by Ivan Morris
“But now I have nowhere to go home to,” she added.
Izawa could not help being touched. “Then why not spend the night here quietly?” he said. “There’s really nothing to worry about, you know. The only reason I got a bit angry just now is that you started setting yourself up in the role of a victim when I didn’t have the slightest intention of harming you. Now then, stay out of that closet and get into bed and have a good night’s sleep!”
The woman stared at Izawa and launched into some more rapid mumbling.
“What?” he asked.
Then Izawa had the shock of his life. For out of her confused mumblings he clearly caught the words “I see you don’t like me.”
“Eh?” said Izawa, gazing at her with open-eyed amazement. “What’s that you said?”
With a dejected expression, the woman began to explain herself, repeating over and over: “I shouldn’t have come”; “You don’t really like me”; “I thought you liked me, but you don’t.” Finally she lapsed into silence and gazed vacantly at a spot in the air.
Now Izawa understood for the first time. The woman had not been afraid of him. The situation was exactly the reverse. The woman had not come just because she had been scolded at home and didn’t have anywhere else to hide. She had been counting on Izawa’s imagined love for her. But what on earth could have made the woman believe that Izawa loved her? He had only exchanged the briefest possible greetings with her a few times near the pigpen or in the alley or on the road. The situation could hardly have been more absurd. Here he was being coerced by an idiot’s will, by an idiot’s susceptibility—forces that must be completely different from those of normal people. It was not clear to Izawa whether what had happened to the woman that evening was, in her idiot mind, a truly painful experience. Having lain in bed for a few minutes without Izawa’s so much as touching her, the woman had come to the conclusion that she was unloved; this had filled her with shame and she had got out of bed. Finally she had shut herself in the closet. How could one interpret this peculiar action? As an expression of an idiot’s shame and self-abasement? The trouble was that in the language of normal people there did not even exist the proper words in which to phrase a conclusion. In such a situation the only way was to lower oneself to the same level as the idiot’s mentality. And after all, thought Izawa, what need was there for normal human wisdom? Would it be all that shameful if he himself adopted the frank simplicity of an idiot’s mind? Perhaps that was what he needed more than anything else—the childlike, candid mind of an idiot. He had mislaid it somewhere, and in the meantime he had become bedraggled with thoughts of the workaday people who surrounded him; he had pursued false shadows and had nothing to show for it all but exhaustion.
He tucked the woman in bed and, sitting by the pillow, stroked her forelocks as if he were stroking a little girl—his own child perhaps—and trying to put her to sleep. Her eyes stayed open with a vacant look. There was an innocence about her, exactly like that of a little child’s.
“I do not dislike you,” Izawa began solemnly. “There are other ways, you know, of expressing love than by simple physical contact. The ultimate abode for us human beings is our birthplace, and in a strange way you seem to be living permanently in such a birthplace.”
Of course there was no possibility of her understanding what he said. But what, after all, were words? What real value did they have? And where did reality reside? There was no evidence that it could be found even in human love. Where, if anywhere, could there be anything so real that it warranted a man’s devoting his entire passion to it? Everything was merely a false shadow. But as he stroked the woman’s hair, he felt like bursting into tears. He was overcome by the heart-rending idea that this small, elusive, utterly uncertain love was the very haven of his life, that involuntarily he was stroking the hair of his own fate.
How was the war going to turn out? No doubt Japan would be defeated, the Americans would land on the mainland, and the greater part of the Japanese people would be annihilated. But all this could be conceived only as part of a supernatural destiny—the decree of Heaven, so to speak. What really bothered Izawa was a far more trivial problem—a surprisingly trivial problem, yet one that always flickered exigently before his eyes. It was the question of the two-hundred-yen wage he received every month from his company. How long would he continue to receive this salary? He never knew from one day to another when he would be dismissed and reduced to utter destitution. Each time he went to collect his salary he was terrified that he would also be given his dismissal notice. And when he actually held his pay envelope in his hand he was invariably overcome by intense joy at having survived for another month. He always felt like crying at the thought of how trivial it all was. Here he was—a man who dreamed about the great ideals of art—yet a wage of two hundred yen, which in the presence of art was less than the smallest speck of dust, could become a source of such agony that it penetrated to his marrow and shook the entire foundation of his existence. It was not merely his external life that was circumscribed by the two hundred yen; his very mind and soul were absorbed by it. And the fact that he could gaze calmly, steadily, at this triviality and retain his sanity made him even more wretched.
The editor’s loud, stupid voice, shouting “What does beauty mean at a time like this? Art is powerless!” filled Izawa’s mind with a completely different sort of reality and ate into him with a great, biting force. Ah yes, he thought, Japan would lose. His countrymen would fall one after another like so many clay dolls, innumerable legs and heads and arms would fly skyward mixed with the debris of bricks and concrete, and the land would become a flat graveyard devoid of trees, buildings, everything. Where would he seek refuge? Which hole would he be driven into? Where would he be when finally he was blown up, hole and all?
Yet sometimes he dreamed of how things would be if, by some peculiar chance, he survived. What he felt chiefly at such moments was curiosity—curiosity about life in an unpredictable new world, life in nibble-buried fields, curiosity also about the regeneration that would come. It was bound to happen, in six months or perhaps a year; yet he could only imagine it as some remote fancy, like a world of dreams. Meanwhile the decisive force of a mere two hundred yen blocked off everything else and swept away all hope from his life; even in his dreams it choked and haunted him; it bleached every emotion of his youth, so that although he was still only twenty-seven years old, he already found himself wandering aimlessly over a dark moorland.
Izawa wanted a woman; this was what he longed for most of all. Yet life with any woman would ineluctably be limited by the two hundred yen. His saucepan, his cooking pot, his bean paste, his rice—everything bore this curse. When his child was born, it too would be haunted by the curse, and the woman herself would turn into a demon obsessed by the same curse and would be grumbling from morning until night. His enthusiasm and his art and the light of his hopes were all dead; his very life was being trampled on like horse dung by the wayside, drying up and being blown away by the wind to disappear without a trace, without so much as the slightest nail mark. Such a curse it was that would cling to the woman’s back.
His way of living was unbearably trivial and he himself lacked the power to resolve this triviality. War—this vast destructive force in which everyone was being judged with fantastic impartiality, in which all Japan was becoming a rubble-covered wasteland and the people were collapsing like clay dolls—what a heart-rending, what a gigantic love it represented on the part of nothingness! Izawa felt a desire to sleep soundly in the arms of the god of destruction. This resignation to the force of nothingness had the effect of making him rather more active than before, and when the air-raid alarm sounded he would briskly put on his leggings. The only thing that made life worth living each day was to toy with the uneasiness of life. When the all clear sounded, he would be thoroughly dispirited and once more would be overcome by the despair of having lost all emotion.
This feeble-minded woman did not know how to boil rice or
to make bean-paste soup. She had trouble in expressing the simplest thought and the most she could do was to stand in line to get the rations. Like a thin sheet of glass, she reacted to the slightest suggestion of joy or anger; between the furrows of her fear and her abstractedness she simply received the will of others and passed it on. Even the evil spirit of the two hundred yen could not haunt such a soul. This woman, thought Izawa, was a forlorn puppet made for him. In his mind’s eye he pictured an endless journey in which he would roam over the dark moorland with this woman in his arms and the wind blowing about him.
Yet he felt that there was something rather fantastic and ludicrous about the whole idea. This was probably because his external triviality had by now begun to erode his very heart in such a way that the frank feeling of love that was gushing up within him seemed entirely false. But why should it be false? Was there some intrinsic rule which said that the prostitutes in their apartments and the society ladies in their houses were more human than this feeble-minded woman? Yes, absurdly enough, it looked as if there really was such a rule.
What am I afraid of? It all comes from the evil spirit of those two hundred yen. Yes, now when I am on the point of freeing myself from the evil spirit by means of this woman, I find that I am still bound by its curse. The only thing I am really afraid of is worldly appearances. And what I mean by “world” is merely the collection of women who live here in the apartments—the prostitutes and the kept women and the pregnant volunteer-workers and the housewives who cackle away in their nasal voices like so many geese. I know that there is no other world. Yet, indisputable as this fact is, I am completely unable to believe it. For I live in fear of some strange rule.
It was a surprisingly short (yet at the same time an endlessly long) night. Dawn broke before he knew it and the chill of daybreak numbed his body into an unfeeling block of stone. All night long he had simply stayed by the woman’s pillow, stroking her hair.
* * *
From that day a new life began for Izawa.
Yet, aside from the fact that a woman’s body had been added to a house, there was nothing peculiar or even different. Unbelievable though it might seem, not a single new bud appeared to sprout forth round him or within him. His reason perceived what an extraordinary event it was; but apart from that, there was not the slightest alteration in his life—not so much as the position of his desk was changed. He went to work each morning, and while he was out a feeble-minded woman stayed in the closet awaiting his return. Once he had stepped outside, he forgot entirely about the woman, and if he thought at all about the event, it seemed like something that had happened in the indefinite past, ten or even twenty years before.
War produced a strangely wholesome kind of amnesia. Its fantastic destructive power caused a century of change to take place in a single day, made last week’s events seem as if they had happened several years before and submerged the events of the previous year at the very bottom of one’s memory. It was only recently that the buildings surrounding the factories near where Izawa lived had been torn down in a frenzy of “planned evacuation,” which had turned the entire neighborhood into a whirling mass of dust; yet, though the debris had still not been cleared away, the demolition had already receded into the past as if it were something that had taken place over a year before. Immense changes that completely transformed the city were taken for granted when one saw them for the second time.
The feeble-minded woman too had become one of the multifarious blurred fragments belonging to this wholesome amnesia. Her face lay among the various other fragments: among the sticks and splinters on the site of the evacuated “people’s bar” in front of the railway station where, until a couple of days before, people had been waiting in queues, among the holes in the nearby building that had been wrecked by a bomb, among the fire-ravaged ruins of the city.
Every day the siren rang out. Sometimes it was an air-raid warning. At its sound Izawa would be plunged into deep disquiet. What worried him was that there might be an air raid near where he lived and that even now, while he sat in his office, some unknown change might be taking place at home. If there was an air raid, the feeble-minded woman might well become excited and rush out of the house, thus exposing their secret to the entire neighborhood. Fear about an unknown change concerned Izawa more than anything else and made it impossible for him to return home while it was still light. Many were the times that he vainly struggled against this pitiful condition in which he was dominated by vulgar worries. If nothing else, he would have liked to be able to confide everything to the tailor; but this struck him as a hopelessly mean action, for it would simply have meant getting rid of his worries by the least damaging possible form of confession. So he remained silent and angrily cursed himself for being no better in his true nature than the common run of men whom he despised.
For Izawa the feeble-minded woman had two unforgettable faces. When turning a street corner, when walking up the stairs in his office building, when detaching himself from the crowd of people in front of a tram—at these and other unexpected moments he would suddenly recall the two faces. His thoughts would freeze up and he would be congealed in a momentary frenzy.
One face was that which he had seen when he first touched her body. The occurrence itself had on the very next day receded into the memories of a year before; only the face would come back to him, detached from the surrounding events.
From that day the feeble-minded woman had been no more than a waiting body with no other life, with not so much as a scrap of thought. She was always waiting. Merely from the fact that Izawa’s hands had touched a part of her body, the woman’s entire consciousness was absorbed by the sexual act; her body, her face, were simply waiting for it. Even in the middle of the night, if Izawa’s hand happened to touch her, the woman’s sleep-drugged body would show exactly the same reaction. Her body alone was alive, always waiting. Yes, even while asleep.
When it came to the question of what the woman was thinking about when awake, Izawa realized that her mind was a void. A coma of the mind combined with a vitality of the flesh—that was the sum and total of this woman. Even when she was awake, her mind slept; and even when she was asleep, her body was awake. Nothing existed in her but a sort of unconscious lust. The woman’s body was constantly awake and reacted to outer stimuli by a tireless, worm-like wriggling.
But she had another face as well. There happened to be a daytime air-raid on Izawa’s day off and for two solid hours the bombers had concentrated on a nearby part of the city. Since Izawa had no air-raid shelter, he hid in the closet with the woman, barricading their bodies with the thick bedding. The center of the bombing was about five hundred yards away, but the houses in Izawa’s neighborhood trembled as the earth shook; with each great thud of the bombs Izawa’s breath and thoughts stood still.
Although both incendiary and demolition bombs were dropped alike from the planes, they had all the difference in degree of horror that exists between a common grass snake and a viper. Incendiary bombs were equipped with a mechanism that produced a ghastly, rattling sound, but they did not explode on reaching the ground and the noise fizzled out above one’s head. “A dragon’s head and a serpent’s tail,”1 people used to say. In fact there was no tail at all, serpentine or otherwise, and one was spared the culminating terror. In the case of TNT bombs, however, the sound as they fell was like the subdued swishing of rain, but this ended in a fabulous explosion that seemed to shatter the very axis of the earth. The horror of the rain-like warning, the hopeless terror as the thud of the explosions approached, made one feel more dead than alive. Worse still, since the American planes flew at a high altitude, the sound of their passage overhead was extremely faint, and they gave the impression of being totally unconcerned with what was happening below. Accordingly, when the bombs fell, it was exactly like being struck by a huge axe wielded by a monster who is looking the other way. Because one could have no idea what the enemy planes were going to do, the strange buzzing of their motors in t
he distance filled one with a peculiar sense of uneasiness; then on top of this would come the swish of the falling bomb. The terror one felt while waiting for the explosion was really enough to stop every word and breath and thought. The only thing in one’s mind was the despair that flashed through one, icy like impending madness—despair at the idea that this was assuredly one’s final moment on earth.
Izawa’s hut was fortunately surrounded on all sides by two-story buildings (apartments, the madman’s house, the tailor’s house) and it alone escaped without so much as a cracked windowpane, whereas the windows in the neighboring houses were shattered and, in some cases, the roofs badly damaged. The only untoward incident was that a blood-drenched hood, of the type people wore in air raids, fell on the field in front of the pigpen. In the darkness of the closet Izawa’s eyes glittered. Then he saw it—he saw the idiot’s face and its writhing agony of despair.
Ah yes, he thought, most people have intellect and even at the worst of times they retain control and resistance. How appalling it was to see someone who was entirely bereft of intellect and restraint and resistance! To the woman’s face and body, as she gazed into the window of death, nothing adhered but anguish. Her anguish moved, it writhed, it shed a tear. If a dog’s eyes were to shed tears, it would probably be infinitely ugly, just as if he were to laugh. Izawa was shocked to see how ugly tears could be when there was no trace of intellect behind them. Strangely enough, children of five or six rarely cry in the middle of a bombing. Their hearts beat like hammers, they become speechless, and they stare ahead with wide-open eyes. Only their eyes are alive; but apparently they are just kept wide open and they fail to show any direct or dramatic fear. The fact is that children calmly subdue their emotions to the extent that they appear more intelligent than under normal circumstances. At the instant of danger, they are the equal of adults. One might even say that they are superior, for adults plainly manifest their fears of death. Yes, children actually appear more intelligent at such times than adults.
