by Ivan Morris
Through the affair between you and Mother I knew that there was a love blessed by no one and asking to be blessed by no one. The love between you was something only you knew about. Aunt Midori does not know about it, nor do I, nor does any one of our relatives. Neither our neighbors nor our closest friends know or should know about it. Since Mother’s death only you have known about it. And after your death no one on the earth will imagine that such a love existed. Until now I believed that love was something bright and cheerful like the sun, something to be blessed eternally by God and man alike. I firmly believed that love was like a pure brook that glitters in the sun and ripples in the wind, and is tenderly watched by the grass, trees, and flowers on the banks, playing exquisite music as it grows. How could I imagine a love like a subterranean stream, with no sunshine and no one to know where the water comes from and goes?
Mother deceived me for thirteen years. She died at last deceiving me still. Not once did I dream that there could be a secret between Mother and myself. Mother used to tell me from time to time that the two of us, parent and child, were alone in the world. On the matter of how she parted with Father she said only that I would not be able to understand until I was ready for marriage. I wanted to grow up more quickly, not because I wanted to know about Mother and Father, but because I thought how difficult it must be for Mother to keep the secret. Mother seemed to suffer very much. To think that she was also able to keep another secret from me!
When I was a little girl, Mother used to tell me a story of a wolf that deceived a rabbit and was turned into stone for the misdeed. Mother deceived me, Aunt Midori, and the whole world. How could she? What terrible thing bewitched her? Yes, I remember she used the word “evil” in her diary. “Both Misugi and I are evil. We should like to be wholly evil.” Why did she not write that she had been bewitched? Mother is far more unfortunate than the wolf that deceived the rabbit! But that dear Mother and my dearest Uncle Jōsuké should have chosen to be bad—the most completely bad persons on the earth! What a sad love it is which requires that one become bad! I remember how on a festival day someone bought me a round paperweight of glass in which were set red artificial flower petals. I was only a child. I held it in my hand and I burst into tears. I must have puzzled everyone. I saw how the flower petals were frozen, as it were, inside cold glass; the flower petals remained still, whether spring or autumn came; the flower petals were being sacrificed. As I thought of the petals, sadness came to me all of a sudden. The same sadness is coming back to me now. The love between you and Mother, like those sad petals!
My dear Uncle, Uncle Jōsuké:
You must be angry with me for reading Mother’s diary. Something told me on the day before Mother’s death that she was unlikely to recover. I had this premonition. As you remember, nothing was noticeably wrong with her except a slight fever. Her appetite was good. Her cheeks were bright and even seemed rosier than usual. However, I could not help feeling depressed. The sight of her from the back—especially that line from the shoulders to the arms—was almost repellent. On the eve of her death, when Aunt Midori came to inquire after her, I entered Mother’s room to let her know of the visit. As I opened the sliding door, I was taken aback. She was sitting on the bed with her back turned toward me. She had on a purple-gray kimono cloak boldly decorated with thistles which she had kept in a chest and rarely taken out. She would give to me, she had said, since it was becoming too loud for her.
“What’s the matter?” She seemed unable to understand why I was startled.
“But you …”
I was unable to go on. I myself could not understand why I had been startled. A ridiculous lump rose in my throat. After all it was not surprising for Mother, who delighted in kimono, to take out a kimono cloak from her youth and put it on. Since she had taken ill it had become almost her daily practice to put on a kimono she had not worn in many years. Probably she wanted to divert her mind. Later, however, I knew why I had been surprised. Mother looked so beautiful that it would not be an exaggeration to describe her as stunning. At the same time, however, she looked forlorn, forlorn as I had never seen her before. Aunt Midori came into the room. “Oh, beautiful!” she exclaimed, and sat in silence for a time as if enchanted. That figure of Mother, as I saw it from the back in a cloak from the Yuki looms, did not leave my mind all that day, a beautiful but lonely figure, like a cold weight on my heart.
In the evening the wind stopped. I helped our maid Sadayo sweep up the leaves scattered in the garden and burn them. I also took out some straw which I had bought at a ridiculously high price some days before, to make straw ashes for Mother’s brazier. Mother had been watching me from the living room. She came out to the veranda with a neat package.
“Burn this too.”
When I asked her what it was, she answered in an unusually stern voice that it was none of my business. Then she said quietly:
“It’s a diary I kept. Burn it, please.”
She turned and walked toward her room, wavering strangely as if in a wind.
It took me about half an hour to make straw ashes. When the last straw had turned into purple smoke, I made up my mind. I went upstairs to my room with Mother’s diary and hid it at the back of a shelf. The wind rose again that night. An eerily pale moon shone on the garden. From the upstairs window the scene looked like a desolate beach somewhere in the far north, and the roar of wind was like waves against the shore. Mother and Sadayo had already gone to bed. Only I was awake. I barred the door with several bulky volumes of an encyclopedia and lowered all the window curtains. (I was afraid of even the moonlight.) I then adjusted the lamp shade and opened the notebook that was Mother’s diary….
Dear Uncle, Uncle Jōsuké:
I thought that I would never know about Father and Mother if I missed my chance to read the diary. Until then I had had no desire to know about Father. Mother would tell me in any case when I married. Only the name, Kadota Reiichirō, I stored in my heart. But my feelings changed after I caught sight of my mother in that cloak. For some reason it became my sad conviction that she would not recover.
I had heard from my grandmother in Akashi and other relatives, I hardly know when, that Mother had had to leave Father. While Father was working on his doctor’s dissertation in the Department of Pediatrics at Kyoto University, I was living at our house in Akashi with Mother, Grandfather, Grandmother, and a maid. I was five. On a windy day in April, a young woman with a newborn baby visited Mother. When she was led into the drawing room, she put her baby in the alcove, loosened her sash, took an under-kimono from a small basket, and began to change clothes. This was the startling sight Mother saw when she came bringing a cup of tea. The woman was out of her mind. It was later learned that the badly formed baby asleep under the red-nandina flower arrangement was Father’s.
The baby died soon afterward. The woman was only temporarily deranged. She soon recovered. I am told that she is happily married to a merchant in Okayama. Soon after this incident, Mother left Akashi with me. It was decided that Father, who had been adopted into the family, should be divorced.
My grandmother in Akashi once said to me—it was when I entered girls’ school: “Your mother is much too stubborn. After all, what has happened has happened.”
Mother’s fastidiousness must have made it difficult for her to forgive Father.
This is all I know about Father and Mother. Until I was seven or eight years old I thought Father was no longer alive, or rather, I was made to think so. But Father is dead, even now, in my heart. I cannot visualize my actual father, who, I am told, runs a large hospital in Hyogo, not an hour from here. He is still unmarried. He is still alive, but my father has been dead a long time.
I opened Mother’s diary. The word which my eager eye caught first was “sin,” a word I had not expected to find. “Sin,” “sin,” “sin.” The word was repeated in a scrawl. I could hardly believe that Mother had written it. Below the repeated word “sin” was scrawled: “God, forgive me. Forgive me, Mi
dori.” She seemed to be groaning under the weight of the words. The rest of the page disappeared, and only this line lay snarling like an ogre, glaring from the page as if to jump upon me.
I closed the diary. A terrible moment! In the silence I could hear the beating of my heart. I rose from my chair and made sure once again that the door and the windows were secured. Coming back to the desk, I fearfully opened the diary again. Then I read it from beginning to end, skipping nothing and feeling like a monster. Nothing could be found referring to Father. There, in frank language, was the affair between Mother and you, an affair of which I had never dreamed. I read how Mother had suffered at one time, rejoiced at another, prayed, despaired, and sometimes even wanted to commit suicide. Yes, she was determined to kill herself in the event that her affair was detected by Aunt Midori. Ah! Mother, who was always talking with Aunt Midori so pleasantly, was afraid of her!
Mother’s diary shows that she lived with death those thirteen years. Sometimes she made entries for four or five days running, sometimes she laid it aside for two or three years. On every page of her diary she was facing death.
“I have to die. Death will solve everything.” What made her write such things? “Why should you have anything to fear, now that you are determined to die? Be brave, Ayako!” What made my gentle mother cry this way? Was it love? The beautiful and glittering thing called love? You once gave me as a birthday gift a book describing a proud, naked woman who stood by a spring with her long hair coiled over her shoulders and her hands supporting her breasts, pressing them upward like buds. How different the love of Mother and you from the love described in that book!
From the moment I read Mother’s diary, Aunt Midori became the most horrible person in the world. Mother’s agony became mine. Ah, Aunt Midori, kissing my cheek with pursed lips! My loving Aunt Midori whom I could not tell from Mother! It was she who, when I entered primary school in Ashiya, gave me a book satchel decorated with large roses; and it was she who gave me a large pneumatic float shaped like a sea gull when I left for summer camp. On a class day when I was in the second grade I won applause for telling a story by the brothers Grimm. It was the same Aunt Midori who encouraged me to rehearse every evening and rewarded me for my perseverance. Aunt Midori, who was a cousin of Mother’s and very close to her. Although she only dances now, Aunt Midori was once good at mahjong, golf, swimming, and skiing. It was Aunt Midori who baked pies bigger than my face and who startled Mother and me by bringing a group of dancing girls from Takarazuka to our home. Why had she come into our life so pleasantly, like a rose?
If I ever had a premonition concerning you and Mother, it was just once. That was about a year ago. I was on my way to school with a friend. When we arrived at Shukugawa Station, it occurred to me that I had forgotten my English reader. I asked my friend to wait at the station and hurried home. For reasons I could not understand I could not bring myself to open the gate. Our maid was on an errand and only Mother was at home. I felt somehow uneasy at her being at home alone. I was afraid. I stood at the gate wondering whether I should enter or not. I looked at the azaleas. Finally I gave up and went back to the railroad station in a strange state of mind which I myself could not understand. I felt that from the moment I left home for school, a special time for Mother began. I felt that if I entered the gate it would annoy her. In indescribable loneliness I went back to the station, kicking at stones on the road along the Ashiya River. Then I found myself leaning on a wooden bench in the waiting room, listening absently to my friend.
That was the first and last such experience. Now it seems unbearably frightful. What detestable qualities man possesses! How could I tell that Aunt Midori had not at times had the same premonition? Aufit Midori who, when she plays cards, is proud of her capacity to read her partner’s mind. Just to think of it is a horror! Maybe it is stupid to worry, since all has ended and the secret was kept. No, Mama died to keep the secret. This I believe.
On that sad day just before her brief but violent agony started, Mother called me, saying with a strangely smooth, almost wooden expression: “I have just taken poison. I am tired, tired of living….”
Her voice sounded like heavenly music, strangely clear, at if she were addressing God through me. I could hear the word “sin,” piled up like the Eiffel Tower, crash down into my ears. The layers of sin that she had supported for thirteen years were now going to crush her weary being and wash it away. It was anger that overwhelmed me, like the blast of an autumn wind from a valley, as I sat in front of Mama and followed those eyes that gazed vacantly into the distance. Looking at Mother’s sad face, I only answered “Oh?” as if this had nothing to do with me. Then my heart became cold as if doused by water. In a quiet state of mind, so quiet that I was surprised at myself, I went along the passage, instead of through the adjoining room, walking as though on water (it was at this moment that I heard Mother’s cry as she was about to be swallowed by death). I went into the telephone alcove at the end of the passage and called you. It was not you, however, but Aunt Midori who, five minutes later, rushed into the house. Mother died, clasping hands with Aunt Midori, the nearest and the most feared. And those same hands laid a white cloth over Mother’s face, now free from cares and sadness.
My dear Uncle Jōsuké:
The first night of the wake was a quiet one—unbelievably quiet. The crowds of visitors during the day, the policemen, the doctors, and the neighbors had all left. Only we sat before her coffin—you, Aunt Midori, and myself. No one spoke. It was as if we were listening to the faint lap of water on some shore. When the incense sticks burned out, we rose in turn and replaced them, and perhaps opened the windows for fresh air. You seemed the saddest. When you rose to light new incense sticks, you gazed so gently at Mother’s picture. On your sad face there was a faint smile, so faint that one could hardly notice it. How many times that night I thought that Mother must have been happy after all.
About nine o’clock, when I was sitting by the window, I suddenly burst into tears. You rose and laid your hand quietly on my shoulder and stood so for some time. Then you went back to your chair without saying a word. It was not because I felt a pang of sorrow for Mother that I was crying. I thought of the fact that Mother said nothing about you in her last moments, and I wondered why it was not you but Aunt Midori who rushed to my side when I telephoned. My heart was wrenched. Your love and Mother’s had to be hidden through the very moment of death. It seemed as pitiful as the flower petals crucified in the glass paperweight. So I rose and opened the window, gazing into the cold, starry sky and bearing a sorrow that was on the verge of finding voice. But then it came to me that Mother’s love was ascending to heaven in that starry sky, fleeting among the stars, unknown to any of us. It seemed to me that sorrow for the death of an individual called “Mother” was trivial compared with the sorrow for a love that was ascending into heaven.
When I sat down to our midnight meal, I burst into tears again. Aunt Midori spoke to me in a gentle voice. “You must be brave. It breaks my heart to think that I can do nothing.”
Wiping my tears and raising my head, I saw Aunt Midori looking at me. There were tears in her eyes too. I shook my head. Probably she did not mind. The truth is that I suddenly felt sorry for her. I watched her prepare four plates, for you and her and myself and Mother, and I suddenly felt that she was the saddest person there. That is why I wept.
I wept a third time that night. It was after you both had told me to go to bed. You said that the next day would be a hard one. Exhausted, I fell asleep in an adjoining room. I awoke bathed in sweat. I found that about an hour had passed. It was quiet in the next room, except for the click of the lighter you were using from time to time. Half an hour later I heard a brief exchange between you and Aunt Midori.
“How about having a rest, Midori? I’ll stay up.”
“No thanks. You go rest.”
That was all, and the quietness returned. I sobbed perhaps three times. This time my sobbing went unheard by you. Everythin
g seemed lonely and horrible. Three of you—Mother, who had already joined all the others, and you two—were in the same room. Each of you was there with different thoughts. The world of adults seemed to me unbearably lonely and horrible.
My dear Uncle, Uncle Jōsuké:
I have rambled on. I have tried to express my feelings as best I could so that you might understand the request I am going to make.
My request is only this: I do not want to see you or Aunt Midori again. I can no longer play the child the way I did before I read Mother’s diary. I should like to escape the tangle of “sin” that finally crushed Mother. I have no courage to write further.
I am asking Uncle Tsumura to see to disposing of this house. Then I am going back to Akashi for a while. I am thinking of opening a small dressmaking shop. In her will, Mother suggested that I consult you. She would not have done so if she had known me as I am now.
I burned Mother’s diary in the garden today. The notebook was reduced to a handful of ashes. A whirlwind carried them away with dead leaves while I was hunting a bucket for water.
Under separate cover I am sending a letter to you from Mother. I found it in her desk the day after you left for Tokyo.
MIDORI’S LETTER
My dear Mr. Misugi:
I address you thus formally, and my heart throbs as if I were writing a love letter. I seem too old for love letters (although I am but thirty-three). During these last ten years I have written dozens of love letters, sometimes secretly and sometimes openly. But why, I wonder, have none of them been addressed to you? I hardly know.
