Modern Japanese Short Stories

by Ivan Morris

  Some time ago Mrs. Takagi, whom you know (remember?—she looks like a fox when she makes up), was commenting on important people living between Osaka and Kobe. She said that you were an uninteresting man to women, a man who did not understand the intricacies of women’s psychology, a man who could love women but never be loved by them. This was of course a careless remark. She was slightly intoxicated, and you need not mind. At the same time, however, you do have something of the quality she described. You do not know solitude, you have nothing of the lonely man about you. You sometimes look bored, but never lonely. You have a peculiarly clear point of view, and you depend entirely upon your own judgment. It makes me want to shake you. In short, you are a man who is unbearable to women, who commands no interest as a man, and whom it would be a waste of time to love.

  Such being the case, it would be unreasonable to try to have you understand my feelings about the fact that not one of the dozens of love letters I have written has been addressed to you. Still it all seems very strange. A letter or two could just as well have gone to you. Although none did, there would have been little difference had I written them as if addressing you. I am shy and naive in spite of my years. I could not write a sweet letter to my husband but I could write to other men one after another. Maybe I was born under an unlucky star, your unlucky star too.

  If I could but know you,

  Then might your lofty tranquility collapse.

  I wrote this poem last autumn when I thought about you sitting in your study. It was a poem into which I poured the feelings of a poor wife who was trying not to disturb the tranquility with which you might have been contemplating perhaps a piece of ancient Korean ceramics; or rather, perhaps it was the sentiment of one who did not know how to disturb your contemplations. (What a formidable and well-guarded fort you are!)

  “Don’t talk nonsense!” you will say. But even when I spend the entire night playing mahjong, I do still have the consideration to think of you in your study at times. I secretly put the poem on Mr. Tagami’s desk—Mr. Tagami is the young philosopher who was promoted to be assistant professor last spring. My act resulted in disturbing the lofty serenity of the young professor. A gossip columnist wrote about it and caused you some trouble. I have said that I wanted to shake you. I wonder if this little incident shook you just a bit.

  Since you will not enjoy reading this, I’ll come to the main point. Our ostensible relationship as man and wife has lasted a long time. Don’t you want to put an end to it? It must be difficult for you too. If you have no objection, suppose we find a way for both of us to be free.

  I think this is the time to end our unnatural relations, especially since you are retiring. (I never expected to find your name on the list of purged businessmen!) Let me be brief. If I may have the house at Takarazuka and the house at Yasé, I shall be satisfied. The house at Yasé is a reasonable size, and the environment is congenial to me. I can live there. The house at Takarazuka I shall sell for about two million yen, on which sum I can live the rest of my life. I’ve been making my own plans. This is the last time I shall ask to have my way, and the first time I am presuming upon your affections.

  Though I am making this sudden request, I do not have a lover at present. You do not have to worry about my being robbed. I regret to tell you that I have never had a lover worthy of being called such. Very few men satisfy even my two basic requirements: a well-groomed neck, as fresh as a section of lemon, and a curve of the loin clean and strong as an antelope. I regret again that this feature which first drew me, a bride, to my husband is still a strong attraction after ten years. Speaking of antelopes, I remember reading a newspaper article about a naked boy who had been living with antelopes in the Syrian desert. What a beautiful picture! The coldness of his profile under that unkempt hair, and the charm of his long legs which, it seemed, could carry him at fifty miles an hour! Even now I feel my blood tingle for that boy. His intellectual face and his wild figure.

  For the eye that has seen that boy, all other men are vulgar and boring. If a suspicion of inconstancy ever flickered in your wife’s heart, it was only when she was attracted by the antelope-boy. When I imagine his tense skin wet with the night dew of the desert, when I think of his serenity, I become excited even now.

  About two years ago I became enthusiastic over Matsushiro of the Shin Seisaku school of modern painting. But you are not to believe the rumors.

  You looked at me then with eyes that had a strangely sad gleam, as of pity. There was nothing, really, to be pitied. Nonetheless, I was somehow attracted by your eyes. They couldn’t be compared with those of the antelope-boy, but they were splendid. Why did you never before turn your eyes, your splendid eyes, even a little on me? Strength alone is not enough. Those are not eyes for appreciating pottery. I became cold, like old Kutani ware, and I desperately wanted to sit down quietly somewhere. That is why I visited Matsushiro’s chilly studio and posed for him. Besides, I like the way he looks at buildings. Although he rather imitates Utrillo, I think he is unique in Japan in that he can paint a common building and yet put into it a modern melancholy (very faintly). But as a man he is no good. If I were to score you one hundred, he would rate only sixty-five. He does have talent, but it is somehow degenerate. He has a handsome face, but he lacks elegance. When he holds a pipe, he even looks funny, like a second-rate artist whose works have sucked all the good out of him.

  It was around early summer of last year that I took up Tsumura, the jockey who won the Minister’s Cup. Your eyes gleamed with cold contempt. At first I thought it was the green leaves outside that made your eyes look so when we passed each other on the veranda. Later, I discovered that I was wrong. It was most rash of me. Had I known, I could have had my own way of looking back at you. But my senses were numbed by the beauty of speed. Your fusty, medieval way of expressing yourself was beyond my understanding. You should have seen Tsumura as he passed a dozen horses in the stretch, one after another, on the back of that superb horse. Even you would have been struck if you had looked through the binoculars at that intense and lovable creature (I mean Tsumura, not the horse).

  A twenty-two-year-old boy, little more than a hooligan, he broke his own record twice because he knew I was watching. It was my first experience of such passion. He wanted my admiration, and he became the incarnation of speed, forgetting me as he rode his brown mare. Life was worthwhile in those days. My love (maybe it can be called love) in the grandstand was stirred by his passion, clear as water, there on the long oval track. I never felt the loss of those three diamonds. They had survived the war and they were his reward. It was only when he was on horseback that he was amiable. Once his feet touched ground, he became a child, a primitive child who hardly understood the taste of coffee. With his fighting spirit on horseback, however, he was better than Seo the novelist or the ex-leftist Mitani. In the end, I acted as gobetween when he married his eighteen-year-old dancer. She had pouting lips, and she too had been one of my pets.

  I have wandered from the subject. Of course I am still much too young to live like a retired person even if I settle in Yasé. I have no intention of behaving like a saint, either. You may go ahead and build a kiln and make teacups and so on, but I think I shall be doing such things as growing flowers—one can make quite a profit by selling them in Kyoto, I am told. I shall be able to grow a couple of hundred carnations with the help of the two maids and two other young girl friends of mine. I should like to stay away from men for the time being. I am tired of men. I really mean it. I am making my plans so that I can find real happiness, starting all over again.

  You may be surprised at my sudden proposal to leave you. No, it may be even more surprising that I did not propose it earlier. A thousand emotions are crowding my mind as I look back over our ten-odd years together. I do not see how we managed. I was labeled a loose woman, and it is likely that we gave others the impression of being an unusual couple. Yet we lived together as best we could, without causing much scandal, and sometimes we even went so
far as to arrange marriages for others. I think I am entitled to your praise. What do you think?

  What a difficult thing it is to write a farewell letter! How I hate to be maudlin! I do not like to be too outspoken, either. I would like to make my proposal gracefully, so that neither of us would be hurt, but an awkwardness comes out in what I am writing. After all, a letter of parting cannot be a beautiful letter, no matter who writes it. Let me, then, write in the direct and cold manner that becomes such a letter. You will not like what I have to say and it will make you even more indifferent to me.

  It was in February, 1934, around nine o’clock in the morning. When I saw you from my upstairs room in the Atami Hotel, you had on a gray suit and were walking along the shore below. This is what happened on a day growing dim as in a half-forgotten dream. Listen to me calmly. Remember the kimono cloak with its thistles against the purple-gray background, worn by the tall, beautiful woman following you? I had never thought that my suspicious would prove so precisely accurate. I had come to Atami by night train to confirm these suspicions. I had not slept. To coin a phrase, I had hoped I was dreaming. I was twenty years old (the age Shōko is now). It was somewhat too strong a medicine for a newly married wife. I called the boy, paid the bill, and left the place as if pursued. The boy stared after me. Standing on the pavement in front of the hotel, I wondered whether I should go down to the shore or up to the railroad station. I started down the road to the shore, but stopped before I had walked fifty yards. I stood there gazing at a point where the sea shone in the mid-winter sun, a sea of Prussian blue rubbed on, as it were, from a tube of concentrated color. Then I took the road to the railroad station. Now I know that what began there is still going on. If I had gone down the road leading to the beach where you were, I should find myself a different person today. Whether for good or for bad, I went to the station. That was perhaps the turning point in my life.

  Why didn’t I go on down the road to the beach? It was because I could not help thinking that I was unequal to the beautiful Ayako, who was five or six years older than I—unequal to her in experience, knowledge, ability, beauty, gentleness of heart, deftness at holding a teacup, talking about literature, appreciating music, arranging a hairdo, everything. The meekness of a twenty-year-old bride which could be expressed only in the lines of a painting! You probably know how you stay motionless when you jump into the cold sea of early autumn because the slightest motion would make you feel the cold even more intensely. I was afraid to move. It was a long time before I decided to deceive you as you were deceiving me.

  Once Ayako and you were waiting for a train in Sannomiya Station. It was perhaps a year after the experience at the Atami Hotel. I stood wondering whether I should go into the waiting room; I was surrounded by girls off on a gay school excursion. And the memory of yet another night is also vividly with me. Insects were humming. Watching the soft light coming through the curtains upstairs, I stood for hours unable to decide whether to push the button at Ayako’s gate, closed tight as a clam. It was at about the same time as the incident in Sannomiya Station. I wonder whether it was spring or autumn. My memory for the seasons fails me at such times. There were many other occasions also, but I did nothing. Even at the Atami Hotel, I did not go down to the sea. Even then. A glaring Prussian-blue sea tortured me, and I felt the searing pain at my heart recede.

  It was a painful period, but time solved our problem. Hot iron cools, and I cooled as you did, you even more than I. It was a wonderfully cold home, cold enough to freeze the eyelashes. So it is now. Home? No, it is far from being anything so human. I believe you will agree with me that it might better be called a citadel. During all these years we have been deceiving each other in this citadel. (You started first.) What sad covenants people make! Our life has been founded entirely on the secrets we’ve kept for each other. You pretended to be ignorant of my numerous misdeeds, although sometimes you showed contempt, sometimes displeasure and sadness. Often I shouted at the maid, perhaps telling her to bring cigarettes from the bathroom. I would come home and, taking a film program from my handbag, fan my naked breast with it. I scattered face powder everywhere, in the drawing room and in the hall. When I hung up the telephone receiver, I would come away waltzing. I invited a group of dancing girls to dinner and had a picture taken with them. In déshabillé, I played mahjong. On my birthday I had the maids wear ribbons while I sported with student guests. I knew that these acts would be objectionable to you. Never once, however, did you rebuke me—nor were you able to. There was no dispute between us. Our citadel was quiet, and the air was raw, sandy, and cold, like the wind in a desert. Why could you not shoot at my heart, you who have shot pheasants and turtledoves so expertly? If you were going to deceive why did you not deceive me thoroughly? A woman can be elevated to godliness by a man’s perfidy.

  Now I know that there lurked in my heart the expectation, faint but persistent, that there would be an end to our compromise, that something would take place, something would happen, and so I suffered for more than ten years. I could think of but two ways in which that end would come. Some day I would either lean on your shoulder and close my eyes quietly, or stab at your chest with that Egyptian penknife you gave me.

  In which form did I expect the end to come? I do not know myself.

  Five years have passed. Do you remember? I think it was after you had come back from southern Asia. I had been away three days and had staggered home drunk in broad daylight. I found you there, though. I had thought you would still be away. You were cleaning your gun. I only said, “Hello,” and sitting on the veranda sofa, I turned from you to cool myself in the breeze. The glass window facing the veranda reflected part of the room as in a mirror. Back-dropped by the canopy over the terrace, it reflected you as you wiped the gun with a white cloth. Nervous and yet languid after my dissipations, I absent-mindedly watched your actions. After wiping your gun thoroughly and setting the polished breechblock, you held the gun up several times and stood as if you were ready to shoot. Then I found that you were aiming with one eye half closed. The gun was pointed at my back.

  I wondered whether you were going to fire at me and whether, even though the gun was not loaded, you wanted to kill me. I closed my eyes, and I waited for the moment the click of the trigger would break the stillness of the room, wondering whether you were aiming at my shoulder, or at the back of my head, or at my neck. There was no click, however long I waited. I was preparing to faint at the click, thinking it would make life worth living after the years of ennui.

  I opened my eyes and found that you were still aiming at me. I remained in that position for some time, but suddenly it all seemed very silly. I moved myself, turning toward you—not toward the figure in the glass. At that moment you aimed at the rhododendron you had brought from Amagi. It had bloomed for the first time that year. Then at long last there was the click of the trigger. Why didn’t you shoot your unfaithful wife? I deserved being shot. You intended to kill me, and yet you did not pull the trigger. If you had pulled the trigger, if you had not forgiven my unfaithfulness, if you had shot hatred into my heart—then I might have fallen quietly into your arms. Or maybe I would have shown you my own shooting skill. Since you did not, I turned my eyes away from the rhododendron that had been substituted for me and withdrew to my room, humming some foreign tune and staggering more than was necessary.

  The years have passed without our having had a chance to put an end to such things. This summer the crape myrtle was a heavy red—red as it had never been before. I was in an agony of expectation—certain that something unusual was about to take place.

  It was on the eve of her death that I last visited Ayako. After ten-odd years I saw again the cloak of purple-gray that had printed itself on my retina in the bright morning sun of Atami. The purple thistles floated up and hung heavily on the thin shoulders of your loved one, who, incidentally, had become a little thinner. The moment I sat down, I thought I would have my revenge by praising the beauty of the cloak. Then the
thought of her wearing that cloak in my presence made my blood boil out of control. I knew that self-control was now impossible. The effrontery of the woman who had stolen another woman’s husband and the meekness of the twenty-year-old bride had to have their confrontation some day. The moment seemed now to have come. I brought out the secret I had never even hinted at and laid it quietly before the thistles.

  “A cloak of fond memories, isn’t it?” I stared at the eyes that were turned toward me. She gave a short and almost inaudible cry. I kept my eyes on hers, thinking she would turn away.

  “You were wearing it in Atami with Misugi. Forgive me, but I saw you that day.”

  Just as I had expected, the color fled from her cheeks. The muscles of her mouth twitched—she was ugly, I really thought she was—and she could say nothing. She only bowed and gazed at the white hands in her lap.

  Fresh as after a bath, I felt that I had lived more than ten years for this moment. Somewhere in my heart I felt too that one ending was now taking form with a kind of indescribable sadness. I sat still for a fairly long time, as if rooted. How she must have wanted to disappear! Then she raised her pale face and gazed at me quietly. I thought she might die. Death had plunged into her. Otherwise she could not have stared at me so quietly. The garden darkened and became sunny again. The sound of the piano from the next house stopped.

  “It’s all right. I shall make him yours now.” With these words, I stood up, went for the white roses I had left in the hall, and put them in water on the bookshelf. As I arranged them I said to myself that I would most probably not see her again (a horribly accurate prediction). Her head was bowed once more. I spoke to her.