room, and speaking in a low voi
ce which would normally fail to make the slightest impression on Umé. Onions were the old lady’s favorite food and she immediately rose to the bait.

  “An onion?” she said. “Oh yes, I’d love one.”

  “I caught you that time, Granny!” cried the boy, and ran out of the room laughing.

  Umé was a tough old woman, but before long the strain of life in a primitive mountain village began to tell even on her. She missed the good food and comfort of Senko’s house, and made no bones about telling everyone so.

  “Oh, I wish I was back in Tokyo!” she muttered one day, as she sat with Sachiko and Minobé by the charcoal brazier.

  “If you’d behaved yourself properly you’d still be there,” said Sachiko. “You’ve got no one to blame but yourself.”

  “I want to go back to Senko’s,” continued Umé in a plaintive whine.

  “If that isn’t adding insult to injury,” said Sachiko to her husband.

  “Well, it doesn’t worry me,” said Minobé, and laughed. “If I let your grandmother annoy me, I’d have lost my sanity long ago.”

  V

  A few days later occurred an incident which reduced still further Umé’s popularity in her new home. The children were playing with toy dragonflies and one of the missiles by chance flew off in the wrong direction and struck the old woman on the forehead. Crying out, she glared into the garden and there caught sight of the young culprit. In a tone that would have sent shivers down the spine of a tough samurai, let alone a small child, she screamed: “Curse you, you little fiend! Curse you, I say!” Taking from the folds of her dress a recently stolen dishcloth, she began to wipe the blood from her forehead.